Abstract
This article maps and analyses the relationship between football and black sound cultures in the UK. Employing a chronological and thematic approach, specifically, it examines the inclusion of football in post-Windrush calypsos, the appropriation of black music forms in football stadia, reggae as cultural critique of English football and British society, and the connections between transnational sounds and a diasporic footballing consciousness. Theoretically, this article draws on – and places in dialogue – Paul Gilroy’s concept of the ‘Black Atlantic’, Josh Kun’s notion of ‘audiotopia’ and Les Back’s emphasis on ‘deep listening’. This framing illuminates how music forms travel back and forth along diasporic roots and routes between Africa, the Caribbean, the United States and the United Kingdom. Critically, the article locates the relationship between football, music and race as providing the context and capacity for progressive change, and foregrounds its role as an important medium and method of cultural resistance to the marginalisations experienced by Black Atlantic diasporas and within football itself. The article concludes by looking forward, in an era of Black Lives Matter, to consider the spaces and practices of fandom and consumption that might open up as a result of listening and responding sociologically to the relationship between football and black sound cultures.
Highlights
This article maps and analyses the relationship between football and black sound cultures in the UK
We locate the relationship between race and football as providing the context and capacity for progressive change, and underscore its role as a powerful medium and method of cultural resistance to these marginalisations experienced by Black Atlantic diasporas
This article draws on – and, crucially, places in dialogue – Paul Gilroy’s (1993) concept of the ‘Black Atlantic’, Josh Kun’s (2005) notion of ‘audiotopia’ and Les Back’s (2007) emphasis on ‘deep listening’. This framing allows us to illuminate how music forms travel back and forth along diasporic roots and routes between Africa, the Caribbean, the United States and the United Kingdom. We demonstrate that it is in particular places, times, cultural spaces and conditions – that is, football and the context of racism in post-war Britain – that these diasporic and syncretic sound forms take on particular meaning and power (Burdsey, 2020; see Melville, 2020, on black music and space more broadly)
Summary
This article maps and analyses the relationship between football and black sound cultures in the UK. We begin this article with Ms Banks as a contemporary point of departure to trace and analyse the shifting and contingent relationship between English football and black sound cultures since the arrival of the Windrush Generation from the Caribbean in 1948.
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