Does Black music need to “get its house in order?”

A new event aims to get to the heart of music scholarship and how ever-evolving genres of Black music are researched, engaged with, and social significance discussed We find ourselves in a bizarre cultural moment, again. Black music, and specifically this digitally-mediated, largely homegrown and magnetic form which draws influence from across the diaspora, has… Read More

Meet Caleb Femi, the Young Poet Laureate telling stories of love at the chickenshop

Heartbreak and Grime will make you shake your head in shame and/or disgust at the things women had to put up with, the bizarre façades which define teen relationships in general and the blatant misogyny that so many of us once drank unquestioningly. Read More

The Police’s Ban on Bashment Reveals Their Fear of Blackness

by Shane Thomas When thinking of police interactions with black citizens, one often visualises the nuisance of harassment and the tragedy of death. But long held anti-black maxims also appear in their involvement in the most innocuous areas of British life. The Metropolitan Police were recently in the news after they allegedly instructed Dice Bar in… Read More

Album review: Kano’s Made in the Manor – staying true to grime’s DIY culture

by Zahra Dalilah In keeping with the theme of his first two albums Home Sweet Home and London Town, Kano takes the opportunity of his fifth studio album to once again rep his ends and celebrate the manor that made him. An honest depiction that doesn’t seek to change minds but jog memories, going beyond… Read More

Courttia Newland on Finding the Way: Voice and the Writer of Colour

Courttia Newland grants us special access into his manifesto of exploring fictional voice and celebrating self-expression in the work of British writers of colour. Keynote speech sponsored by The Royal Literary Fund at the inaugural Bare Lit Festival It could be argued that when a child is born, it has a voice. Of course, it’s… Read More

You cannot mention Grime and not mention Blackness, you cannot mention the art form and erase the people

by Shereen Abyan  To try to come up with a set definition of Black British culture would be difficult. The very idea of Black Britishness is relative. It relies on the intricacy of localities and waves of immigrant communities, melding into each other as they adapt to the limited institutional access given to them by the… Read More