Why are UK radio stations ignoring Black British music to play recycled American rap? | Elijah

[Tony Sweeney]

Why are UK radio stations ignoring Black British music to play recycled
American rap?
Elijah

It’s been five years since Stormzy headlined Glastonbury, a defining
moment in Black British music history. But if you listen to stations
like Capital Xtra, Kiss and BBC Radio 1Xtra, they still centre American
hip-hop and R&B – a staggering amount of it from the early 2000s – such
as 50 Cent, Ja Rule and Chris Brown. It’s particularly vexing that BBC
Radio 1Xtra, which uses “Amplifying Black music and culture” as its
tagline, still doesn’t prioritise Black British artists in its daytime
programming. Homegrown music is reserved for the night-time slots, when
fewer people are listening. Why are we paying for a station that doesn’t
focus on representing our music?

It’s no secret that the publicly funded station faces heavy competition
from commercial rival Capital Xtra, but the answer can’t be to copy its
tired formula of “hits” all day and night. Last week I listened to 1Xtra
and Capital Xtra, and they both played Joe Budden’s Pump It Up, a US rap
hit from 2003, within minutes of each other in the middle of the
afternoon. It’s as if our airwaves are frozen in time, with no benefit
to our artists or ecosystem.
Without extensive radio support across many stations – not just BBC
Radio 1Xtra – it’s still difficult for artists to make an impact in the
charts. Even though streaming drives sales, radio is still key to
driving listener growth for artists, especially those without
pre-existing audiences and major label budgets. Incredibly, there are no
Black British artists in last week’s official singles and albums chart
Top 40, something that would have been an unthinkable future when
Stormzy shouted out over 50 Black British artists in a row during his
set in 2019.
I see this reflected in the clubs, too. Black British DJ culture birthed
jungle, UK garage, grime, UK funky and Afroswing in the past 30 years.
But in the past five years, club DJs have relied heavily on new remixes
of the same early 2000s hip-hop and R&B on 1Xtra. “Edits” culture has
boomed across social media and platforms like Boiler Room and Keep Hush
where DJs play a familiar vocal on a different but familiar instrumental
track, or vice versa.
They get good reactions from party crowds, but some ravers that are
yearning for new sounds are having to look farther afield to genres from
abroad like Amapiano from South Africa to hear something fresh. A night
has started in Peckham called No Edits to reverse this trend and
prioritise original club music, led by a group that includes jungle DJ
Sherelle, who has a show on BBC 6 Music, a station where you are more
likely to hear contemporary Black British acts regularly like Little
Simz, Ezra Collective and Loraine James than on 1Xtra.
Young people’s wide adoption of streaming services adds another layer of
complexity, meaning we now have a generation that may have never
actively listened to radio at any point in their lives. This is not the
only medium vying for their attention, with social media, gaming and
podcast consumption providing new content daily in a way radio isn’t
able to keep pace with. What is the best way to bring them in? Play them
a small selection of American hip-hop and R&B hits from when their
parents were growing up, or open them up to the wide selections of
voices and sounds happening right now in the country they live in?
We have an infrastructure of support for musicians in the UK from pirate
and community radio, youth groups, grant funding and subsidised
professional development. This is a fragile ecosystem that has been
consistently losing financial support for the past 15 years, under the
Tory government, with no signs of it improving under a possible incoming
Labour government. The Brixton community station, Reprezent Radio, which
has been an incubator of broadcasting and production talent for the BBC
and commercial stations, has had to launch a crowdfunder to stay afloat
after seeing costs rise, funding cut and demand for its services for
young people increase dramatically as other youth services have closed.
It’s counterproductive that those presenters, who help break new talent
on these smaller platforms, are moving to commercial roles just to play
American music.
1Xtra broadcasts to more than 750,000 listeners a week, according to the
latest numbers from Rajar (the audience research body set up by the BBC
and commercial broadcasters), and there’s an opportunity here to
establish what “Amplifying Black music and culture” means in 2024. If we
don’t nurture the current and next generation of Black musical talent,
we will lose a big part of what makes British music special. It can’t be
done with just BBC 1Xtra alone – it needs the whole ecosystem to come
together to make a healthier landscape for Black artists, broadcasters,
producers and people who work behind the scenes.
What would 1Xtra sound like with Black British artists at the core of
its programming? It would play the commercial hits and slept-on classics
from the past 30-plus years of Black British artists and shine a light
on areas that have been underrepresented historically in the culture
from Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland. It would celebrate the music
of our diaspora, and how it still informs how British music sounds
today. Why not go for a full dedication to Black British music in an age
where we are overwhelmed already with American pop culture?
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Elijah is a DJ and writer specialising in Black British culture and
electronic music

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https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/article/2024/jun/26/uk-radio-stations-black-british-music-recycled-american-rap