Controlling the Flow: Music Videos and Public Order

What is it about?

As a key genre within the urban music economy, grime music has a national and global presence. In the YouTube era, young people film music videos and broadcast them online. Legislation and policies ostensibly created as a means to maintain public safety combine to create methods to control the behaviour of young people. The production and circulation of urban music videos, therefore, become a contested activity. The racial mechanics of this gaze mean that for urban black youth, group endeavours are often criminalized as ‘gang activity’. Drawing on a 2014 Twitter profile as its starting point, this article examines the application of public safety legislation and policies in an East London borough. It reflects on how a ‘disciplinary process’ allows for local authorities, the metropolitan police and the judiciary to pin down and organize the movements of urban music practitioners in specific and particular ways.

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Why is it important?

I have shown how certain youth leisure pursuits, such as the making of a grime music video, have become entangled with policies that are purportedly designed to maintain public safety. Urban music practitioners reinvent themselves by taking on new names and adopting a performance persona that can articulate experiences of life on the margins (Rose, 1994: 21). However, by gathering in groups, wearing garments of the same colour and referencing particular geographical areas, young people, particularly young black men, risk an easy entry into the criminal justice system. Music makers are rendered as troublemakers if they gather in public spaces and when they share their creative practice online. The neoliberal turn towards the use of risk assessment tools and processes such as ASSET and MAPPA locates the risk within the individual. Therefore, as well as being a management tool, ASSET and MAPPA function as dynamic mechanisms to predict patterns of behaviour, thus becoming a disciplinary technique for intervention. Through these processes, large numbers of young black men can be categorized as ‘risky individuals’ thereby reproducing class, gender and race relations.