Putting on Black Rap Gigs Is Still As Hard As Ever

This is the reality not just for Sleazy, but many of Manchester’s Black rappers – being regularly denied entry to their own city’s music venues. 

It’s not just the Rainy City, either – there have been countless reports on London venues’ racist stereotyping of Black music over the years. Until now, though, there’ve been few on how this plays out in regional cities. Through writing an academic paper on the policing and prosecuting of rap, published by Cambridge University Press, we found so many more stories like Sleazy’s. We actually found evidence of prejudice going back at least 20 years against Black rappers and DJs from central Manchester venues – continuing well into 2023, where rap claims a record share of the UK albums market and is literally the most popular genre in the U.S. 

Our research shows prejudice continues to happen in London and other UK cities, like Liverpool, and this has a direct effect on rappers’ and DJs’ ability to earn a living from their craft. It’s a practice that dates back to London’s Form 696, introduced in 2005, when the police would shut down events that were considered to be playing Black music genres. The Form was scrapped back in 2017, but prejudice towards Black punters and Black artists remain.

The policing of Black music in the UK has received most of its publicity in the years prior, like injunctions against the rapper Digga D stopping him mentioning certain violence-related words in his lyrics. But it has a long history dating back to the 50s and the shutting down of Jamaican sound systems. In the 2000s, grime became the ultimate target for police censorship practices, like the time BRIT-nominated MOBO-winning rapper Giggs had his tour shut down over police safety fears. He’d been on police surveillance under Operation Trident – a 1998 police initiative to tackle gun crime in London’s Black communities – despite the fact that he hadn’t been involved in any gang activity for over a decade. 

Criminologists, including Manchester Metropolitan University’s Patrick Williams, have actually found that not only are the people on police “gang” lists mainly from Black, Asian and minority ethnic backgrounds, most aren’t actually involved in gangs or any serious crime at all. “Despite featuring heavily in gang databases, young Black and minority ethnic people do not appear to be responsible for most serious violence in their areas,” Williams writes alongside co-author Becky Clarke in 2016 report Dangerous Associations: Joint Enterprise, Gangs and Racism.

Brixton-raised rapper and visual artist GAIKA, who released his politically charged debut EP Security in 2015 and displayed artwork in 2022’s British Art Show, describes similar experiences. After moving to Manchester for university in the early 2000s, he became a promoter and co-founded the blueprint-setting club night Murkage. 

“Let’s talk about RIO, let’s talk about Wrigz,” GAIKA tells VICE, referring to Manchester rappers. “They’d come to me as a booker, as a promoter, and say we wanna do this party or this show, and we’d try to do it but the police would say, ‘We’ve got intelligence you’re in a gang’ or they’d slap you with [Form] 696. They’d just say, ‘Nah, we’re going to shut you down’ or would find out who the venue owners were and terrify them.” 

In more recent years, it’s been drill music facing heavy criticism in the UK press, leading to the police requesting YouTube to remove hundreds of music videos deemed to be promoting gun violence, and music lyrics being used as a form of evidence to prosecute rappers in criminal trials, like with Unknown T. Given all that, the practice of policing Black sound has become undeniably obvious.  

Then there’s the detrimental planning and policy decisions. Sociologist Dr. Joy White says local authorities’ hellbent aim to attract richer demographics to her home-borough in East London (AKA gentrification) has pushed grime and drill to the margins. “In a bid to make Newham a place where people will choose to live, work and stay, the public locations where music was made are now categorised as places of fear and deficit,” she writes in her 2020 book, Terraformed: Young Black Lives in the Inner City. “The young people who occupy these spaces are rendered as troublesome, and become subject to control and surveillance.”

Over in Liverpool, professor Sara Cohen tells of the exclusion of rap genres when the city became the European Capital of Culture in 2008, in her chapter for the 2013 book Musical Performance and the Changing City: Post-Industrial Contexts in Europe and the United States. Interviewing musicians who drew maps of their music-making in the city, Cohen found that rock musicians’ maps were rich with venues they’ve played. But “live public performance venues were generally absent from the maps produced by grime and hip-hop musicians, who commonly complained that they and their music were excluded from the city centre by those who managed and promoted those venues”.

In Manchester, the marginalisation of Black music in tandem with gentrification has been affecting rappers since the early 2000s, when grime crews like Mayhem came on the scene. “Mayhem were pretty much blacklisted everywhere,” says Danny “Falz” Fahey, also known as rapper Fallacy, who was a music promoter at the time. “I was one of the only people that would put them on and I’d put them on in spaces outside the city centre, because grime had to find itself in unique spaces, especially locally.” 

Rapper Sleazy remembers playing at the incredibly unusual spot of Manchester rock venue Rebellion in 2018, when no other venues would take him on. “Who would think about booking Rebellion?” he tells VICE, still in disbelief he actually performed there. 

DJ Silva tells a similar story. An Old Trafford-hailing selector with 30 years’ experience playing dancehall, R&B and hip hop, he’s faced racial profiling, countless attempts to shut down his events and discrimination at city centre venues. It’s left him feeling that he can’t be visible as a promoter – especially in venues where he’s already been racially profiled as a punter. Now, he actually gets his white business partner to book his events. “I know if it was me that went to them, it wouldn’t be happening,” Silva tells VICE. “You have to get certain faces to go up front, and do the talking, which is totally wrong, but that’s just how it is.” 

More recently, gentrification-driven prejudice in Manchester plays out most noticeably in the Northern Quarter’s bars. An area where once-cheap rents attracted artists and musicians, it’s now been sanitised beyond recognition, with finance bros and their sausage dogs filling the sourdough bakeries now on every corner. DJ Silva has seen how this affects DJs playing rap first-hand. “A lot of the main [Black rap] DJs that you would see in town, you don’t really see them around anymore. When I’ve been Northern Quarter lately, there’s a lot of white DJs,” he says, adding that they’re playing rap music previously played by Black DJs, to largely white crowds. 

This white-washing of music venues impacts bigger artists, too. Our research found that even big name Manchester rapper Bugzy Malone has performed in the city only seven times since 2015. Just take a look at the lineups for Parklife festival and superclub Warehouse Project – they either have no local Black rap acts at all or host them on their smallest stages. Sure, Parklife made some improvements to this in recent years, platforming Manc Black and mixed race artists like Abnormal Sleepz, Meekz Manny and Strategy on its main stages. But in comparison to how many other acts performed, including rap acts, this feels tokenistic at most. 

Post the pandemic, being able to earn a living from playing live is incredibly important for musicians needing to make up for lost earnings – especially in the face of evidence from a 2021 Intellectual Property Office report. This found that “revenues from recorded music, including streaming, downloads and physical sales, constitute only a small proportion of UK music creators’ earnings.” And that live music is one of the main ways that music creators make a living. So basically, having your shows shut down in 2023 is even more catastrophic to your career than when Giggs was targeted, because at least back in the 2010s, physical sales of music were still a major source of revenue to artists. 

GAIKA is one of the few artists we spoke to who’s managed to have an international career despite these challenges, with recent album Drift gaining critical acclaim. For Murkage, he developed strategies for navigating the shut downs, like putting it on mid-week and not announcing the headliner until the day before, or only by word of mouth. Murkage’s partially white, middle class student audience also hugely helped them stay out of the police’s radar. 

“If we had a Black, working class audience and not a Manchester University student one for the first few years, I don’t think we would’ve been able to stay open,” he tells VICE. “I saw the difference because I also promoted nights that catered to Black working class audiences.” Another strategy was to create promo artwork that looked like it was an indie music event. One way they did this was by using dark colours and gothic imagery on their posters, and avoiding a gloss finish to their flyers. 

“Seeing that discrimination is what led me to take such a political stance in my art,” GAIKA says. Some rappers and DJs haven’t been able to fulfil their potential amid all this discrimination, though. 

DJ Silva, for example, is a very well-respected DJ in Manchester, but he hasn’t nearly achieved the national and international success locals agree his talent deserves. Silva puts it down to the way British racism is less obvious than it is in countries like the U.S. –  it insidiously affects your opportunities.

The solution? Not only do we need to fight the more obvious ways in which Black rappers and DJs are discriminated against, we need to take action against the subtle and indirect ways – like gentrification and planning policy – too. Police discrimination aside, ultimately it’s their ability to earn a fair living from performing that’ll enable Black rappers and DJs to carry on doing what they love. And if they’re not given the space to, most won’t survive. 

@kamilarymajdo
@toyx