UK rapper Dave recently made black history during Black History Month with his first No 1 single, Funky Friday, featuring Fredo. As the news breaks, six artists have gathered to discuss the rise of their scene. Dave’s success sets the tone; the room is instantly electric at the news. Not3s, a 20-year-old British-Nigerian rapper, assures a characteristically nonchalant Dave on speakerphone that it will sink in once he receives his trophy from Radio 1. Producer Steel Banglez, at 31 the de facto father figure, reminds the group that it is illustrative of “how far the culture has come”.
“It’s a big thing,” says rapper Kojo Funds. “To come from where nobody was listening to our kind of music, for that to become No 1, it means people are adapting to our sound right now. It’s a great push for our scene.”
Once Dave would have been an exception to the rule, but British music of black origin is now richer and more successful than ever, with UK rap, grime and Afro-pop filling up the charts. While debate rages regarding genre names – Afro bashment? Afro trap? – all agree that the popularity of what was once called “urban” music is at an all-time high. Giggs, J Hus and Nines have scaled the albums chart, Stefflon Don is building a strong transatlantic career, and Hardy Caprio, MoStack and Yxng Bane are building devoted fanbases from streaming.
“It’s very special,” says the singer Mabel, whose 2017 single Finders Keepers made the Top 10. “We look at 90s R&B as being some kind of like golden era. I’m so confident that in 15, 20 years, we’ll look back at this time in UK music and be like: ‘That was fucking sick.’”
In the past, homegrown black music has received short bursts of interest from the industry. Few acts squeezed through, and even fewer managed to maintain their position in the mainstream beyond one hit. In the 90s and early 00s, Mark Morrison and So Solid Crew were the exceptions. Craig David’s rise from 1999, Dizzee Rascal in the mid-00s, and hip-pop trio N Dubz’s takeover nearly a decade ago are the most recent isolated peaks. There were black pop artists such as Jamelia, Alexandra Burke and JLS, but anything edgier was shut out; rappers such as Chip (then Chipmunk), Tinchy Stryder and Tinie Tempah won success only after embracing a glossy, mainstream sound.
In the past few years, however, grime has re-emerged in a purer, harsher form, with Skepta and Stormzy paving the way for a new generation of young, ethnically diverse British musicians creating radically hybrid pop. Gone are the “hood celebrities”, whose fame rarely stretched beyond inner London, the likes of Flirta D and Bruza. The new school blends the recent, summery “UK funky” dance sound with the tougher street cred of “road rap”. Just as a few years ago Mista Silva, Sona and Kwamz & Flava forged a UK take on melodic west African dance-pop called Afrobeats, today’s scene draws on Caribbean chord progressions and dancehall rhythms. The outcome is both thoroughly rooted in the black diaspora and unmistakably British.
“London is a melting pot of so many different places and it’s just become this one thing,” says Mabel, 24, who credits her sound to both London life and a childhood spent travelling the world with her parents, the Swedish-Sierra Leonean pop singer Neneh Cherry and the Massive Attack producer Cameron McVey. “We’ve really mastered taking all of these different cultures and making this one sick sound, and I think that’s why everybody is looking at us right now.” Mabel emerged in 2015 and falls at the pop end of the spectrum, blending dancehall, R&B and British pop.
Kojo Funds made his name by merging the grit of grime, the sunny sound of Afrobeats and the braggadocio of road rap. He cites his African mother and Caribbean father as influences. “I’m getting the best of both worlds,” he says. “My experiences being a British black guy, the struggle of coming up here – the African and Caribbean background just adds a little flavour on top.” The celebration of this diverse sound, incidentally, is welcome respite from the semi-serious “diaspora wars” among second- and third-generation immigrant kids, competing over who has the best jollof rice and the pronunciation of “plantain”.
But despite the scene’s diversity, it is by no means colourblind. Debates are often thrown up around authenticity and appropriation.
Hackney-based vocalist B Young, 23, found fame last year with Jumanji, a tropical Afro-bashment track sprinkled with US trap, with a chorus that dominated Instagram captions for months; followup 079ME has spent the past 12 weeks in the Top 40. B Young is of Turkish-Cypriot heritage, and his Afro-Caribbean intonation threw some listeners, but he shrugs off criticism. “I wasn’t exposed to any race discussion till I made music,” he says. “Growing up where I grew up, race wasn’t a thing, man. Not in London.” Mabel, however, struggled in the scene, having grown up of mixed heritage in Sweden, and says she has been told she’s “too white”.
Their myriad inspirations have made many artists impossible to categorise. “I’m Not3s, B Young is B Young, Mabel is Mabel, and so on,” says Not3s, another Hackney export, whose songs Addison Lee, My Lover and Aladdin have each been streamed tens of millions of times. “With us, they want to call us ‘grime star Not3s’ or whatever. But when you say Ed Sheeran or Anne-Marie, you don’t use a label before them.”
“You once had to box it to sell it to people,” says producer Steel Banglez, born Pahuldip Singh Sandhu in Forest Gate; he earned his moniker because of the bracelets he wore as part of the “five Ks” of Sikhism. “But maybe genres don’t even matter any more.” Responsible for tracks such as J Hus’s Fisherman and No Words by Dave, Sandhu draws on south Asian samples, Afrobeats and Jamaican dubs, and is influenced by pirate radio and the early days of grime.
Yet accusations of “all sounding the same” plague the scene. Sandhu says artists and labels are trying to copy specific songs. “You get a hit record out of that because it sounds a bit similar. But it’s not great artistry.” It’s a critique particularly aimed at the scene’s female artists.
“You’re signed as a woman, and you’re moulded into something,” says Mabel. “It can all sound the same because we’re not actually given the freedom to experiment, because they’re like: ‘I want you to be like her.’”
“People think girls can’t make hard tunes,” adds the north London singer Amelia Monet. The youngest of the group, at just 17, her debut single Baddest got 1m views within a week of its release this summer. “When we really can – because we’ve got sauce!”
The industry’s sudden appetite for this diasporic sound couldn’t be more different to its initial reaction. A few years ago, Sandhu played No Words and his own track Bad to Warner Bros execs, who assured him they didn’t have potential. “They didn’t really pay attention from when the seed was planted seven years ago by the early rappers,” he says. “They didn’t think we was gonna be here, so they have a hard time understanding what we’re doing.”
Kojo Funds recalls a similar experience. “When I brought out Dun Talkin, people liked it,” he says of his breakthrough hit. “But they were confused – when I sat down with the labels they were like: ‘But we don’t know what this is.’ It’s just good!”
“[Labels] just couldn’t hear what I could hear,” Mabel adds of Finders Keepers, which peaked at No 8. “Now, I can feel the difference when I walk into my label. I feel like we’ve all proven something together.”
Collaboration is also key. Mabel has made songs with both Kojo Funds and Not3s, who in turn has worked with Steel Banglez. During our conversation, Not3s and B Young swap numbers and Sandhu announces his intention to get every one of them in the studio.
“In other golden eras of music, there was so much competitive energy,” Mabel says. “But now, I feel like we’re jumping on each other’s tracks, supporting each other on tour. There’s some mad construct that we’re supposed to be competing against each other, which is so dumb, because that’s when something dies. We need each other.”
The internet is another support network this generation of musicians has at their disposal, which has been integral to bypassing industry structures. Monet went from Instagram influencer to musician, signing with Sony, while many of the group found fame via independent video platforms such as Link Up TV and GRM Daily. Views started counting toward chart positions from June, which helped to secure Dave and Fredo their No 1.
B Young refers to streaming services as “the new-gen radio ... Before, it was like music was forced on to the audience. Now, they pick what they want to listen to. So, labels are looking at followings and plays – they don’t even know if it’s a banger, they’re just like: ‘Rah, people like it, boy, let’s sign that!’”
In the new democracy of pop, where the old order of labels and radio has dissolved, these artists can break down the boxes they have been put in and make careers in music on their own terms. The group discuss the pros and cons of digital music distribution companies such as Tunecore and Ditto, which allow artists to retain master recordings and often offer more money than a label deal. “It’s mad that we even know that,” Sandhu says, saying that in the past musicians were often “oblivious to what they were doing” when it came to signing contracts. “This is a conscious generation.”
“We’re in control, at the end of the day,” B Young adds. “We’ve got to know our own value or else we’re going to get taken advantage of.”
