- 1 Like Bob Stanley I will be using the term ‘pop’ in an all-inclusive sense (xiii).
1One of the original concepts for the Beatles’ Sgt Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band (1967) was a collection of songs about growing up in Liverpool, a concept that in the end only made it as far as ‘Penny Lane’ and ‘Strawberry Fields (Forever)’, released in February as a double ‘A’ sided single to satisfy EMI’s impatience regarding the lack of any new material since the previous summer. Consequently, further exploration of the Beatles’ connections with their Merseyside past was dropped and a deeper thematic unity discovered: not through the framing device of transforming themselves into a fictional brass band, but as a result of many of the songs dealing with altered psychological states and the knowledge gained therein. Almost fifty years later, Kano’s album Made in the Manor (2016), also released on the mythical Parlophone label, might stake a valid claim to be the first concept album to have evolved out of grime, one which expresses a powerful sense of place, family history and local community in similar and yet different ways to ‘Penny Lane’ and ‘Strawberry Fields (Forever)’ and their unfulfilled relationship with the original Sgt Pepper project. For Kano, the connection between the environment and the individual is explored more fully throughout the album format as the binding narrative thread, but it is also one within which other themes and concerns are considered. Further parallels can be found through the way in which both albums are breaking down cultural barriers. For the Beatles, Sgt Pepper challenged traditional boundaries between high culture and popular culture through self-consciously turning pop into art; while Kano’s Made in the Manor works to redraw the popular cultural terrain more generally through re-examining ideas about what constitutes ‘Englishness’ in the second decade of the 21st century. In so doing, Kano is also indirectly responding to historical notions of national identity that coalesced around the Beatles and their music and that had a powerful impact on the sometimes-self-conscious construction and conservation of an English pop music tradition.1
2Although inspired by rock and roll, rhythm and blues and early Motown, the Beatles in 1967 seemed - like many bands who had followed a similar trajectory - to be going back in time to celebrate the influence of English music hall, as if somehow aware that the source of their inspiration lay much deeper than sounds from the USA. The so-called British Invasion of 1964 helped set in motion a lessening of the American popular cultural domination of the UK and lead to the subversion and/or transformation of its music into something more home-grown, more familiar and - in time - more attuned to local, rather than transatlantic, desires and concerns. Seminal albums like The Kinks are the Village Green Preservation Society or single releases like the Small Faces ‘Lazy Sunday Afternoon’ - both from 1968 - are good examples of the almost deliberate cultivation of a particular English sound and subject matter that reverberated through the work of bands like the Jam in the late 70s and so-called Britpop bands like Blur and Oasis in the 1990s. It might not seem obvious at first, but grime artists like Kano and their immediate predecessors also had to resist - or appropriate in similar ways to the Beatles - the prevalence of American music, this time hip-hop, house and techno from the mid-to-late 1980s onwards. This was a creative task, one that was energised by reaching back to earlier musical styles and genres that had more to do with the colonial past and still post-colonial present, and a return journey that also challenged the canonical domination of white post-60s English pop, exploded its stereotypical and sometimes stultifying vision of the UK and expanded its conception of nationhood.
- 2 There are, of course, many grime artists who have African ancestry. Pirate radio stations like Rins (...)
- 3 Often referred to generally as MLE: Multicultural London English. For a wider look at the evolution (...)
- 4 Jason Arday observes that the ‘White, generally male, and middle-class lexicon’ of Britpop and the (...)
3Developing in the East End of London in the early 2000s on run-down housing estates, early grime artists adapted, reworked and subverted contemporary American electronic dance sounds, blending them with the influence and inspiration of their largely West Indian musical heritage in terms of delivery and performance. In his book Inner City Pressure, Dan Hancox understands grime to have grown out of and away from earlier 1990s underground scenes like jungle, drum and bass and UK garage and consequently is keen to point out that, while US hip-hop is part of grime’s genetic make-up, it has even closer links with reggae, dub, toasting and sound system culture (37).2 It also provided an ideal platform for the mainly third generation of children from immigrant families to address their experience of discrimination, poverty, and urban crime, as well as their hopes and aspirations: local themes recounted through raps and flows in a hybridised street language that was still recognisably English and - like the sound of grime itself - a further testament to the continuing influence of post-war immigration and the ways in which it changed - and continues to change - both the cultural and musical landscape.3 Even if black music had always maintained a presence within the wider context of UK pop - through imported rhythm and blues, soul, ska, reggae, disco, house and hip-hop, for example, as well as through homegrown versions and/or transformations of those genres and others - it always had a somewhat second class status as something foreign, exotic, and un-English in terms of either sound, language, intonation, or subject matter. Although subsumed into the mainstream and given plenty of media airplay, it was also and at the same time marginalised by the dominance of white English pop that evolved from the 60s to assume a very self-confident awareness of its shared, collective identity. From the British Invasion to Britpop, an Anglocentric aesthetic was cultivated that sometimes excluded or subjugated, however indirectly, expressions of difference and diversity from full participation in the nation’s soundtrack.4
4The transition of grime from the underground into the mainstream to assert itself as a dominant and internationally recognised genre dealing with subjects that reflected life in so-called multicultural Britain challenged such exclusivity. In this sense the work of pioneers like Wiley, Dizzee Rascal, Skepta and Kano can be seen as continuing – completing, even - the task of what Lloyd Bradley has referred to as a “repositioning (of) black music as part of the fabric of British pop” (296), something that he understands to have begun with the London sound-system led scene of the 1980s and the success of collectives like Soul II Soul. Grime too offered a different narrative, an alternative musical tradition to that inherited by bands writing themselves into the self-enclosed canon of white English pop from which they drew their inspiration. At the same time, the ability of grime to agitate and reflect upon life in the disunited kingdom strengthened its inclusion and recognition within the wider popular cultural life of a nation that was outgrowing often insular and stereotypical reflections of itself and needing to embrace more fully notions of plurality. Critics described Dizzee Rascal’s Boy in Da Corner (2003) as groundbreaking in its redefinition of hip-hop and techno, as well as through subject matter that introduced many listeners to a disturbing and destabilising version of the UK that they were unfamiliar with. Comparisons made at the time between Dizzee Rascal and the musical and social impact of the Who, the Sex Pistols and the Smiths are also interesting for the way in which they reflect and anticipate how grime has continued to assert itself as something home-grown, as something British, even through and especially because of its transformation of the social, cultural and musical topography (Plagenhoef). The steady rise of grime’s popularity and a so-called ‘second coming’ with more recent artists like Stormzy - who famously headlined Glastonbury in 2019 - have all helped to embed the genre in the nation’s musical sensibility: so much so that in a recent BBC documentary from 2021 second wave rapper Saskilla boldly stated that “grime has had the same impact for British music as the Beatles” (Made in Britain).
5As an artist involved in grime almost from its inception, Kano was well placed in 2016 to consider these and other issues. Made in the Manor, his fifth studio album and first in six years, offers a nostalgic return to the contexts out of which grime was born and reflects upon its presence, influence and location. Autobiographical and confessional, but connecting the personal with a wider agenda, Kano works to establish the growing presence, visibility and organic nature of grime within the popular cultural history of the equally evolving nation. It is the past that holds the album together, offering a place that Kano continually revisits and celebrates as an essential part of his identity. At the same time, he attempts to come to terms with the present and his development as a black East End musician in a still sometimes hostile environment. The album artwork, a black and white photo collage of Kano as a child surrounded by friends and family members with 69 Manor Road as the focal point, recalls something of the original limited edition picture cover to ‘Penny Lane’/‘Strawberry Fields (Forever)’ with its back cover photographs of the four Beatles as young children intersected with the song titles linking them to the places that both shaped and inspired them. On Made in the Manor, the blue skies are urban rather than suburban, but a similar trajectory is present as Kano fills his ears and eyes - and those of the listener - with the sounds and images of halcyon days, most obviously in the opening of ‘T-Shirt Weather in the Manor’ that offers a paradise-lost-like vision of family and community life in the 1990s. Similarly, just as both ‘Penny Lane' and ‘Strawberry Fields (Forever)’ found the Beatles working to reinvent themselves and their music - a process realised even more fully on Sgt Pepper – so Kano is attempting to transform grime and push it into new thematic and sonic spaces, as the opening track ‘Hail’ clearly establishes. However, for both the Beatles and Kano, moving forwards is something that can only be achieved by looking back and acknowledging and incorporating what has gone before in the present act of creation.
6In an interview prior to the album’s release, Kano stated that ‘T-Shirt Weather in the Manor’ was the track that “sparked off this particular body of work and set the spirit for what the album was going to be like” (Doran). Warm Sundays, ice-cream vans, barbecues with family and friends, and cross generational togetherness; mid-90s sounds being played by the DJ, while the older crowd want something earlier, but are still happy to get up and try to dance to more contemporary music. ‘T-Shirt Weather’ is heavy with nostalgia, wistfully celebrating family and community life in and around Newham, but also touches on forces both internal and external that threatened it. There is a darker undercurrent to the song as Kano recalls the Gs and rude boys coming out at night and remembers how the party atmosphere could “change in a minute” and “innocent summers turn sinister” through lost tempers and violence. This recollection sets in motion an urgent, almost breathless autobiographical flow that interrupts the laid-back sound of the main piano riff, one where Kano jumps forward in time and comments on his “bittersweet” rise to fame and the consequent troubles with “gangster shit” when all he wanted to do was “rep the manor right”. The price of success turns out to be costly through the demands and offers made by friends and crooks, by those who criticise you for changing, who “love you and hate you and then love you again”, who have a distorted view of who you are and what you can do, all of which propels Kano back again to the refuge of a time before the “05 shit” and his first album that “changed my life forever”.5
- 6 ASBOs - Anti-Social Behaviour Orders - were replaced in 2014 in England and Wales by the CBO - Crim (...)
7At the same time, thoughts of Made in the Manor offering escape into an only idyllic past, or simple idealisations of life in the East End, are balanced against further reflections of growing up in the “bloodclart manor” both then and now. On ‘New Banger’ Kano documents how “walking to school was an everyday scrap” for the first people of colour living in Canning Town’s flats and how “locals” used to racially abuse “our mothers” and “call them coons”. Things might have improved slightly, and Kano’s mother can now ride shotgun in her son’s Mercedes, but the police still want to pull him over, check the number plates, and ask him about the value of the car in acts of humiliation that confirm their prejudice towards the community. Not that the place Kano grew up in is not without crime, but cogent reasons for its presence are offered in ‘A Roadman’s Hymn’, especially to the ignorant who think they know, or pretend to know. Clothes and cars are “worshipped” because “we don’t own no land, so we’re stuck in no man’s”. Kano explains why, in a world where the odds against becoming a lawyer or doctor are high, gangsters are regarded as “superheroes” and advertise a lifestyle easier to access than via the liberal professions. On ‘This is England’ the East End is peopled with ASBO6 kids on crack and Super Tennents Tenant’s lager, a “hood” where you are either a “villain or a victim”, where it’s hard to stay straight in a “town full of crooks”, while ‘Endz’ finds Kano riding through a cityscape of late night murders where “niggas go to jail everyday”. These examples show Kano writing about the familiar thematic territory of grime in pointing out racial and class exclusion and the consequent hardship of growing up in and around socially and economically disenfranchised boroughs of London only a few miles from the City, the West End, Downing Street, and Buckingham Palace and yet still largely unknown or ignored. Kano keeps them on the map and in the mind through carrying on the work of rapping for “the have nots and the have less” (‘This is England’), and through an album with a strong sense of its locale and history he testifies to the experience and impact of both immigration and marginalisation.
- 7 Joy White offers a perceptive and sometimes first-hand account of the difficult conditions of livin (...)
8A sense of ambivalence runs through Made in the Manor and not simply regarding the good and bad memories that are accessed. It is also found in the opposition between a sense of pride in the authenticity of a gritty, down to earth, tightly knit neighbourhood and the desire to get out before one is either crushed by, or incarcerated for, being on the wrong side of the law. In ‘This is England’, Kano’s “idiot’s guide to the Manor” advises those who make money to “make it out” and “avoid pen”. He tries to resurrect faith in Sam Cooke’s hope that “a change is gonna come for the masses” but acknowledges that such hope is weakened by the “same old, same old” problems of economic hardship, one parent families, gang violence, and mistrust on the streets. ‘A Roadman’s Hymn’ finds Kano seeking clemency for the “mandem” who “fucked up”, asking for them to be freed from prison and pardoned for crimes perpetrated because of society letting them down. He receives no answer to his repeatedly asked question “where is forgiveness?”, which suggests that, like the change desired by Sam Cooke, it will be an equally long time coming. As things stand, and for many of the reasons that Kano explores, becoming involved in crime offers a solution to privation and is part of the “survival instinct” described as a “must” on ‘Sea Shells in the East End’, albeit one that carries obvious risks and can - sometimes quite literally - lead to a dead-end for all the wealth and status it might confer. The other way out - considered on the album through Kano becoming his own subject - is through grime. Both crime and grime are viewed by Kano as aspirational within the community he grew up in and while he is not condoning the former and has experienced his own difficulties with the criminal underworld, he understands it as an inevitable aspect of life in the East End.7
- 8 Jonathan llan also works to clarify the troubling confusion that sometimes exists in the perception (...)
- 9 He could perhaps also have escaped by becoming a professional footballer after playing as a child f (...)
- 10 Obviously, one thinks of the Beatles and Liverpool, but other examples - of which there are a great (...)
9Crime and grime are different reactions, but different reactions to the same contexts - both social and economic - which may go some way towards explaining the almost intimate relationship that exists between them. Although this might also account for, but obviously not excuse, the stereotyping by “regulating authorities” (White 25) who see grime solely as an integral part of gang culture, Made in the Manor suggests that the petty street criminals, drug dealers, heavier gangsters, and grime artists belong inextricably together through their shared general upbringing and background.8 On ‘Sea Shells in the East End’ Kano is aware of the fine line that exists between himself and the kids who got into trouble, who grew up in the same “ends” and bought “sweets with the same pence”. He wonders whether it was “pot luck” or whether he was “god blessed” to have escaped the “ill manor” and whether he would be in the same mess “if I couldn’t rap”?9 Once more Kano urges those growing up in his old neighbourhood to leave “before you get stuck”, however easier said than done that may be. For all the ways in which he tries to promote a positive attitude and the cultivation of “internal strength” to counteract “external influences”, a sense of ambivalence remains in the many questions raised both directly and indirectly. Is it nature or nurture that defines one’s destiny, is it really any better beyond the manor, does freedom really lie beyond one’s home, is escapism a form of power or dreaming a way to really live? Kano writes that there’s still a war going on in the minds of the defeaters, a conflict between the victims and victors, but ‘Sea Shells in the East End’ also suggests that for all his positivity he too finds it as difficult to extricate himself from a place that “ain’t changed” as it is for the “low self esteemers”, “small winners” and “it is what it is is-ers”. Kano has of course made it out and “to the top”, but at the same time is somehow permanently stuck in the manor himself, as it will always be an essential part of who he is and the music he makes. It is a place to which he returns both physically and imaginatively, recalling it and recreating it in an autobiography powerfully connected to the wider social and cultural history of the UK, all of which gives Made in the Manor a greater cohesion and Kano the authoritative kudos required to explore the themes and ideas that concern him. Paradoxically, it is these very qualities that allow him to grow and move forward both psychologically and musically, almost as if the process of writing the album has become an act of working through the past to get beyond it and yet understand more fully the ways in which it is carried into and transforms the future. This is something that seems to typify a great deal of English pop and the closeness that certain artists and/or genres have with a particular area, which further consolidates Kano - and grime more generally - within the wider musical estate of the UK, while also signalling how that estate is being modified.10
10Revisiting his own past in Made in the Manor also becomes a journey back to the origins and impact of grime itself in which he challenges traditional, white, Anglo-Saxon pop histories through the assertion of a different musical narrative closely bound up with his own identity and the place he comes from. On ‘New Banger’ Kano recalls “partying to dancehall riddims” which he states are “in my DNA, I can’t part with it”. He also tells us that he knew Yellowman’s ‘Zungguzungguguzungguzeng’ before he learnt the alphabet and on ‘My Sound’ that his mother listened to Beres Hammond and Daddy Freddy, which again testifies to the impact of Jamaican music on his own artistic development. In the wide-ranging musical references he makes, Kano is celebrating the importance of both continuity and change. Citing reggae and lover’s rock legend Dennis Brown on ‘T-Shirt Weather in the Manor’, he acknowledges the abiding presence and influence of Caribbean sounds as the bedrock of black music in the UK, while the mention of Tina Moore’s American R&B single ‘Never Going to Let You Go’ from 1995 - which became popular as a remix on the UK garage scene in 1997 - points to the growing eclecticism of urban music and the new sounds and sometimes transatlantic influences that were adopted and adapted in a variety of cross-fertilisations out of which grime itself eventually appeared. Dub-step, jungle, drum and bass, rave, garage, and eskibeat are all mentioned on the album, reminding the listener of the diverse yet related ingredients that lead to its creation. At the same time as Made in the Manor discovers Kano to be taking inspiration from the distant and more recent past, he is equally keen to experiment and create something new. He has spoken of how on this comeback album he wanted to “work under the umbrella of grime”, but also the way this was matched by a desire to “twist it and see how I could make it mine and not just the idea of what was expected of me” (Doran). Once again, this shows how Kano reconstructs not only his own musical identity - a return journey closely connected to his own personal history - but also the way he seeks to maintain black urban music as a vibrant, creative and continually evolving presence within the contemporary UK music scene.
11There are songs on Made in the Manor like ‘New Banger’ and ‘3 Wheel-Ups’ to satisfy the grime purists, establish Kano’s credentials, and give him the authority and confidence to carry his music into different and less familiar territory. On ‘New Banger’ he repeats that “the ruler’s back”; on ‘3 Wheel-Ups’ that unlike many of his younger contemporaries he’s a “direct rude boy”, an authentic practitioner of his craft, and doesn’t need to justify himself to anyone. The guest appearance of Giggs and references to D Double E and clashes with Wiley - the ‘Godfather of Grime’ who is also listed as featuring on the track - adds further weight to Kano’s claims and is a timely reminder of his own involvement in the early days of the genre as he returns on Made in the Manor to participate in and shape its unfolding narrative. Once again, recent but important history is surfacing here, something that Kano is keen to write about on the album - not only write about but write into and against the once exclusive nature of English pop and challenge its conservative inheritance. On ‘Hail’, the album’s opening fanfare, Kano is backed by the heavy sound of metal guitars, not merely as a dramatic means of announcing his return as “king of this shit”, but almost as a way of establishing the power of grime through the appropriation of heavy rock, a traditionally white musical genre, even if its origins can be found in Afro-American blues. It also reflects Kano’s eclecticism and his attempt to engage with other sounds and influences, as well as reveal the sources and inspirations of his own music. Obviously ‘Deep Blues’ is not in any real sense a traditional blues record in its overall sound and instrumentation, but the title, the subjects it explores, and the emotional feel of the vocal deliveries find it reaching back to make a connection with another time and place as Kano once more criticises the recent directions that urban music has taken. He laments the fact that now “we’re fucking rapping for fashion”, infatuated with expensive cars, and he resents the reappearance and dominance of US trap music. In this context the autobiographical nature of ‘Deep Blues’ reads like an appeal for a return to more integrity and authenticity to counter the commercial superficiality of the mainstream and reawaken grime’s social conscience.
- 11 Wings also released an album entitled London Town in 1978, the whimsical title track written by Pau (...)
12The presence of Damon Albarn singing the chorus on ‘Deep Blues’ is interesting with regard to Kano’s self-conscious revisiting and reworking of popular music throughout Made in the Manor. Albarn had already featured on ‘Feel Free’ from Kano’s second album London Town in 2007 and Kano rapped with Bashy on the Gorillaz song ‘White Flag’ on the concept album Plastic Beach released in 2010.11 The Gorillaz project allowed Albarn to break away from the narrow limitations of Britpop and work in a more eclectic mode himself, something that spilled over into the Africa Express organisation that he set up to foster a creative interplay between Western, Middle Eastern and African music and with which Kano was involved, taking part in various events and tours at home and abroad. Britpop has often been criticised for writing the influence of black music out of its 60s-inspired retro revival, so Damon Albarn singing on a Kano track called ‘Deep Blues’, with all the cultural associations that the title suggests, becomes another example of the way in which the album is shifting English pop away from an insular and exclusive Anglocentrism towards a more diverse, hybridised outlook. Made in the Manor is not a rejection of the UK’s musical heritage in the hope of replacing it with something new, but rather an attempt to reshape and adapt it through locating grime (and the artistic, cultural and social community out of which it developed) within its pages. “This real East End theme music”, Kano boldly states on ‘Hail’, and it’s just as real and a part of the musical architecture of London life as the Cockney music hall and pub song ‘knees ups’ of earlier times.
13The idea of grime being intrinsically British is also underlined on ‘Hail’ in Kano’s criticism of American artists “crossing the pond and fishing for hits”. He acknowledges that there’s much to gain from a shared transatlantic influence but asks, “how come no-one credits us Brits?” The patriotism on show here recalls something of the British Invasion in the mid-60s and its subversion of American popular cultural power: so too Britpop’s rejection of grunge in the early 1990s. Recreating a similar discourse of resistance further entrenches Kano and grime in the historical narrative of UK pop that is - at the same time - being rewritten as Made in the Manor explores its own concerns surrounding the relationship between music and identity. On ‘This is England’, he asks “who am I to mess tradition up?” in a song that celebrates the way in which grime is a vital part of both local and national life. Kano and his music are, he suggests, as embedded in the East End as the Kray Twins and it is no accident that the opening of the promotional video is set in E. Pellicci’s on the Bethnal Green Road where Reggie and Ronnie Kray often dined in the 60s. Opened by Italian immigrants in 1900, Pellicci’s has become almost legendary for the full English breakfasts it serves with cups of strong tea, all on display in the video as Kano himself tucks in surrounded by the hustle and bustle of frying up and the coming and going of neighbourhood characters. It is a typical English café, but still run by members of the original family who also prepare and serve Italian food, once more signifying Kano’s commitment to highlighting hybridity and cultural exchange. ‘New Banger’ records that the older generation of gangsters and wide boys showed the Windrush descendants “what bangers and mash is” and “we showed them what dumpling and yam is” while setting up “sound systems in houses” long before black musical genres became widely popular, but establishing the foundations, connections and exchanges for just that to happen.
14‘This is England’ is certainly a key track on the album in serving Kano’s desire to inscribe grime and the world it comes from within the national consciousness. As well as opening a broken window onto the harsh conditions of inner-city life and the consequences of social marginalisation and economic precarity - crime, violence, drugs, dysfunctional families - the song offers hope in the idea of moving forward and getting out, but not at the cost of forgetting. This is an England often ignored, but Kano reminds us here and elsewhere of its very real presence, one that contrasts with the riches and escapism available in ‘Drinking in the West End’ - as equally a part of London as Kano’s manor - and both of them figuring in the diverse social panorama of the UK at large. This varied and sometimes paradoxical portrait is developed through the promotional video for ‘This is England’. It portrays Kano taking a cross-country journey via multiple shots and short scenes that unfold after the inhospitable opening image of a union jack fluttering against a dark and rainy sky, foregrounded by a spiked, grey metal fence. We are taken from the East End to Land’s End, from Bristol to Blackpool, from bleak moorlands to rolling patchwork fields; from trashed and boarded up terraced houses and inner city wastelands to stately homes; from jellied eel cafes and traditional English tea rooms to Little Chef service stations and pub interiors; from football terraces to greyhound stadiums and amusement arcades, one of which is called ‘Merrie England’. Kano is the constant presence as both traveller and guide, rapping and flowing his way through the video, his music and the subjects it explores representing and reflecting an aspect of England as justifiably a constituent part of the country’s identity as any of the other lifestyles or cultural practices on show.
- 12 For an interesting critical analysis of the ‘Parklife’ video and the toxic Anglocentrism of Britpop (...)
- 13 Ruth Adams also sees the video as further testimony of the way in which the East End and the UK mor (...)
15The video is similar to and yet different from Blur’s representations of Englishness on, for example, the promos for ‘Sunday, Sunday’ (1993) or ‘Parklife’ (1994), both of which are equally full of stereotypical signifiers, but largely reflect only white working class life.12 Kano adds another dimension, again not messing tradition up but acknowledging that the world he comes from needs to be included within its compass. In this way ‘This is England’ once more finds Kano subverting earlier pop genres like Britop by redefining their exclusive Anglocentric vision. The appearance of several union jacks and a large cross of St George is also interesting in this respect. Kano’s appropriation of the flag long associated, from the 60s onwards, with British pop bands such as the Beatles, the Who, the Jam and Oasis - to name but a few - liberates it from being the sole property of white artists and represents what we can understand to be a post-colonial assertion of black identity and culture. To refer to - and misquote - the title of Paul Gilroy’s groundbreaking study of racism in Britain, Kano is attempting to put some black into the union jack and counter the nefarious idea that national identity is based on whiteness alone. This aim is furthered through Kano using ‘This is England’ as a text to write not only the story of grime in his recollections of the days “when Lethal Bizzle was Lethal B” and “Wiley was Wiley Kat”, but more importantly to continue to write it into the wider historical narrative of popular music and culture in the UK. His memories of those early days, “spit(ting) sixteens” at house parties and shebeens “til they called the police”, are also followed directly by the refrain “this is England, this is England” suggesting that therein lay some vital aspect of the nation’s creative spirit, obscured by the dark, at first not apparent, but something waiting to be discovered, assimilated, celebrated in the music of grime and the community it represents and something that Made in the Manor is bringing into the light.13
- 14 A pum-pum is a type of yellow yam, but also Jamaican slang for female genitalia, as referenced in t (...)
16On ‘My Sound’, Kano boldly states that his music is “the realest”, the “real deal”. It’s a rap filled with references to friends, family and crew members; full of sometimes obscure - to the uninitiated - East End street language and Jamaican patois; and rich with echoes, both in text and sound, of the West Indian music that nourished Kano, certain strands of which - as we have already seen - found themselves in the music and culture of grime. The feel and rhythm of ‘My Sound’ with its “rum pum pum, pum pum pum” and “po po po po po po” refrains certainly gives it a Caribbean flavour and finds Kano once more looking back, at the same time as creating something new in reshaping and recycling those influences for a new generation.14 He also self-consciously refers to himself as a “forefather”, aware of his place in the musical genealogy of post-war black music and furthermore, although not stated explicitly here, the important impact that albums like Made in the Manor can have in changing perceptions about what we mean when we talk about English or British popular music. The invitation that he extends at the beginning of ‘My Sound’ to East Ham, Plaistow, Stratford and Canning Town to “stand up” with him in an act of self-assured resistance against the haters and help him re-establish “my ting”, creates a powerful sense of identification between Kano, his music, his family, friends and culture, with his own “ends” and even more widely with London and the UK as a whole. Again, this is related to the album’s challenge to stereotypical ideas about local and national identity through the celebration of diversity.
- 15 As clearly evidenced by the Grenfell Fire (2017) and its aftermath; the Windrush Scandal (2018); an (...)
- 16 Jason Arday writes that ‘the eternal optimist within yearns for a reconceptualisation of Britishnes (...)
17It is the blending of autobiography and personal testimony, cultural and musical history, all concentrated in a specific and vividly brought to life area of East London, that gives Made in the Manor a powerful conceptual unity and sense of purpose, similar and yet different to Sgt Pepper, as mentioned in my introduction. Similar because of the thematic continuity, sense of place and revisiting of earlier musical genres to reanimate the contemporary; different in its presentation of an alternative view of Englishness through a rewriting of pop history that accommodates previously marginalised sounds and voices. It becomes a microcosm of a troubled and turbulent UK struggling with its lopsided multicultural identity,15 but at the same time asserts the positive impact of post-war immigration in having (re)shaped - and continuing to shape - ideas about nationhood. While Kano is not taking an explicitly political stance, there is an important cultural manifesto at work in the album, attesting to the important presence of black identity, culture, and sound within the UK, and how grime as a product of all those things is different to what he refers to in ‘Hail’ as “RP cup of tea music”. It’s hard not think of the Beatles or the Kinks or any of the Britpop spin-offs when music and tea are mentioned in the same breath, and while Kano is not directly dismissing them and PG Tips are part of his hangover cure in ‘Drinking in the West End’, they can be associated with stereotypical ideas about what constitutes Britishness to the detriment of other musical forms and cultural practices. That is why he denies knowing the Queen at the end of ‘Hail’ and adds, with a degree of cheek that matches John Lennon asking the rich to rattle their jewellery at the Royal Command Performance in November 1963, “but that bitch stays in my jean pocket”. Her Majesty may have been a “pretty nice girl”, as Paul McCartney sings on the coda to Abbey Road (1969), but Kano rejects her as another symbol of an out-of-date Britain more in tune with the past than the present of 2016. Keeping the Queen in his pocket, while obviously a reference to money, can also be read as an expression of confidence and self-assertion, a role-reversal reflecting the way in which grime artists and the communities they speak for seek to establish a new power and presence to both challenge and change the image of an outmoded and still sometimes overly backwards-looking country that remains haunted by institutional racism and the troubling presence of right-wing extremism.16