Less Words, More Actions

This came like a flash. Protein asked me if I’d like to pick “five critical/cultural writers you’re following right now”. It took about two minutes of trying to come up with names before I realised that overwhelmingly the discourse I’m taking cues from recently has come not from writers, but from doers.

No shade on writers, though (far from it – see footnote). But the minute I stop to consider whose words linger in my mind most often – who inspires me to write – it’s not professional writers, thinkers or commentators. It’s practitioners. And since much of my work centres on UK music, it’s those practitioners, both within and around the UK music scene, who influence me most.

Okay, some of them do write commentary too, more or less formally, but even those do so in the process of building real world constructions: networks, events, even bricks and mortar buildings. We often speak in the abstract about “community,” “subculture,” and “grassroots,” but the reality of these concepts is messy and often contradictory. In the words of the great James Baldwin, they’re all built “on the love and the passion of a very few people”.

These are people whose ideas are tested in practice daily, doubly so as they are effectively “open source”, putting their practice out there for all to see and try out in turn. Most of them have been at it for a while, but the urgency of the current political and cultural moment throws their efforts into stark relief:

We have never needed community builders who are willing to open up culture on the nuts-and-bolts level and show its workings more.

There are many, many I could have picked: my old FACT colleagues Tom Lea and Chal Ravens of No Tags, Elijah, Sean Adams, Bradley Zero, Colleen “Cosmo” Murphy, Mark Davyd of the Music Venues Trust… but in the spirit of urgency, it’s “first thought best thought” and these are the first five names that sprung to mind.

Sherelle

If you’ve followed the dance music of the past half decade, you can hardly have missed the meteoric rise of Sherelle Thomas, who has been the figurehead for the explosion of uptempo, hardcore rave music into the mainstream of clubs and festivals. But she is much more than just a DJ. Sherelle is hyper-articulate and driven, passionately campaigning for greater opportunities for creatives through her inclusive booking and signing policies, as well as the workshops and programs she organises. She is equally committed to giving fans affordable and accessible entry into the culture.

Musically, she is heavily informed by the classic rave, hardcore and jungle of the 90s, but she isn’t a misty-eyed nostalgist: she presents it refreshed, renewed, with the full knowledge of the faults of past scenes and everything rewired for a more inclusive present. And as a young, Black, masculine-presenting queer woman who is also a scholar of image, photography and fashion, she embodies her worldview as the full, 360° package: word, sound, deed, action and appearance all in sync. Her career seems to move as fast as her DJ sets, so she doesn’t have a single place where her ideas are expounded but that’s precisely the point: across radio, raves, record labels, interviews, socials, her ideas unfold as practice more than as manifestos.

Man Power

Again, there’s no single manifesto for Geoff Kirkwood aka Man Power: he, too, tends to move too fast to settle on one, and everything he does is expressed through his activities. I’d been aware of his music but first met him when he invited me in 2022 to come and survey the DIY scene of Newcastle and the surrounding areas, which I managed to persuade The Guardian to write up. I was struck and remain so by how committed he was to his hometown – though he’s a DJ with global reach he makes sure not to get trapped on the constant travel merry-go-round and put back into art projects, venues and more: most recently securing investment into in the old-school working class social club where he’d been putting on pop-up parties in order to create a permanent music venue within it. Across his projects and interviews, there is a continuous self-interrogation of the intersections between class, locality, neurodivergence and other factors that shape our understanding of “community”.

Skill Issue

Alright, I’m going against my own brief here as in this manifestation, Christopher Watson and Hue are, kind of, commentators. Hue also is, or has been, a music journalist too. But I know them first as participants in The Culture, as clubbers, as movers and shakers, and in Christopher’s case as a DJ, musician (albeit well overdue a new release) and part of the fantastic Rye Wax organisation. Rye Wax, when it was a physical space, was one of my favourite places in London, pretty much the Platonic ideal of a music-centric community space with record shop, cafe, bar and venue taking up a sprawling basement of the Bussey Building in Peckham – all of which I wrote about here. In their mailout Skill Issue, Hue and Christopher blend their voices, and an unholy cocktail of club culture, gaming and radical politics, together into an impassioned, often surrealist tirade, a mad blend for a mad world… and the real reason they fit into this list, is that it feels like the collective voice of people out there doing the things which make up collective subcultures: for me as an old man, long since semi-detached from late nightlife, if feels like a bulletin direct from the smoking terraces of the best clubs.

DJ Mina

As I said in the Guardian article I wrote about them in 2022, Boko! Boko! DJ squad are like a superhero team – but each of Tash LC, Juba and Mina have their own superhero plotlines separately from the crew too. Everything they do is about a commitment to making the global local and vice versa: their sounds joining dots from rambunctious rave styles from Kinshasa to Kuala Lumpur, but never with a homogenising impulse, always with emphasis on specific effects in specific moments. And all of them work to reinforce the connections beyond just the material: I’m highlighting Mina here because of the powerhouse work she does opening up lines of communication, whether through her music production and performance with Ghanaian MC Bryte, the Funding With Mina Instagram channel, which provides free guidance to public and private grants available to musicians, or her partnership with a grassroots venue in Nairobi called the Mist, where she’s been a guest resident and curating events, forging information-sharing connections with venues in the UK, and also brought the Keep Hush streaming channel there.

Jamz Supernova

Jamz has had a parallel life to Sherelle, both getting their break on London’s Reprazent Radio, both now staples of BBC 6 Music. While Sherelle has maintained a laser focus on high-energy turbo rave dancefloors, Jamz has embraced a more expansive musical approach with her broadcasts, club nights, and Future Bounce label. Her work opens up a rich, international landscape, incorporating everything from the riotous global bass Mina plays, to sophisticated hip hop, neo-soul, older jazz, and global sounds. A natural autodidact, her reporting from places she visits is always informative and relatable, with a strong emphasis on informing the world about small, unique but networked music communities. She is also a glorious advocate for the culture itself. As she told me last year: “We’ve got to have optimism because that’s what we go on to the dancefloor for. We’ve been through tough times before, so we reset, rebuild and go again.”

*I am a writer myself and remain bloody-mindedly committed to longform writing as an anchor in turbulent attention storms, publishing long Q&As every fortnight on BassMidsTopsAndTheRest. I’m currently rebuilding and rebooting theartsdesk.com – the site I co-founded 15 (!) years ago with a lot of disenchanted broadsheet journalists. The site is dedicated to preserving old-school arts criticism. I’m part of the Association of Music Editors, which Sean Adams founded to remind the world that grassroots music writing is as important to the cultural ecosystem as just about any other part of it. On it goes.