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Dave’s new track ‘Black’ of his debut album ‘Psychodrama’ is a perfect example of how Grime music functions as a vehicle for expressive diaspora identity in postcolonial London. His track tackles issues of racial identity as well as his own personal journey of being Nigerian while living in South London. The scene acts as an educator with artists often articulating themselves as antithetical to eurocentrism.

Cultural background

Grime music is a vital platform for the expression of transnational identity with artists highlighting their experiences of diaspora to other marginal fractions of the population providing a voice for the voiceless. It is in these voices where the hidden effects of colonialism, slavery and eurocentrism are seen in the sheerest light. The ‘double consciousness’ of being both European and Black are prevalent in the Grime scene as stories paint a vivid picture, not just of artists lives within a particular community, but include their multicultural identity. This identity cannot be easily understood as either a direct continuity of African tradition or a variation of European traditions, but rather the cultural process of creolization. Dave has always been vocal that he is Nigerian, and for the music video “Black” he decided to shoot it in his hometown of Streatham, South London and in his homeland Nigeria demonstrating a profound exploration of black identity, excellence and the diaspora.

From the very beginning founding fathers such as Wiley and Dizzee Rascal have set the scene for Grime offering a space for those to celebrate their history and heritage, and that’s exactly what Dave did with his song Black. The song is a mature reflection of his identity growing up in Britain as a man of African heritage, and questions why history is so keen to erase large chunks of other cultures.

Black is strugglin’ to find your history or trace the shit

You don’t know the truth about your race ’cause they erasin’ it

Black has got a sour fuckin’ flavour, here’s a taste of it

This section of his song is empowering as it offers a firm rebuke to the contradicting idea of history being progressive while at the same time providing an opportunity to re-periodise and reaccentuate accounts of the dialectic of enlightenment which have not always been concerned to view modernity through the lenses of colonialism.  What Dave is representing here is an articulation of black ideologies through his double consciousness of being Black and British which articulates itself as antithetical to eurocentrism.  The “sour fuckin’ flavour” acts as a metaphor to the states long attempts to erase African contributions to world knowledge, but the song creates an opportunity against the unproductive debate of a Eurocentric rationalism which banishes the slave experience from its accounts of modernity. For Dave it is important to express his inner dialectics of diaspora identification and music acts as this device for ordering the self.

Black is people namin’ your countries on what they trade most

Coast of Ivory, Gold Coast, and the Grain Coast

But most importantly to show how deep all this pain goes

West Africa, Benin, they called it slave coast

The lyrics here show the explicitly of cultural oppression, referring to the practices of European colonialists naming ‘their’ African territories after the ‘goods’ they exploited and exported.  Its insights of slavery raise awareness and reopen discussions about the Euro-American age where the consequent relationship of radicalism energised slaves struggles for emancipation, and from this diasporas still endure in the struggles of their dispersed descendants. The history and past of diasporic subjects are not buried in the past, rather Grime music acts as an expression of diverse identity, an illuminator providing a space for alternative avenues of identification for diasporic subjects in postcolonial London. The new ways of belonging challenge the binary polarities of oppressor and oppressed, pure and impure, authenticity and hybridity. Grime music offers a place of power for marginalised youths to search for their hidden histories and to reclaim their representation.

In an interview with The Guardian about Black, Dave says “that track is my experience, me being south London, black, Nigerian, that’s what I’m mainly basing it on. It’s a good representation of what I associate with and everything that I think”. Here we can see how Dave wants to represent history exactly how he has experienced it, from the imperialists’ lens to show the brutality that his ancestors had to live through and how this still affects him being Nigerian and living in London.

Paradoxically, when Dave’s song was first debuted on mainstream Radio it received a massive amount of backlash. Listeners missed its nuanced critique of language as a limiting construct on ethnic identity, expression and diversity. Radio 1 DJ Annie Mac answered back on Twitter, along with an interview for NME saying “people are scared of the word black, they seem reluctant to have conversations around it”. This demonstrates the residues of eurocentrism still embedded in the nation, and confirms that present day racism is the inheritance of the nation-state created by, and for a homogenous culture.

It is at no surprise that the song received such a visceral reaction from a country so determined to keep race clandestine. Orientalism argues just this, that the orient was always a European invention created by those in power using their own ideology to control the East. From the government implementing a Eurocentric view of the world, political and media establishments in Britain continue to fall short in representing ethnic minority experiences, therefore ‘Black’ doubles as a manifesto for responsible phraseology and against anachronistic stereotyping.

Dave’s lyrical narrative brings to light the brutality that eurocentrism has hidden from us with Grime music providing the platform to essentially give the history lesson schools never bothered to teach. Grime answers back with the experiences of the marginalised living in Britain that are often silenced or policed by the mainstream. Dave’s song fills these holes by laying down his experiences and the lyrics “Loud in our laughter, silent in our sufferin” illustrates his response to the nation’s deeply ingrained attitudes to blackness. Dave and other Grime artists have this space to fight against the Eurocentric grand narrative through their music, to provide healing to the diaspora while proposing glimpses of an alternative future.

Essential tracks: Black, Lesley, Psycho, Purple heart and Streatham

Written by Nicole Horwood / Twitter: @Whorewoods