Franklyn Addo traces grime from the tower blocks, pirate-radio sets and bus routes of East London to festival stages, electoral politics and the centre of British popular culture.

Writing as a Hackney-born journalist, rapper and youth worker who grew up alongside the genre, he places its clipped flows and abrasive electronic sound within a longer history of Black migration, deindustrialisation, housing estates, policing and the periodic British habit of diagnosing working-class youth as a public emergency.

This is especially good on grime as more than a sequence of famous artists. Addo considers the cheap technologies and informal networks that allowed it to exist before labels were interested: bedroom production, Nokia phones, DVDs, clashes, youth clubs and pirate frequencies. He also examines how the language of “antisocial behaviour” and New Labour’s Respect agenda turned the neighbourhoods producing grime into objects of surveillance, while the music made those same places culturally central. 

Jacaranda hardback, first edition, 2024. Very good condition with light cover wear.