A slightly different version of this post was first presented at the ‘Black British Music: Past, Present and Futures’ Symposium on 12 July 2024 at the British Library. The symposium was a collaboration between the British Library and the Black Music Research Unit at the University of Westminster. The session was chaired by Julia Toppin.

Part of this research was completed during my doctoral studies at the University of Bristol. Many thanks to Profs Justin A. Williams and Michael Ellison for their invaluable guidance. Full dissertation available here.

I want to approach the question of what ‘Black British music’ means with two distinct provocations. First, I will trouble the idea of being British, of ‘Britishness.’ As a relatively recent immigrant to the UK, my participation in and access to Britishness are constantly in flux, and this colours my engagements with topics like this. Second, I will consider the concept of ‘Black music,’ with a particular air toward de-essentializing Black music as a concept. This is important not only for understanding the nature of Black music but also for acknowledging its presence in non-Black-majority nations like the UK.

I was neither born nor raised in Britain. While my personal enculturation is beyond that of a tourist or new arrival, I have lived in England for only six years, largely without progress toward settled status. I might one day achieve this status, or maybe even the loftier goal of citizenship, but even at that imaginary point in the future, I find it hard to believe I could ever be seen or understood as ‘British’ in the sense some people mean it.

Nationality is often hamstrung by migration. By leaving my home country to start a life in the UK, I threw myself into complex issues of identity for which I had not fully prepared. Some issues have had material impact, like the impact of my immigration status on pandemic assistance, but others have been more intangible, like my identity as an artist and researcher. Living here for six years, composing music about Bristol’s St Pauls neighbourhood or The Rime of the Ancient Mariner, I often wonder if the music I have been composing is ‘British’ or ‘American.’ What is the overall confluence of who I am, where I am composing, what I am writing about, and why I am doing it?

As the poet T. S. Eliot wrote about his own national identity: ‘I am used to dealing with the question of whether I am, qua poet, American or English; and usually can escape by pointing out that whichever Wystan Auden is, I am the other.’ Eliot shows a bias toward his American identity throughout his life, yet many sources are comfortable describing him as ‘American-English,’ ‘US-born British,’ or even as having multiple national versions of himself (‘an English Eliot, an American Eliot,’ and others (Crawford, 2015)). Eliot settled in the UK around the same age as me, his mid-twenties. Does this similarity mean I will be equally able to make ‘British’ art as T. S. Eliot? I will not attempt to answer this here, but I do think it is worth thinking about the various factors at play.

David McCrone (2002) writes that an individual’s sense of national identity is ‘constructed in the processes of everyday life. It is not fixed and can change over space and time.’ Thus, ‘Britishness’ is not a permanence; it can come, and it can go. My own mother was born a Citizen of the UK & Colonies on the island of Jamaica, and she lost any claim to Britishness when Jamaica secured its independence in August 1962; she then gained her Americanness over many more decades. Eliot was born American, and he gained his Britishness in part through citizenship but also through his artistic output. Nationality and identity are not static.

When I attended the Beyond the Bassline exhibition at the British Library, it was wonderfully affirming to see the history and impact of Black musical culture on the UK and the world. Yet, even though the exhibition is described as ‘British,’ it was obvious that the musics and musicians on display were international and multinational. Many shared the same complications of overlapping (or missing) national statuses. Ignatius Sancho, for example, was born on a slave ship in the Atlantic Ocean and was sold into slavery in the Americas. His Britishness came about through being gifted to and subsequently raised by three British sisters in Greenwich. His enculturation began as a child, and his national identity comes in part from knowing no other. Nationality and identity are not static.

Musical genres, like individuals, can gain and lose national identities. Ska and reggae, for example, have found a place within the canon of Black British music despite their obvious Caribbean origins. The exhibition speaks of ‘inherited African traditions’ that ‘became the basis for reggae music’ as people and their traditions migrated from Africa to the Caribbean and eventually to Britain. They have produced numerous musical offshoots that have come to define popular musical culture in the UK. A genre like grime can also be traced from its roots in American and Caribbean sounds to its becoming an internationally syncretic yet quintessential ‘British’ musical expression. The same could be said about the proliferation of rock and roll within mid-century Britain and house music in more recent decades, creating ties to African American musical traditions. Nationality and identity are not static.

The Beyond the Bassline exhibition makes clear that Black music (‘British’ or otherwise) has long been integral to the development of British culture. Black music is, by nature or by circumstance, international and highly mobile. It seems to resist being constrained by national borders. Despite being as useful as any national descriptor (for which I know musicology has great fondness), the ‘Black’ part of ‘Black British music’ almost demands to be understood across national borders.

But what is Black music, really? Oftentimes, it is simply conceptualized as music made by Black people or, less essentially, music of Black cultures. In this simple form, ‘Black’ (like ‘British’) is treated as a straightforward, objective category that can describe an airtight body of music. However, because this is neither the case musically nor culturally, I have tried to consider a framework of Black music that better accounts for its broad, multi-ethnic, and international appeal and performance. The framework that I use has three main dimensions: Black music as the text, as the artist, and as the genre. It is not intended to produce objective definitions of Blackness, so it cannot be used to ascertain what ‘is’ or ‘is not’ ‘Black music.’ Rather, it provides a basis upon which to discuss the cultural connections between musical texts, the musicians who create them, and the contexts in which they are produced and consumed.

To consider Black music as the text involves looking at a musical text, theoretically divorced from its historical or cultural context, to try to observe, in Olly Wilson’s words, a ‘critical mass’ of aesthetic signifiers to convey that the music is, in some way, ‘Black.’ This dimension on its own is circular and incomplete, and it depends heavily on introducing sociocultural context, but musicologists have often felt drawn to the kinds of indices this dimension produces. Scholars like Wilson, Samuel A. Floyd, and many others have compiled lists of signifiers in African and Afrodiasporic musics that are useful in this dimension (think Floyd’s ‘Call/Response,’ for example).

Black music as the artist involves a consideration for the musicians who created a particular text (including both composers and performers), who and what their influences are, how and with what they identify, and how they choose to express themselves. Again, this dimension on its own is incomplete and potentially tricky, as it risks oversimplified, essentialist appraisals of individuals. It does, however, help to contribute the sociocultural context missing in the previous dimension. What is it about this artist’s cultural background that contributes to how they express themselves musically? For example, people who identify as Black may seek out art made by other Black people as means of reaffirming their cultural identity. They use the aforementioned aesthetic signifiers to evoke a ‘Black sound,’ whether these come exclusively from an African tradition or not, which is a clear act of Signifyin(g).

To that end, Black music as the genre focuses on broader organizations of musicians and musical texts into stylistic categories. Genres carry within them histories of musical development and change, of the migration of sounds and bodies, and of connections between musical communities. Built into both the second and third dimensions of the framework is an understanding that Black music is not always or exclusively made by artists who identify as Black. I argue that inviting non-Black artists into discussions about Black music does not undermine the category. Instead, such an invitation speaks to explicit musical connections between non-Black artists and Black artists who directly influence the former’s musical practices. This understanding seeks to undermine essentialist arguments against the term, reject cultural chauvinism, and acknowledge the contributions to Black musical traditions that have been made by people regardless of their race or ethnicity. Like racial or national descriptors, genre categories are also dynamic, and genres are not immune from ‘kinship’ issues raised by George Lewis in my previous post.

Taken together, a label like ‘Black British music’ may invite more questions than it provides a tidy body of work to discuss. ‘British’ music often has roots outside Britain; there is no racial prerequisite or implication to making Black music. So, what does ‘Black British music’ mean beyond the sum of its parts? I find that the term more readily describes how we in the UK experience and participate in the global, multinational phenomenon of Black music than it does any national claim to Black music.

I do believe there is an ironic phenomenon where a label like ‘British music’ readily takes up African and Afrodiasporic musics for its purpose of constructing a national musical identity while also, as a national political priority, working to limit the physical bodies of people from the Outside within its borders. Such an impulse feels distinctly colonial, especially when the Britishness of Black Britons is often scrutinized or called into question … ‘Where are you really from?’ The desire for tidy categories is both musicologically and politically expedient, regardless of how functional these categories are, and the manifest untidiness of ‘Black British music’ can, I hope, serve as a reminder to forfend against the more material consequences of nations, borders, and the looming consequences of a lust for tidiness.

References

Baskett, S. S. (1982). T. S. Eliot as an American Poet. The Centennial Review, 26(2), 147–171.

Crawford, R. (2015, January 10). TS Eliot: The poet who conquered the world, 50 years on. The Guardian. https://www.theguardian.com/books/2015/jan/10/from-tom-to-ts-eliot-world-poet

Floyd, S. A. (1995). The Power of Black Music. Oxford University Press. https://doi.org/10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195109757.001.0001

Gates, H. L. (2014). The signifying monkey: A theory of African American literary criticism (Twenty-fifth anniversary edition). Oxford University Press.

McCrone, D. (2002). Who do you say you are?: Making sense of national identities in modern Britain. Ethnicities, 2(3), 301–320. https://doi.org/10.1177/14687968020020030201

Wilson, O. (1983). Black Music as an Art Form. Black Music Research Journal, 3(1), 1–22. https://doi.org/10.2307/779487