‘Doing that music which moves me’: A conversation with Bristol hip hop pioneer, Krissy Kriss

Abstract

From the early-1980s, the arrival of hip hop in the UK city of Bristol created a wave of new possibilities for multiracial Bristolians. In the medium-term, this would help yield the music popularly termed ‘the Bristol Sound’, exemplified by post-hip hop performers like Tricky and Massive Attack – all of whom were part of the city’s early hip hop scene. More immediately, however, Bristol would become home to a vital hip hop party culture, centred on makeshift – and frequently illegal – parties thrown in warehouses, shebeens and small independent clubs in and around the city’s storied Black district, St. Paul’s. In this wide-ranging oral history conversation, which broadens the debate on Bristol hip hop and its diasporic sound-making, pioneering Bristol MC, Kriss ‘Krissy Kriss’ Johnson, discusses his memories and experiences of hip hop in the city. He provides fresh insights on diasporic Black identities in semi-rural contexts; the historic textures of teenage Black popular culture in Bristol in the 1970s–80s; the political realities of early-Thatcherism; the resurgence of British street racism in the 1970s; the psychogeography of Bristol neighbourhoods and historic change in St. Paul’s; the historically grounded appeals of hip hop culture as a site of affirmative teenage Black identity and possibility; the lived experience of Bristol’s DIY hip hop party culture. In doing this, Johnson offers a historically important Black perspective on a scene that has often been glossed by journalists and academics alike in terms of its utopian polyculturalism. By prioritizing his response as a young Black person in the historical particularities of his lived context, the conversation moves beyond the priorities of such accounts to provide a nuanced appreciation of Bristol’s hip hop movement in the city’s complex race and class geography. The account, moreover, recentres hip hop in the history of this party scene, which journalists have typically viewed from the prism of an overdetermined hybridity seen as peculiar to the city.