black radical #2 beyond the bassline, an incredible kind of sadness, brplaylist ft. poly styrene, joan armatrading, the go! team.
a well done and well meaning exhibition, taking (some) stray shots.
A couple of weeks ago I went to the British Library for its new exhibit, Beyond the Bassline: 500 Years of Black British Music. I was taken by the exhibit’s more focused moments rather than its breadth. I loved what the sections on British composers, jazz music, and the particularly strong sections on the histories and connections between jungle and grime. The deep dive into reggae, dub, and the real-life communities - whether radicals or hedonists - that encircled the genres was clinical and the best part of it.
The number of Black-owned record shops, venues, and labels in the 70s and 80s was illuminating: Pecking Records, the Bamboo Club, The Reno Club, - small, mighty and safe ‘third’ spaces that gave Black people room for play. The former made me think how the story of reggae in the diaspora is too often centred around Chris Blackwell and Island Records as though business and enterprise started - and became ‘important’ - once a white person got involved. It also emboldened my position as someone who doesn’t centre popularity in discussions of Black art, or who brought (and bought) it to the masses.
Because what is popularity/importance in the diasporic and Western sense if it’s not white acceptance? And if this is the case, it decentralises us as the foundation, the instrument, and the ‘first person’. From a structural point of view, with a few exceptions, we don’t have the means to make our art exponentially popular or important in a mainstream sense intra-racially or as Black individuals without white systems and acknowledgments. All of this before we’re appropriated, tokenised, and removed, btw.
Decentring popularity allows us to know, feel, and depict Black art from what exists (not hidden) in the nook to the wide open shore, (think of the recipes we lose when we don’t focus on seemingly inconsequential, but abundantly important ingredients?); to keep in place the parts of this art that is untouched by white acceptance and adjacency and unseen and unmodified by the white lens; to ensure that it’s known by them, and even more importantly by us, that we’re the premise and not the adjunct or the surplus. But it’s true that, given how much we’ve been separated from our histories, simply knowing what Black art is a radical position to be in. Beyond the Bassline fell slightly short of expressing this.
The exhibit featured a few expected notes on Black musicians in alternative genres - namely Poly Styrene, Joan Armatrading, Skunk Anansie, and Don Letts. But these notes typically described them as unequal, transactional counterparts or mere participants to white people and white genres. This would have been more accurate: white and Black artists were performing genres that were deeply rooted in Black art like the folk music of Joan Armatrading; some of these genres were an equally yoked amalgamation of Black sounds of the Caribbean, like Ska (this is alluded); that genres that appeared white had Black participants from the very beginning of their developments.
It suffered from representation and tokenistic fallacies that we associate with white people as gatekeepers. Yes, Poly Styrene and Don Letts were included (‘box checked”), but Poly Styrene wasn’t just a Black woman who fronted a white band, as described, and Don Letts wasn’t just a Black person who introduced Punk-heads to reggae. Firstly, they were punk(s); part of the fabric, not stitched on as an afterthought. They were also Black punks, a concept that seems to be shrouded in cognitive dissonance; reading between the lines, the exhibit seemed to say that being Black and punk, or Black and folk can’t exist as one.
Some words Don Letts had to say about Poly Styrene. Taken from Dayglo: The Creative Life of Poly Styrene - a really great book that I managed to pick up in a charity shop. It features interviews with loads of cool people, and Poly’s own words are included too.
Taken from the exhibition, really cool bit of archive showing how the worlds of punk and reggae merged
Secondly, and something that is the bane of anyone interested in artistic preservation: it feels that because there weren’t enough Black people in these spaces (whatever ‘enough’ is), a deeper investigation into their presence wasn’t warranted. But if it was considered that these artists didn’t live in a vacuum or fall out of a coconut tree, a thoroughfare that noted their long-standing influence would have presented itself. There is a thread of history between Joan Armatrading and Arlo Parks; Poly-Styrene and Big Joanie; Don Letts and Bob Vylan.
And what of the platinum-selling post-punkers Bloc Party and the 00s indie-pop of the Noisettes, VV Brown, and the Go! Team? Or the internationally renowned and revered Dev Hynes, whose early career was set in the math-rock and singer-songwriter work of Test-Icicles and Lightspeed Champion, respectively? The commercial and critical success stories of Michael Kiwanuka and Benjamin Clementine?
Some non-intelligible scribbles I made right after I’d left the exhibit
I’m going to state here that I’m not really pop-girly, and would defer a lengthier post about that to people who are, but I think the omissions or poor representation of Black pop-stars - not R&B, not hip-hop, POP - were questionable. Think of the likes of Beverly Knight, Gabrielle, Alexandra Burke, the Sugababes, Little Mix, Leona Lewis, Jamelia, Cleopatra, and Eternal. I’m guessing it probably stemmed from who they thought their fanbases were: white middle-aged Radio 2-listening women and white gay men. If this was the case, this wasn’t grounds for their dismissal.
In a 2009 interview with Publisher’s Weekly Amiri Baraka speaks about his seminal essay Jazz and the White Critic, and states, “It’s an incredible kind of abuse that you’re never allowed to judge your own aesthetic development. There always has to be a non-you deciding whether it’s worthwhile or not.”
A powerful and truthful quote considering the overwhelming white world of music journalism1, but I also believe this lends itself to some difficult conversations about how Black artistry is represented in Black art spaces, by Black people. Where the Black press was and is allowed to thrive or manages to resist demarcation, it was and continues to be resistant to writing about blues2 and jazz music, barely putting up a good fight against whiteness’ pervasive impulse to take over spaces, and the domineering white journalists and titles that continue to deeply dominate coverage of the genres.
Includes the Baraka quote, but thought I’d scan the full page, for some further, interesting context. Notice how Baraka doesn’t shit on the white journalists he encountered (well, actually, he goes on to in lots of his other writing), but notes the importance of sociological context.
Currently taking up a conversation is Black participation in the genesis of country music and present-day representation. We’re checking white establishments about their poor and often racist representations of us in these spaces, i.e., Old Town Road vs Billboard Country Charts, Beyonce vs CMAs - all noble and rightful fights. Yet, this hasn’t translated to Black places routinely covering these artists, beyond the ‘5 Black Country Acts You Should Know’ features or only covering them when they’re massive or co-signed by global superstars. Sadly, this is the same route that white titles take.
I could adjust Baraka’s quote to say, “It’s an incredible kind of sadness that we don’t judge our own aesthetic development.”3 but I know it’s more complex than that. I’ve routinely written about how not knowing our histories stems from forces much more powerful than wilful ignorance on our part4. Plus, change is being made; it’s encouraging that the MOBOs have added a Best Alternative/Rock act to their categories (the exhibition featured a short but decontextualised snippet of Nova Twins and Bob Vylan winning the award) and to see Skepta bring house music back into the hands of his Black fan-base with Big Smoke Festival.
I think that the process starts with decentring popularity, whiteness, and our proximity to it in specific cases, and where we have the tools, resources, and knowledge, we must - for the sake of our collective sense of selves, to ensure that we aren’t the agents of our own artistic misrepresentation - depict the fullest truths of Black art from in the nook to wide open shore. To me, the exhibition is a celebration of what is known and a reminder to think more deeply about Black art.
Next Substack will feature an interview with new South London jazz outfit Oreglo as well as a personal meditation on the sounds of Black-Britishness in Horace Ove’s 1976 feature film Pressure.
Ain’t But A Few of Us, Willard Jenkins, https://www.dukeupress.edu/aint-but-a-few-of-us
https://www.jstor.org/stable/1214982
https://www.abebooks.co.uk/book-search/title/black-music/author/baraka-amiri-as-leroi-jones/
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2022/jun/25/house-music-black-drake-beyonce-white-fans