Urban youth, the grime scene and the linguistic performance of regional identities in music

Grime music is inextricably linked with the concept of ‘urban’, emerging in London in the early 2000s as the creation of musicians influenced by British garage, American rap and Jamaican dancehall (Ilan 2012). Its rich lyrical content offers an insight into the world of UK urban youth and into a non-mainstream culture in which mixtapes are marketed informally and school-age teenagers earn their reputations and collect accolades by ‘spitting bars’ on illegal airwaves (ibid 2012). With recent technological advances and increasing access to online formats, grime has flourished in video format, with amateur, semi-professional and professional artists uploading videos to YouTube and often proclaiming allegiance to their cities in the process (ibid 2012). Now, in 2016, grime has spread out of London, with notable grime artists in all major UK cities who maintain their regional accents and dialects as a symbol of their authenticity and independence from the popular music scene (Drummond and Carrie 2017). The prevalence of place - from city to neighbourhood - in so many grime tracks offers an opportunity to explore the ways in which regional identity is performed through the language of grime.

The project will take a primarily variationist approach to analysing the language of grime. In doing so, it aims to identify the role of particular linguistic features in the construction of regional identity through music. Initially, the language of grime artists from various UK cities will be analysed and compared in terms of dialect features at the levels of sound, syntax and lexis. In addition, the content of grime tracks will be analysed from a discourse analytic perspective, in which further identity-related themes will be explored and compared. Further data will be collected from regional grime artists themselves by means of interviews and personal correspondence, and will be used for two main purposes: firstly, to gain insights into the practice of grime itself and the importance of regional identity in the minds of the artists; and, secondly, to further explore the language of grime as identity performance by comparing the speech of artists in natural conversation with their linguistic production when ‘spitting bars’. The linguistic analyses described here are likely to highlight competing influences on the speech of UK urban youth, especially those who practise grime (Drummond forthcoming). Regional pride and regional dialect, as well as the London grime scene and Multicultural London English (Cheshire et al. 2011) or what has, perhaps, more aptly been termed Multicultural Urban British English (Drummond 2017) all shape the linguistic performance of young people throughout Britain. The extent to which these play a role in the performance of grime is of particular interest in terms of how urban youth identities are enacted in social practices.

There are several academic and non-academic beneficiaries of the research. The language of urban youth often appears in the mass media, almost always portrayed in a negative light; analysis of the linguistic sophistication of grime will challenge the negative stereotypes surrounding urban youth language. From an academic perspective, analysing the language of grime advances our understanding of the changing nature of urban language by building on work investigating Multicultural London English (Cheshire et al. 2011) and Multicultural Urban British English (Drummond 2017). It also builds on previous sociolinguistic research investigating the linguistic authenticity of hip-hop and indie rock artists (Alim et al 2009; Eberhardt and Freeman 2015; Beal 2009). Finally, with the increasingly established and prominent role of urban centres beyond London and the recent political discussion surrounding devolution and the Northern Powerhouse, this project provides an opportunity for sociolinguists to investigate and validate regional identities in Greater Manchester and other urban contexts.