Introduction
On 29 July 2020, the British Broadcasting Corporation (BBC) aired a feature that detailed a shocking racist attack. A young man received significant injuries following a racially aggravated hit-and-run, and the details were relayed through a reconstruction that appeared concomitantly on the regional BBC Points West and the BBC News Channel. In the piece, the broadcaster recounted the words used by the assailants, purportedly to emphasise the gravity of the situation. However, rather than censor the language at appropriate moments, the BBC made an editorial choice to air a white female broadcaster saying the n-word on daytime TV. This decision caused shockwaves and deep upset among many who watched the broadcast live, and thereafter through channels such as Twitter and Facebook. The BBC received thousands of complaints. But rather than apologise, the BBC's initial response on 4 August defended the move, stating that ‘we were aware that it would cause offense’ and that the ‘decision to use the word was not taken lightly’. The BBC claimed that its broadcast was to provide ‘context’, owing to the attack being racially motivated (BBC News 2020). Irrespective of the need to offer context, one can argue that there are many ways to articulate the assailant's intentions without broadcasting a word that has such a problematic history.
This decision by the BBC to broadcast offensive language in a primetime slot knowingly caused further pain and trauma for members of the Black community. Furthermore, instead of reneging and apologising, representatives doubled down on its usage. This approach is in sharp contradistinction to the way in which the broadcaster – and other outlets across the UK – regularly censor musical content on their platforms. This disjuncture in policy resulted in indignant rage from a number of artists on the BBC: DJ Sideman resigned from the corporation in protest; DJ Target (formerly of East London grime collective Roll Deep) indicated his grievances on Twitter, citing ‘double standards’ from the BBC, while Mistajam posted a tweet castigating a lack of parity between censorship of Black music and daytime television (@DJTarget 2020; @mistajam 2020).
This incident brings into focus a level of inconsistency with respect to decision making within the BBC. It also demonstrates how censorship is often racialised, and contingent on context. The BBC were willing to air the n-word on primetime, while also policing the language of musical artists in specialist programming.
Policing grime and drill: censorship, legality, minimisation
In Eduardo Bonilla-Silva's acclaimed text Racism without Racists (Reference Bonilla-Silva2013, p. 311), he demonstrated how appeals to living within a post-racial society have led to ‘the space for talking and debating race matters in the public … decreas[ing] tremendously’. Within the four frames of ‘color-blind racism’ that he sets out, key to this is ‘minimisation’, a frame which involves ‘regarding discrimination as all-out racist behaviour’ effectively eliminating ‘the bulk of racially motivated actions by individual whites and institutions’ (Bonilla-Silva Reference Bonilla-Silva2013, p. 77).
The BBC's response to the complaints that they received is evidential of minimisation. Rather than take into account this pain and hurt, they reinforced their right to cause offence. Since what they presented was to provide ‘context’, rather than be explicitly racist, it was seen as an act of journalistic integrity, minimising the damage caused. In contrast, the BBC's censorship of musical practice is very often racialised, with Black music policed and positioned to be accessible to a white majority audience.
This censorship that polices Black musical practice in the UK takes a variety of forms. Lambros Fatsis’ article ‘Policing the Beats’ notes how a ‘policing of blackness [within the UK] is a state agenda’ (2019, p. 1301). In particular, recent Black musical forms such as grime music and drill have been subject to punitive measures. South London rappers Skengdo and AM faced criminal proceedings for performing their songs live, with the duo banned from rapping about a particular area code (SE11; Fatsis, Reference Fatsis2019, p. 1303; Hancox Reference Hancox2019). And in October 2019, North London rapper Rico Racks was ‘issued with an order that forbids him from rapping certain words’, including ‘bandoe’, ‘trapping’ and ‘connect’, all of which refer colloquially to drug dealing, after he was sentenced for three years in prison for drug-related charges (Beaumont-Thomas Reference Beaumont-Thomas2019).
Owing to these high-profile cases, the censorship and criminalisation of grime and drill music have been attended to extensively, in both journalistic and academic spheres, with Ciaran Thapar, Cheraine Donalea Scott, Lambros Fatsis and Jonathan Ilan (among others) all writing important work over the past decade (Fatsis Reference Fatsis2018, Reference Fatsis2019, Reference Fatsis, Peršak and Di Ronco2021; Ilan Reference Ilan2012; Scott Reference Scott2020; Thapar Reference Thapar2018, Reference Thapar2021). Ilan's work details grime artists’ ‘negative experiences of policing’, despite ‘no basis to infer anything but a coincidental link’ between the form and criminal activity (Reference Ilan2012, pp. 42 and 46). Thapar evocatively highlights the trials and tribulations of artists he has met through his youth work, while acknowledging a ‘grip of panic’ that has resulted in police – with ‘minimal justification – ‘investigat[ing] anything labelled “drill”’ (Reference Thapar2018).
Detailed reports of oppressive policing practices are held within the pages of Fatsis’ writings, showing ‘over-policing’ through a number of initiatives such as Operation Domain, which has resulted in over 100 drill videos being removed from YouTube, and the Terrorism Act 2000 being used to ‘pursue “drillers” as “terror suspects”’ (Edwards Reference Edwards2019; Fatsis Reference Fatsis2019, pp. 1303 and 1310).
Despite this coverage, however, the minutiae of linguistic policing over the radio airwaves has not been looked at. Rather, this work has focused primarily on interactions between the criminal justice system and these artists. Returning to Bonilla-Silva's concept of ‘minimisation’ and the ways in which racialised acts – unless explicitly egregious – are positioned as insignificant in a purportedly ‘post-racial’ world, it is important to look at the minutiae and the quotidian racialised policing of Black artists’ creative work in all fora (2013, p. 77). While radio stations do not exercise censorship with the same severity as the Metropolitan Police, this censorship nonetheless has a particular impact. As indicated above, the article will show how the attentiveness to censorship within the radio sphere – especially when it comes to Black creative practice – is far more stringent than the BBC's censorship of its daytime television offerings.
Methodology
In order to achieve this, this article specifically explores the linguistic policing of grime and drill programming at the BBC on their youth focused station Radio 1Xtra. The study focusses on three of the station's most popular shows during the late 2010s and early 2020s: Sir Spyro's ‘The Grime Show’, Snoochie Shy's weeknight residency and Kenny Allstar's Rap Show. All three of these shows play predominantly grime, drill and UK rap, with the station averaging 744,000 listeners per week in the last six months of 2021. Rather than focus on the immediacy of the penal system, this article will explore the extent to which institutional bodies uphold and maintain a programme of racialised censorship across their radio broadcasts.
My approach combines data analysis and ethnography. Radio shows from all three DJs are analysed, determining how recorded material gets censored when aired publicly. In addition, live performances, known as ‘sets’, from MCs and the respective DJs are also addressed. In both cases, this article is also concerned with what material gets censored, and on what grounds. Is it bad language? Is it slang? The nature of this censorship can tell us a great deal about the methods being used, and the communicative channels that are being denied.
To illuminate these tensions, the article also draws upon a number of research interviews. These were conducted with members of the London-based grime collective Over The Edge, for whom I am the DJ. Two of these artists regularly feature across these BBC programmes, with other members also offering insight into (often hidden) acts of censorship undertaken by the BBC and its production teams. Interviews were semi-structured, and supplemented by everyday conversations within the collective.
Through exploring these censorship practices, both from the perspective of performers and through the actualities of the practice itself, this article will aim to understand inconsistencies in decision making across the corporation with respect to censorship, and how this aligns with a wider, ‘state-administered’ sense of racialised public morality that has garnered negative press coverage, tampered with artists’ expression of their own realities and resulted in legal ramifications (Fatsis Reference Fatsis2019, p. 1301).
Coded language and the censorship of Black music
Various patois and coded languages have been used historically by marginalised communities as a palpable way in which to communicate while avoiding the prying eyes of institutional bodies. James C. Scott's Domination and the Arts of Resistance: Hidden Transcripts explored how oppressed communities employ patterns of resistance against those in power. In the most extreme settings, such as labour camps within the Soviet Union, Scott writes of a ‘dual culture’ that emerges with ‘its own biting slang, its own music, its own poetry, its own humour’ (Reference Scott1992, p. 51).
For Black musical forms in particular, resistance is longstanding and often demonstrated linguistically. Trinidadian calypso vocalists, such as Mighty Sparrow, would share stories through music, engage in provocative picong (boastful banter) and narrativise colonial histories, such as his 1964 track ‘The Slave’ (Goldman Reference Goldman2018). Also important is the African American homosocial game of the dozens, which can be traced back to at least the 19th century, with Amuzie Chimezie arguing for much of its basis being derived from West Africa, noting ‘similarities’ between ‘Afro-American, Igbo, and other African varieties of the dozens’ (1976, p. 406).
The dozens is characterised by linguistic double plays, goading and code-switching, and are a central part of African American performance practice, as outlined in the foundational text Signifying Monkey by Henry Louis Gates Jr (Abrahams Reference Abrahams and Dundes1993, p. 295; Gates Reference Gates1988). This practice has profoundly influenced hip-hop – denoted the ‘black CNN’ in post-Reaganomics America by Chuck D (Jazzie B Reference Jazzie2010) – with ‘verbal subversion’ an important asset for lyricists, as evidenced by the work of Dead Prez (Alim Reference Alim2006, p. 74).
It could be argued that through policing terminology and language systems that seek to subvert and ironise majority white structures, institutional bodies are imposing a value judgement upon creative practice and censoring expression. This deems certain practice as non-permissible, while other artists that tackle explicit themes get a free pass. Content of this character is present across a multitude of genres, from Tom Jones’ celebrated paean to femicide ‘Delilah’, to Eric Clapton's ‘Cocaine’ and Justin Bieber's song ‘What Do You Mean?’ that toys with and obfuscates sexual consent.
While grime and drill do engage more explicitly with violence, it is often an articulation of the everyday, rather than a glorification. Fatsis writes of ‘drill and grime lyrics … chronicl[ing] the violence and disorder that young Black rappers suffer from rather than cause in the spatial and social milieus they inhabit’ (2019, p. 1309).
There exists a clamour to censor Black music, or position performers as those to be feared, and this stretches back to the censoring of jazz at schools within its place of birth, New Orleans, a policy ‘rooted in racism’, and blanket genre bans, such as the Chinese 2018 ban of ‘references to hip-hop culture’ across media outlets following performances from two Chinese rappers that – according to government official Gao Changli – had ‘problematic moral integrity’ (Pasha-Robinson Reference Pasha-Robinson2018).
More stringent control over Black musical forms is evidential of a ‘politics of respectability’, as discussed by Evelyn Rose-Higginbotham, that is unfairly and disproportionately placed on Black creative practice (Higginbotham and American Council of Learned Societies Reference Higginbotham1993, p. 185).Footnote 1 Lambros Fatsis’ Reference Fatsis2018 article ‘Grime: Criminal subculture of public counterculture’ demonstrates ‘metonymic, associations between rap culture(s), violence, and crime in order to reveal some longstanding and deep-rooted prejudices’ that have befallen grime music and its artists, including the notorious Form 696 used by the Metropolitan police (until 2017) to cancel grime events with impunity on the basis of an audience demographic that was likely to attend (Fatsis Reference Fatsis2018, p. 450; Reference Fatsis2019, p. 1307; Riley Reference Riley2017). And in Empire's Endgame, Gargi Bhattacharyya explores how a knife crime ‘panic’ is tied to an aggrandised sense of ‘black on black crime’, peddled by public figures such as the British broadcaster Piers Morgan (Bhattacharyya et al. Reference Bhattacharyya, Elliott-Cooper and Balani2021, pp. 59–60).
Case study: 1Xtra and the censorship of grime and drill music
Grime music has a particular and complicated history with the broadcasting authorities in the UK (Riley Reference Riley2017; Topping Reference Topping2010). The form's emergence was tied to a self-determined network of raves, record shops and – importantly for this study – pirate radio stations (de Lacey 2020; Hancox Reference Hancox2018, p. 64; White Reference White, Duman, Hancox, James and Minton2018). Key stations such as DejaVu FM, Rinse FM, Freeze FM and Heat FM would broadcast illegally across the capital, sharing fresh music and live lyrics from DJs and MCs with a community of clued-in listeners.
Since these stations were transmitting music without a Radio Broadcasting Licence, they would regularly come into conflict with the Department of Trade and Industry (DTI).Footnote 2 Anyone found to be involved in ‘illegal broadcasting’ can face up to two years in prison or an unlimited fine, under the Wireless Telegraphy Act 2006 (OFCOM 2021).
In a recording from South London's OnTopFM from 2005, you can clearly hear the MC Desperado in a fit of panic after a loud knock at the studio door: ‘Oi that better not be the DTI or I'm jumping out the window’ (de Lacey 2020, p. 204). While the knock was from a guest on the show, the constant worry of being shut down by the DTI undergirded and coloured the nature of pirate radio practice. There was a continual level of both excitement and jeopardy. Artists could lose their entire record collection and face time in prison. These uncertainties relate quite clearly to wider experience for Black youth growing up in the inner city where their very existence is criminalised. While artists were simply trying to broadcast their music ‘by any which way you could string up a pair of decks and some speakers’, the penalties for artists sharing their craft were substantial (Sama Reference Sama2019).
Earlier that same year, Rinse FM co-founder DJ Slimzee was famously issued with an Anti-Social Behaviour Order (ASBO) that prevented him from going up further that the third floor in tower blocks (Bradshaw Reference Bradshaw2015). This was issued owing to his propensity for – and notable capacity for – affixing radio aerials in lift shafts and on roofs.
While the DTI's (and latterly OFCOM's) policing of pirate radio was more prevalent throughout the 2000s – with a shift to online radio lessening the need to stringently police stations (Day Reference Day2005; Alwakeel 2015) – an inauspicious policing of language and tone continues to persist in legal channels, including BBC Radio 1Xtra.
BBC Radio 1Xtra was set up in 2002, and initially presided over by George Ergatoudis. It was set up to function as a sister station to Radio 1, with a focus on Black music, including hip-hop and R&B. In a 2004 documentary from the BBC, Ergatoudis called grime an ‘exciting new sound’, and this attitude was evidential of a generally forward-thinking approach to broadcasting (East is East 2004: 15:30). In a performance analysis survey from the BBC TrustFootnote 3 in 2015, the station was found to have a median age of 24 years old, with a white listenership of 69%, comparatively lower than the overall UK population (88%) (BBC Trust Service Review 2015, p. 10). As mentioned above, it has close to 750,000 listeners each week (as of 2021), and is a key source for grime and drill music.
One of the central figures for grime programming is Sir Spyro (born Karl Joseph), a DJ and producer from East London. Sir Spyro began DJing on Rinse FM in 2005, while it was still a pirate station. This means he has seen the form develop first-hand over 15 years, broadcasting across a number of different scenarios. Rinse FM secured official FM status in 2012 after a lengthy process that included a ‘100-page document submitted to OFCOM’ for a Community Radio Licensc (Topping Reference Topping2010). Following this, it had to attend to broadcast regulations, that the station did not need to follow prior to this point, in order to maintain its licence.
During this period, Spyro hosted the Sunday night ‘Grime Show’ and was beholden to these Community Radio restrictions. OFCOM's guidance broadly relates to ‘offensive language’, which includes ‘lyrics in music tracks’, ‘live music performances/interviews/studio conversation’ and ‘speech and comedy content’ (OFCOM 2016, p. 1). There is particular emphasis on ‘when children are particularly likely to listen’, which ostensibly results in a tacit watershed where ‘care should be taken concerning the use of offensive language on radio, and any such use needs to be justified by the editorial context’ (OFCOM 2016, p. 4).
In 2017, Spyro joined BBC 1Xtra. This move resulted in further content restrictions that moved passed the Community Radio guidance provided by OFCOM. The censorship undertaken at BBC 1Xtra is often applied on top of ‘clean edits’ of tracks provided by artists who submitted music to the show.Footnote 4 His 1Xtra grime programme aired from 11 p.m. to 1 a.m. each Friday, and it regularly opened with a content warning from fellow East Londoner, Ghetts:
Yo, you're locked into my brudda Sir Spyro on 1Xtra, you know how the ting's set already. There's guna be certain things on this show that you ain't guna hear anywhere else. And if that's guna offend you, I suggest you go somewhere else and listen to something else because this is something else.
This opening statement is a mandatory requirement on 1Xtra, with disclaimers necessitated for shows that have content deemed to be explicit. While Ghetts delivers the statement in an inventive way, it plays on stereotypes to excite the audience, much in the same way as Parental Advisory stickers in the USA, used for ‘violent, sexually explicit, or otherwise [containing] morally abhorrent content’ soon became marketised, particularly by rappers such as NWA (Viator Reference Viator2020, p. 68).
In Spectacle of the Other, Stuart Hall wrote about the ways in which ‘sentimentalised version[s] of stereotyping’ from slavery remain in post-Civil Rights era society, with images from the ‘white imaginary’ perpetuated across cinema.Footnote 5 Ghetts is toyfully playing with fears and problematic depictions of Black characters, and this ‘something else’ she is referring to acts as a marker of racial difference, rendered outside so-called respectable society and relegated to late night airing (Hall Reference Hall, Hall, Evans and Nixon1997, pp. 250–1).
Despite Ghetts’ warning at the outset of Spyro's show, BBC producers routinely censor material that appears on his show. This next section will explore concrete examples from Sir Spyro's radio show, demonstrating how this censorship is far from cohesive. Importantly, it will show how artists’ work and words are adversely discriminated against owing to a legacy of racialised public morality that imposes greater sanctions and restrictions on Black art.
‘Separate soul from body’: Coded language and resistance in Grime music
In November 2019, Hackney-based rapper Razor – who I work with as part of the grime crew Over The Edge – guested on Spyro's show alongside the Essex-based collective Payback Entertainment. Towards the end of the performance, Razor recited the following lyric.
Oh golly, how dare a man get gobby? I tell him take dat and I leave like Robbie [Williams]. Never say please or sorry, separate head from body, separate soul from …
I listened in live. When the video was uploaded to YouTube a number of words were cut out. In this instance, ‘body’ was censored. And while this lyric has seemingly violent connotations, there is a longstanding tradition within soundsystem practice where artists can lyrically ‘kill’ opposing performers. This is evidenced on Barrington Levy's 1984 track ‘Murderer’, and later with Brooklyn hip-hop trio Black Moon's ‘Murder MCs’ from 1994. This metaphorical play is also a demonstration of lyrical supremacy. Razor is not issuing a call to physical arms, and the inability to comprehend a deeply enculturated musical tradition is potentially evidential of a gulf between practitioners and broadcast production teams.
In addition to this lack of comprehension, there is also a generalised fear around words getting through that can result in over-censorship. This is captured well by Razor in two conversations a year apart from each other, where we discussed the particularities of censorship in relation to grime music.
In 2020, Razor spoke of how ‘the BBC censor things other than cuss words in terms of wider context. They also censor things like “Wap”, “dots”, both of which relate to guns’.Footnote 6 This means that slang, or actions, seen to be tangentially related to violence will be addressed.
In our later conversation, he spoke to the ‘legal precedents’ mentioned above, but focused in on how the ways they are employed varies significantly:
Razor: a better question is to ask why the platforms are more likely to enforce those rules against UK rappers than they are against a US rapper or even a singer. People can be singing about suicide and murder and rape on the radio in the middle of the day, but if I say I had a shank in my sock, no no no, you know what I'm saying. I don't think it's about the platforms censoring the artists, because the censorship is there from the broadcasting authority, in this case OFCOM. The problem is the way in which these rules and these laws are applied and what can and can't get you off the air.Footnote 7
Razor's concern here speaks precisely to the way in which respectability politics is employed in a grime context. There is distinct musical precedent to Razor's work, and while artists such as the Beatles can pen songs such as ‘Maxwell's Silver Hammer’, which directly refers to murder, a lyrical allusion in grime is seen as problematic. This incident also touches on the inability afforded to Black artists to perform persona. Any action uttered by a Black artist is taken on a literal basis, whereas white performers can actively take up a role in their work.
Fairchild and Marshall's comprehensive survey of Music and Persona explores varying ways in which persona can be employed, with a focus towards artists’ ‘self-generation of persona and public selves’ (Reference Fairchild and Marshall2019, p. 5). Many artists perform different roles, from David Bowie's extra-terrestrial exploits as Ziggy Stardust to the explicitly violent escapades of Eminem. A key figure in performance studies, Philip Auslander, has written on how ‘a performer is well-aware of their particular posturing and deploys it for defined ends as a “meta-persona”’ (Auslander Reference Auslander2006, pp. 116-17; Fairchild and Marshall Reference Fairchild and Marshall2019, p. 4).
And yet, grime and drill artists who do so are routinely denied the opportunity to perform and create a role and embody a meta-persona. It is read as literal. Fatsis highlights how drill tracks are said to constitute violence by the Metropolitan Police rather than reflect on it (2019, p. 1309). And here, we have a denial of the opportunity for artists to embody roles, tell tales and narrativise what is going on from multiple perspectives. Razor, and others, are not afforded ground to embody a character.
This brings into focus the central question of this article, regarding the way in which coded language is policed, and how this can have wider implications. In my conversation with Razor, he highlighted how the BBC would notice phrases like ‘waps’ and ‘dots’ and censor them accordingly owing to their use as terms for weapons within Multicultural London English (Fox et al. Reference Fox, Khan, Torgersen, Kern and Selting2011). This practice by BBC producers signals a move towards trying to stay ahead of routes that are intended to be both covert and resistive, while simultaneously censoring real-life evocations. Slang in counter hegemonic settings has a particular function – as discussed above – and its policing evidences an ongoing contestation between the invisible hand of allegedly respectable media outlets and the everyday practice of Black artists.
This censorship is acknowledged by artists who play on language that is used to police their very existence. Razor, for example, asserts success in the face of adversity through the employment of his lyric ‘IC3 with a 2:1’, using the police denotation for Black male ‘IC3’ alongside his university achievements. This act is a powerful juxtaposition of a police designation and achievement for a young Black male and an exemplary degree classification. Razor, as mentioned above, is from Hackney, an East London borough with ‘48% of children classed as being in poverty’ (Trust for London 2022). In 2018, Hackney's Community Strategy Partnership set up a four year strategic vision to ‘improv[e] outcomes for young black men’ in ways that ‘increase visibility’ and ‘tackle inequalities’ without the use of negative stereotyping (Hackney Council 2019).
This lyric from Razor demonstrates the employment of grime music for positive means, denying singular assertions that attempt to irrevocably tie the genre to negativity and the glorification of violence. Instead, it offers a triumphant narrative.
Further to this, these evocations of violence – when they do occur – are not a catalyst for more violence. For Ruth Adams, ‘the stories grime tells paint a vivid picture, not just of individual lives in particular communities, but also of the larger canvas of a global, multicultural city in perpetual transformation, and the resulting changes in cultural and socio-linguistic practices’ (2019, p. 438). The language used matters for the stories that are told, and its policing sullies this creative work.
There are also successes in dipping under the watchful eye of censors through creatively reworking lyrics, with artists’ audience in full acknowledgement of the terms’ actual meaning(s). For example, Jesse Bernard noted how J Hus altered his 2020 single ‘Must Be’ through adjusting the sonority of the word ‘opp’, a slang word for enemy. Through a raised cadence and soft articulation, rather than a plosive enunciation, ‘opp’ sounded more like ‘ah’, thus evading punitive measures (Bernard Reference Bernard2019).
As indicated by Razor above, this sort of censorship sees a decided shift away from simply censoring language that is seen to violate community measures on the basis of sexuality, race or religion. OFCOM's 2016 guide to ‘Attitudes to potentially offensive language and gestures on TV and radio’ is based around two categories: ‘general swear words’ and ‘discriminatory language’ (2016, p. 4).
This means that broadcasters have shifted from taking direction from OFCOM. Broadcasters such as the BBC are seeking out terminology – as suggested by Razor above – in an attempt to police coded acts of resistance when music is aired. Owing to this, even when artists are not using language typically seen as inflammatory or inappropriate, it still gets censored.
This was picked up more explicitly in a conversation I had with Chowerman, an Essex-based MC who also performs with Over the Edge.
Chowerman: What's super annoying though, is when you write a bar talking about something cryptically. Whether it's blazing, shotting, banging, anything, you know what I mean; a bit more cryptic than spelling it out on the page, that I used to do a couple years ago. They pick it up on Radio 1 or wherever and they censor it and that's annoying because 99% of people aren't going to know what it is. Do you know what I mean?Footnote 8
This overly stringent approach can also result in arbitrary cover-ups and innocuous missteps, many of which are evidenced on Sir Spyro's show. A show from June 2019 demonstrates the ways in which this censorship can work well, and fall embarrassingly flat. Early in the show, Essex rapper Tommy B – a member of Payback Entertainment and affiliated with Major Musik – was censored uttering ‘packet’, a slang term for cocaine. In accordance with the BBC removing terms associated with drugs, this could be seen as a legitimate act of censorship. Later in the show, though, a term was censored for fear of it being a new piece of slang terminology. North London MC Capo Lee had the word ‘gherkins’ taken out of his freestyle (Sir Spyro 2019). This effectively becomes a game of cat and mouse, where censors are trying to outthink the artists, who creatively come up with new terminology.
Frustrations at inconsistent censorship are longstanding within the grime community. This is well evidenced in a livestream from September 2020, where two members of grime crew Boy Better Know criticised (unnamed) radio stations. The event was organised in anticipation of MC Frisco's forthcoming album Familiar Stranger. Following a live P.A. of Frisco's new single, ‘Red Card’, JME noted how the word ‘Skeps’ – short for the name of his brother Skepta – was routinely censored on their 2011 hit single ‘Too Many Man’: ‘they thought Skeps was something different. It's mad.’ This approach clearly suggests that censorship is often arbitrary, with Black music held to a more punitive standard.
Shortly after, Frisco addressed the recent censorship of his new track.
you see you radio stations, you lot are moving crazy, Some of the words you are editing, you lot are editing normal words that are in the dictionary, you know what I mean. I'm sending you lot the normal edit and I'm hearing half the verse chopped out. But it's normal we're working with it still, a banger's a banger.
Specifically, he drew attention to large-scale cutting of any lyrics that broadcasters thought might be associated with criminality, rather than acknowledging the artist's capacity for wordplay.
You can't chop out man's lyrics like that … you lot's edits are crazy. Chill with it. The edits are violent bruv, I'm telling you I'm hearing two bars straight chopped out. You're not taking no risks. They're [the broadcasters] saying that sounds like a mad ting, [so they] chop out all of that. One time. (Big Fris 2020)
This statement from Frisco is telling. With entire lines removed from a track, his artistic message is compromised. This idea of broadcasters ‘not taking no risks’ means his music suffers. Considering that 30 years on from the release of The Pogues’ ‘Fairytale of New York’, there are fans – and Shane Mc Gowan of the band – who still defend the right for a blatantly homophobic word to be aired in broadcasts, there is a decided distinction between the wanton immediacy of this censorship of Black artists work and the work of white performers (Krol Reference Krol2018).
While certain instances of censorship – as evidenced above – can be comical, through trying to outwit artists, in this instance broadcasters are inferring what is permissible, and this is anchored in racialised fears around criminality.
Spyro is obligated to frontload a content warning to his show, since the nature of these artists’ work might not align with a majority palate, while censorship of material affects the listening experience, contorts the comprehensibility of entire tracks – particularly for Frisco – and imparts value judgement upon the artists performing.
‘Cheffing Opps’: inconsistencies in the censorship of misogyny, drugs and violence in UK drill
The final section of this article turns to two other shows that were popular on BBC Radio 1Xtra during the late 2010s and early 2020s. Both of these shows focus primarily on drill and grime. It will examine how certain types of offensive language are not censored, while anything pertaining to violence is immediately removed.
The two shows in question are South London DJ Snoochie Shy's weeknight residency, which began in April 2019 running from 11 p.m. to 1 a.m., and Kenny Allstar's Friday night rap show. Allstar's show aired in the two hours leading up to Spyro's show, promising to ‘bring the sounds of the streets to 1Xtra’. Shy's show is more general, featuring ‘late night music and chat’ (BBC Sounds 2020, 2021b). If we look closely at the way in which artists’ material is censored, we can see a similar pattern taking place across both these shows.
In terms of the submission process for music, Snoochie Shy's production team request that tracks are proposed in their explicit form: ‘Please send over the explicit version and NOT the clean audio!’ (email communication 2021). This means that BBC 1Xtra vets tracks in-house. Rather than allowing artists to determine what is and isn't legible, BBC producers are in charge of this process. While I made contact with a number of producers at the BBC, none of them replied to my requests for a conversation.
Nonetheless, we can see a particular type of censorship taking place. And this is most notable on Snoochie Shy's show. While curse words aren't censored, anything relating to violence and drugs is edited out, perhaps indicative of the way in which legal channels have policed what artists can and can't say (see Rico Racks above).
Her show from 22 July 2021 featured a track from prominent Peckham rapper Kwengface, of the collective Zone 2. Entitled ‘Chef’, the lyrics throughout document an engagement with a love interest, cooking up white and confronting ‘opps’, or rival gangs (BBC Sounds 2021a). On Shy's show entire passages are not censored. The word ‘fuck’ appears five times in a four-bar passage, while a short section about meeting a ‘peng grade ting [attractive girl] called Maxine’ is rendered legible for the audience.
However, as soon as drugs or violence are mentioned, or even implied, almost everything is erased. Multiple words for guns, from ‘skeng’ to ‘hand ting’ to ‘mash’, are removed along with slang for drugs like ‘grub’. This is consistent with Razor's testimonial above.
While the word ‘Chef’ itself isn't removed – despite its association with stabbing – the act of ‘cheffing’ is, along with getting ‘chinged’. Concerns around a ‘knife crime epidemic’ are evidenced here, where simply bad language is not removed, but acts associated with this music by sensationalised media reportage are (Bhattacharrya et al. Reference Bhattacharyya, Elliott-Cooper and Balani2021, p. 62). Nonetheless, what we are seeing is a marketing of the allure of this music, but its full character remaining hidden from view.
This marketisation of criminality is resoundingly captured in an examination of the output from Kenny Allstar. Kenny Allstar began his career working on stations such as Radar Radio and Brixton-based youth broadcaster Reprezent Radio. He had a very successful YouTube series called MadAboutBars, which featured prominent drillers and rappers from across the UK. His special with West London MC Digga D had just under 10 million views, as of August 2021 (Mixtape Madness 2018).
In 2017, Kenny Allstar invited South London stalwarts Roadside Gs onto his radio show. This collective, from Coldharbour Road in Brixton, were a key grime crew in the mid-2000s, yet their elision from histories of the genre is complicit with their music being seen as too raw for a general palate. The content of Roadside G's material has meant their work is not as esteemed as that of fellow MCs in grime, such as Lethal Bizzle, Wiley and Tempa T, who combine cartoon-like imagery with violent escapades.Footnote 9 In 2004 they released their debut mixtape Lesson 1: Curb on Smash, and had a number of videos featured on Channel U, a satellite television channel that was highly important for the wider dissemination of grime music (Adegoke Reference Adegoke2018). However, their video for ‘Come 2 Da Roadside’, from their second tape Lesson 2: Gangsta Grime, was later banned from the channel following complaints from the Metropolitan Police.
In conversation with Roadside Gs, Kenny Allstar unpacked the intricacies around this work and the reasons by which the group were seen to be under-appreciated in the annals of grime history. In particular, MC Den Den spoke to the difficulties with presenting their work while simultaneously being engaged in day-to-day activities in South London: ‘I'm guna tell em straight. Man's ting was violent, the music was violent. Our followers were violent. So our ting came with a lot of violence, you get what I'm saying. Street politics and at the end of the day it ended up in handcuffs, you get me’ (Allstar Reference Allstar2017). This quote speaks to Ciaran Thapar's work on grime and drill, where music is presenting as an ‘all-pervading folk devil, whose topic has usurped people's attention away from any nuanced discussion about root causes of, or preventative measures for, societal violence’ (Thapar Reference Thapar2018). Artists don't act as the root cause this unrest, but their documentation and lived experience are penalised rather than attending to social inequalities that result in violence.
Paul Lynch, co-founder of the Boxed club night, wrote an article in 2012 that spoke both to the sonic character of their practice and the censorship they faced: ‘they chose a harsh, abrasive beat selection that most MCs have shied away from that has often worked to their detriment … [the ‘Come 2 Da Roadside’ video censorship] sums up why it never really happened for them’ (Lynch Reference Lynch2012).
This treatment of Roadside Gs cuts a sharp contrast with prominent East London rapper Crazy Titch, who was idolised for his antics. His firebrand braggadocio is seen as authentically grime yet catchy, while his life-sentence for murder has drawn out the mysticism surrounding him and his ephemeral presence at grime's outset. Whereas Crazy Titch is seen as ludic and playful despite being a convicted murderer, the work of Roadside Gs was seen as a step too far (Muir Reference Muir2006).
Radio personalities must strike a balance between presenting voyeuristic excitement about a genre and the need to meet (racialised) editorial standards. Kenny Allstar is the ‘Voice of the Streets’, but the streets have to be in accordance with BBC expectations. This is evidenced in the censorship at play on Allstar's BBC Radio 1Xtra show that began in 2018 after a number of successful guest appearances the year prior.
His Pop Smoke special, celebrating the late-New York driller, opened with 40 minutes of new music from UK drill artists. Similarly to Spyro's show, it begins with a content warning, this time from Digga D. Kenny, then plays the latest single from Digga D, in collaboration with Birmingham rapper M1llionz, entitled ‘No Chorus’. The censorship practices here are almost entirely consistent with the approach demonstrated on Snoochie Shy's show, which suggests parity across the in-house production team. Anything related to violence or drugs is meticulously censored, demonstrating a real understanding of slang words, and also context. This implies that they are hiring producers to specifically look out for this language.
For example, ‘wig’ is censored owing to the implication that a rival's ‘wigtop’, or head, is going to get shot. Meanwhile, misogyny goes unchecked. The track regularly objectifies women and boasts of sexual conquests. Aside from censoring the word ‘b*tch’, the rest of the track is markedly bare, with tales of multiple ‘gals’ who M1llionz and Digga D treat poorly. This is also the case for fellow West Londoner Central Cee's single ‘Little Bit of This’, that features regular misogyny that goes unchecked – asking girls to ‘shake that back like a video vixen’ or boasting to ‘back out the rod like let's go fishing’. However, as soon as there is some semblance of violence, it gets censored, even if it has nothing to do with killing. This is most notable in a passage that continues along a misogynstic path, and promises to ‘kill the pum pum, assassinate it’. While Cee is referring to a sexual act – in an incredibly graphic way – it is the allusion to violence that has caused the censors to take action, whereas in the earlier examples of misogny, this was rendered permissible.
This investigation brings forth two key concerns. The first is the way in which censorship rarely addresses misogyny. Tricia Rose has written on how hegemonic standards are regularly employed in hip-hop to almost exclusively blame the genre for misogyny, rather than acknowledging this misogyny as a symptom of wider white cis-hetero-patriarchal society (2008, p. 117). In these instances though, this symptom is recognised, but the censors see no reason to take action.
This is perhaps indicative of wider societal discrediting and valuing of women's bodily autonomy – as evidenced by Rose – and is consistent with the furore in 2020 around Cardi B and Megan The Stallion's single ‘WAP’. Here, a politics of respectability is placed upon Black female artists who simply aren't allowed to be sexually provocative in their content, whereas their male counterparts can roam free. For Eliza Sellen, Missy Elliot acts as a disruptor of expectations, resulting in calls for her to ‘perform correctly’ in line with her gender (Sellen Reference Sellen2005). These same calls have befallen Cardi and Megan. Male artists regularly boast about sexual conquests, yet an instance of bodily autonomy asserted by two of the most visible women in hip-hop faced striking resistance and radio censorship (@AFVTERGLOW 2021).
In addition to this gendered character, the second key concern relates to violence – specifically, the racialised association of young Black men with violence. This censorship runs in parallel with the introduction of ‘knife-crime prevention orders’ that function similarly to ASBOs, that were issued to DJ Slimzee for his involvement with Rinse FM. The orders mean that mere suspicion can result in arrest, ‘expelling racialised people from the albeit limited protections of criminal law’ (Bhattacharrya et al. Reference Bhattacharyya, Elliott-Cooper and Balani2021, p. 66). Any semblance of violence is immediately censored across this programming.
Furthermore, in the case of Spyro's programming, words that are presumed to be slang – even when it transpires they are simply food items – are routinely censored to stay ahead of the game. Finally, these programmers are both censoring and marketing and aggrandising allure around violence. Both Spyro and Allstar's shows open with content warnings that align with a process of sensationalised othering. While the material words are censored, the intention is altogether clear, and – if anything – censoring can be a tool for intrigue.
Conclusion
The examples presented in this article demonstrate how the BBC enacts a stringent censorship policy for Black music, in ways that are non-commensurate with the rest of its output. This excessive policing of practice is primarily focused on violence and results in an implicit criminalisation of the artists whose work is aired.
Grime and drill artists are beholden to certain standards in ways that impart a racialised public morality upon their craft. While BBC Radio were shown to fawn at new innovations in language – resulting in a pickled vegetable mistakenly getting censored – they also demonstrated assiduous censorship of slang across Kenny Allstar and Snoochie Shy's programming.
These findings also suggest intersectional prejudice against artists of colour in UK broadcast media. Misogyny is freely broadcast, while Black men are a priori associated with violence. Moving forward, there is a real need to appraise the ways in which tracks are censored, and how progressive aspects are seen as permissible while certain content is hidden from view. A denial of lived experience and a literal whitewashing of artists’ practice both reaffirms difference and offers a level of misrecognition, where claims to lyrical supremacy – such as those lodged by Razor on 1Xtra – are misread as a violent gesture.
Black music is placed under a very public, racialised morality, and its endurance throughout history – from spirituals to jazz, to funk, to grime and now drill – is evidential of the way in which the white cis-hetero patriarchy determines how Black artists can act in a musical setting. Returning to Bonilla-Silva, there needs to be an epistemic shift away from the white racial frame, which governs ‘society's racial structure [through] the totality of the social relations and practices that reinforce white privilege’ (Reference Bonilla-Silva2013, p. 9). Language is a powerful tool, and the legacy of subversion and signifyin’ is a testament to both the ways in which Black artists have historically resisted and reworked a language of domination. Nonetheless, in these examples presented here, these artists through their work have demonstrated innovative ways to have their voices heard, offering a creative riposte to state-sanctioned censorship and vilification.
