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?
Elijah is a DJ and writer specialising in Black British culture and electronic music
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