4.4 Grime reception

Despite grime’s poor early media reputation and negative associations with violent crime, the genre has grown because of cohesion, strong social networks, collaboration and cooperation between its artists and audiences. Throughout this section you have discovered how reception literature and music criticism can shape an audience’s perception of musical style and its status and reputation in music history. Rock and pop music has an illustrious history of artists and fans that have fallen foul of the law or caused outrage, which begs the question what is it that makes grime different? Considering its association with young Black males, examining who the reception media is aimed at and the agenda of its authors form an important part of answering this question and understanding grime music and its position within British musical life.

If this is your first exposure to grime music, it could easily skew your understanding of it, and this highlights how important it is to critically engage with sources of information. In this course, you have mainly focused on the environment that grime emerged from and a murder case. This does not make for pleasant reading, but it does raise an important question: if you were previously unfamiliar with the genre, how has this influenced the way you have received grime and how would you describe the music? Bear in mind that you have only encountered one example of grime music and a handful of sources that discuss the genre in this course.

While there are considerably more positive representations of the genre in the current media, it has taken time for this to happen. A landmark event that signified a change in the tide was grime artist Stormzy’s headline performance at Glastonbury festival in 2019. The media reported positively on the performance and its socio-political significance, with the headline to the Guardian’s review of the concert stating, ‘All hail Stormzy for historic Glastonbury performance’ (Walker, 2019). The following year female rapper Lady Leshur received a British Empire Medal (BEM) in the Queen’s Birthday Honours for services to music and charity.

During the 2015 Brit Awards, the American hip hop rapper Kanye West (who himself has since garnered controversy through antisemitic comments) invited 40 grime artists onto the stage with him during a performance. A viewer complained about the performance commenting: ‘A bunch of young men all dressed in black dancing extremely aggressively on stage. It made me feel so intimidated and it’s just not what I expect to see on prime-time TV’ (Virk, 2019). It’s difficult to say accurately what the viewer’s preconceptions were about this style of music, but it does suggest bias or racism and a lack of understanding of who these people are, where they come from, what their music is about and what they were doing on stage. Similarly, their view could have been predicated upon their reception of biased sources. What is interesting is how the quote presented above was also used in Skepta’s 2015 song ‘Shutdown’: an example of grime artists themselves highlighting the racial bias they face.

It is important to remember how reception crafts the way we engage with all musicians. Music is heard differently by different listener groups, and the publications and critics that report on musicians uphold political positions. Whereas the reception of musicians from previous centuries have typically continued to evolve since their death, grime artists offer a more immediate example of reception developing around us. Whichever musicians’ work you study, critically engaging with reception requires a greater awareness of the political landscape and positions in which the music is embedded.