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Cultural diversity and popular music in the UK

Cultural Diversity and Popular Music in the UK

Introduction
David BOUSQUET, Romain GARBAYE et Vincent LATOUR

Notes de l’auteur

Note: While we are aware of the debates around the capitalisation of “black” and “white”, the spelling of these words in the articles of this special issue reflects the authors' individual choices.

Texte intégral

1Since 1945, popular music and the musical subcultures that have often been associated with it have provided a unique window on the evolutions of British society. This has reflected both social and cultural changes linked to mass immigration and has shaped the perceptions of the host society by immigrants, as well as their place within this society. This is arguably truer of the United Kingdom than of any other European country, although such cultural practices are also intimately linked to the increasingly multicultural character of societies elsewhere in Europe.

2Transnational diasporic communities based in the UK have extensive economic, political and cultural connections around the world, from the Caribbean to the Indian sub-continent, with Caribbeans and Asians, broadly defined, constituting the largest immigrant groups from the New Commonwealth, i.e. the predominantly non-white colonies that gradually became independent as decolonisation unfolded from the mid-late 1940s to the 1960s. They also have links with migrant communities in what used to be known as the Old Commonwealth, the former dominions where native populations were outnumbered by white settlers from the British Isles (Canada, Australia, New Zealand), as well as in the United States, for example. Over the past 30 years these communities have become increasingly varied. They have found themselves at the heart of intricate and ever-changing relations between migration flows, transnational identities and ethno-cultural diversity, against a background of fast-evolving musical styles in the UK.

3This phenomenon has taken various forms. In the UK, musical scenes and subcultures have produced and disseminated practices and ideologies that challenge dominant discourses. This became apparent from the 1960s onward, with the rising popularity of Caribbean musical scenes such as ska, reggae and sound systems (Bradley; Hebdige, Subculture and Cut‘n’Mix), and took place in a context marked by multifarious transformations, whether demographic, legislative or cultural. First, the end of mass economic immigration from the Caribbean and the Indian subcontinent, a consequence of the 1962 Commonwealth Immigrants Act), and the subsequent shift towards family reunion, transformed the country far more than economic immigration in the period from 1948 to 1962. Second, when he first came to power in 1964, Harold Wilson had two strong convictions relating to immigration and race: New Commonwealth immigration was growing and the restrictions introduced by the Tories in the early 1960s should be upheld and indeed extended.

4Furthermore, the level of hostility and discrimination encountered by New Commonwealth immigrants had become intolerable and would generate tensions sooner or later; action was therefore required. This led successive Labour governments in the 1960s and 1970s to combine immigration restrictions with a specific Race Relations legislation. The three Race Relations Acts (1965, 1968, 1976) were passed under Harold Wilson’s premierships. They were meant to offer those already on British soil protection against racial discrimination, which was then widespread, and, ultimately, to bring about integration in housing, education, employment, and social services. Under Labour governments (1964-70; 1974-76), “integration” became increasingly distinct from attempts at “assimilating” immigrants, whether along American or French lines, which created a propitious climate for various forms of migrant artistic creation. This trend was illustrated in the way Roy Jenkins, the then Home Secretary, defined integration in a 1966 speech: “I define integration, therefore, not as a flattening process of uniformity, but cultural diversity, coupled with equality of opportunity, in an atmosphere of mutual tolerance […].”

5Nevertheless, despite these particularly advanced and ambitious policies aimed at facilitating the inclusion of new migrant populations from extra-European and post-colonial backgrounds, British society has remained marked by extensive manifestations of rejection of these populations and widespread racial prejudice and discrimination for decades. To mention just a few particularly well-known episodes, the Conservative politician Enoch Powell’s “river of blood” speech of 1968, with its spectacularly racist and violent overtones, secured considerable support from large sections of the public. In 1976, the Notting Hill Carnival in London, which had already become a mainstay of Caribbean life in the UK, was marked by widespread rioting in the context of heavy-handed policing of the event by the Metropolitan Police. The following decade, until 1985, saw frequent and violent episodes of urban rioting, directly reflecting tensions between Black youths and police forces all across the country, against a backdrop of economic marginalisation and socio-cultural exclusion of minority populations.

6The musical subcultures that emerged in this evolving social and political context are privileged places for the expression, both cultural and political, of immigrant communities, leading to the elaboration of autonomous discourses. This reflects the paradoxical position occupied by these communities, characterised by economic and ethnic disadvantage and conversely by active participation in other sectors of British society, notably through their contribution to popular culture. We are particularly interested in the role played by musical practices in the construction of minority identities and in the development of their sense of belonging. This leads us to reflect on the relations of power that these communities have with dominant UK institutional spheres, in the musical as well as in the political domains, and to ponder about subsequent forms of resistance. This raises the question of the tensions between underground scenes and the mainstream pop music industry. It also questions the role played by musical subcultures in furthering the recognition of migrant contribution to British culture and British society as a whole.

7The influence of Caribbean (notably Jamaican) approaches to music as a vehicle for social chronicle, anti-racism, and resistance against the oppression of migrant communities rooted in the history of colonisation and slavery has been prominent, as noted by Paul Gilroy (There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack; The Black Atlantic). Nevertheless, British society has also witnessed more diverse and complex instances of musical evolutions, reflecting the role of mass immigration in its popular culture. Originally, Asians, mostly from India and Pakistan (which both became independent nations in 1947), were fewer in number than Caribbeans, who came from colonies that did not gain independence until the turn of the 1960s. Asians numerically caught up with Caribbeans in the early 1960s. Although the impact of Asians on British pop music is frequently perceived as less substantial than that of Caribbeans, they have also played an important part. Their contribution has sometimes been influenced by the ethos of resistance and the politicisation of much of British-Caribbean music. However, their approach to popular music is also distinctive and involves the creolisation of traditional musical forms from the Indian sub-continent. These forms may be seen as evidence of the adaptation of their traditional artistic sensibilities to the context of late twentieth- and early twenty-first-century Britain (Bakrania, Huq).

8Since the turn of the millennium and the onset of Vertovec’s influential concept of “super-diversity” in the context of enhanced globalisation, pop music scenes in the UK have displayed a renewed capacity to reflect changing demographic and cultural dynamics. This has contributed to enabling ethnic minority groups to construct a sense of community and inclusion within British society with new takes on music as a mode of citizenship and belonging. In recent years, the rising popularity of afrobeats, preceded by the development of grime, has given visibility to the communities of West African origin, who have played a key role on these scenes. The influx of West African musical ideas and new perspectives on anti-racism and community have renewed the tradition of Black music, famously extolled by Paul Gilroy. In this respect, the recently published collection of essays by Monique Charles, Black Music in Britain in the 21st Century (2023), which includes chapters on UK garage, dub, jungle or grime (see also Stratton & Zuberi), constitutes an important contribution to our understanding of the diversity of thriving Black musical scenes in the UK.

9Finally, international migrations have nourished the pop music industry for decades. They have powerfully contributed to the British recording industry. They have turned the UK into a major exporter of musical styles—probably the single most influential nation in pop music—if not the place where the very notion of “popular music” appeared. This is where Caribbean influences should perhaps be understood in much deeper and more novel ways than is usually the case—through the presence and know-how of musicians and producers everywhere in the record industry.

10This special issue is grounded in solid expertise deployed and mobilised within the MIDIB (Migration and Diversity in the British and Irish Isles) network, with an original approach mixing migration studies and popular music studies. MIDIB was created in 2020 to bring together scholars from various backgrounds working on migration and diversity in the British and Irish Isles, in order to stimulate and disseminate innovative research on these issues, both in the field of anglophone studies in France and more internationally. While the network’s central focus was and remains the political dimension of academic discussions on migration and diversity in the United Kingdom and the Republic of Ireland, it has nonetheless sought to foster research on more cultural or artistic dimensions of these topics. This issue of e-Rea is the final outcome of one of the events organised by MIDIB with that objective in mind: a one-day conference co-organised with Centre Interlangues of Université Bourgogne Europe in Dijon on diversity and popular music. It brings together specialists of different styles, from the most contemporary to earlier instances of minority scenes from the 1970s onwards, using both textual (audio, visual, lyrical) and contextual (historical, sociological, political) perspectives. In addition to Black music, both Caribbean and African, we aim to document the complex patterns of cross-influences between Black musical aesthetics and ethics and other “minority” styles (such as Asian Underground, for instance), as well as the pervasive influence of musicians of Caribbean origin in British pop. In this way, we seek to prod deeper into what may be termed the “melting pot” of British popular music. A variety of transnational influences have come together in the context of that thriving and evolving pop culture to produce sounds and styles that have often become extremely influential worldwide.

11The issue opens with Black music such as reggae and sound systems, hip hop and other musical styles that contribute powerfully to the inclusion of British popular culture in a transatlantic cultural network marked by exchanges with the United States and the English-speaking Caribbean, as shown in Paul Gilroy's seminal book The Black Atlantic as well as in Monique Charles’s recent Black Music in Britain in the 21st Century. David Bousquet reviews the often-overlooked contribution of Jamaican producers and sound engineers to the British musical landscape, arguing that it has creolised UK pop music far beyond mere stylistic borrowings. The next piece, by Jeremy Tranmer, provides a critical reassessment of Two Tone and its construction as an epitome of the anti-racist movement, and a comparison between the Two Tone and Asian Underground movements.

12Our exploration continues with two articles on grime as a more recent incarnation of Black British music. Ben Winsworth provides an in-depth analysis of the verbal and visual text of Kano’s Made in the Manor, read against more conservative views on English national identity as they have crystallised around popular music since the Beatles. Juliette Issartel analyses new forms of political participation on the part of grime artists during Jeremy Corbyn’s campaign and in the wake of the Grenfell fire in 2017. Beyond the influence of Black or Afro-Caribbean styles on British music scenes, the issue closes on Sonia Awan’s analysis of qawwali and bhangra as transnational, diasporic genres, building on works such as Bakrania’s Bhangra and Asian Underground: South Asian Music and the Politics of Belonging in Britain or Huq’s Beyond Subculture: Pop, Youth and Identity in a Postcolonial World, for example, which also enquire into youth musical subcultures from South Asia.

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Bibliographie

BAKRANIA, Falu. Bhangra and Asian Underground: South Asian Music and the Politics of Belonging in Britain. Duke University Press, 2013.

BRADLEY, Lloyd. Bass Culture: When Reggae Was King. Viking, 2000.

BRAMWELL, Richard. UK Hip-Hop, Grime and the City, the Aesthetics and Ethics of London’s Rap Scenes. Routledge, 2015.

CHARLES, Monique. Black Music in Britain in the 21st Century. Liverpool University Press, 2023.

GILROY, Paul. There Ain’t No Black in the Union Jack: The Cultural Politics of Race and Nation. Hutchinson, 1987.

GILROY, Paul. The Black Atlantic: Modernity and Double Consciousness. Verso, 1993.

HEBDIGE, Dick. Subculture: The Meaning of Style. Routledge, 1979.

HEBDIGE, Dick. Cut‘n’Mix: Culture, Identity and Caribbean Music. Routledge, 1987.

HUQ, Rupa. Beyond Subculture: Pop, Youth and Identity in a Postcolonial World. Routledge, 2006.

STRATTON, Jon, and Nabeel ZUBERI. Black Popular Music in Britain Since 1945. Routledge, 2016.

VERTOVEC, Steven. “Super-diversity and its implications.” Ethnic and Racial Studies, vol. 30, no. 6, 2007, p. 1024-1054.

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Référence électronique

David BOUSQUET, Romain GARBAYE et Vincent LATOUR, « Cultural Diversity and Popular Music in the UK »e-Rea [En ligne], 22.2 | 2025, mis en ligne le 15 juin 2025, consulté le 20 juillet 2025. URL : http://journals.openedition.org/erea/19256 ; DOI : https://doi.org/10.4000/144q2

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Auteurs

David BOUSQUET

David Bousquet is a senior lecturer at Université Bourgogne Europe in Dijon and a member of the Text, Image, Language research centre (Centre Interlangues TIL – UR 4182). He specialises in the study of Caribbean literature, poetry and popular culture with a particular emphasis on musical traditions and reggae. His research on song lyrics and performance poems focuses on the tension between orality and writing from the perspective of postcolonial and cultural studies.

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Romain GARBAYE

Romain Garbaye is Professor of British Studies at the Université Sorbonne Nouvelle in Paris. His research interests in the last 25 years have ranged from the politics of migration and ethnic diversity in the UK in comparative perspective with France, to the history and sociology of popular music in the UK. He is the codirector with Vincent Latour of the international research network MIDIB (Migration and Diversity in the British and Irish Isles): https://midib.hypotheses.org/. He has recently co-edited with Gérôme Guibert the volume Musical Scenes and Social Class: Debating Punk and Metal (New York: Palgrave, 2024 ; https://link.springer.com/book/10.1007/978-3-031-56506-9). His academic webpage is: http://www.univ-paris3.fr/m-garbaye-romain-103035.kjsp.

Vincent LATOUR

Vincent Latour is Professor of British studies at Toulouse-Jean Jaurès University. His research focuses on migration and diversity issues in the UK, with particular emphasis on Franco-British and wider European comparative studies. With Romain Garbaye, he is co-director of MIDIB (Migration and Diversity in the British Isles), an international research network (Groupement d’Intérêt Scientifique), launched in 2020. He is also the joint-director of the Centre for Anglophone Studies (UR 801, Université Toulouse- Jean Jaurès).

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