The politics of Generation Grime

Abstract

In the 2017 UK general election, Grime artists (musicians representing the experience of a young black dispossessed city working class) came out in support of the Labour Party’s radical leader Jeremy Corbyn. The author, drawing on in-depth interviews with Grime experts and leftwing activists and an examination of social media, explains that endorsement in terms of the concept of ‘embedded ethics’ which allows Grime artists to present themselves as authentic social commentators on intersecting forms of poverty, state racism and social exclusion. Using the work of cultural theorists Stuart Hall and Paul Gilroy, she argues that Grime is more than a music genre and more a way of life giving cultural meaning – explaining the mobilisations for both the election and, later, over the Grenfell fire. But the piece asks whether, at a time of blatant neoliberalism and harsh austerity, there is a need now to insert a more direct discussion of class into the cultural theory debate.