Dr. Monique Charles’ research combines her interests in music, spirituality, sociology and the African Diaspora. Other research interests include popular culture, music/musicology, sound studies, embodiment, spirituality, cultural studies, class, gender and race. She primarily explores the lives, experiences and cultural productions of the African Diaspora generally and Britain specifically. Monique will be joining the Chapman sociology faculty in 2021.

Listen to Monique Charles' lecture at chapman.edu/wilkinson.

Engaging the World: Leading the Conversation on the Significance of Race is a ten-part podcast series of informed and enriching dialogues to help us better understand our world – how we got here, who we are, and where we are going as a society. This series engages in conversations with scholars, artists, filmmakers, and activists to investigate racial inequality, systemic racism, racial terrorism, and racial justice and reconciliation. Through education, art, and storytelling, we can all learn to be allies and engage the world to help evolve to a place of compassion and social equity.

Guest: Monique Charles
Host: Jon-Barrett Ingels
Produced by Public Podcasting in partnership with Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences at Chapman University.

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[00:00:03] Dr. Monique Charles: This is something that I began to think about. I began to think, okay, we're in London. This is a London music, a Black British music form. There are ancestral forces going on. I need to trace some of those ancestral forces and think about some of the locational things, the things that are happening in and around London to make sense of this music.

[00:00:22] Host: Chapman University's Wilkinson College of Arts, Humanities, and Social Sciences and Heritage Future present Engaging the World, leading the conversation on the significance of race, a 10-part podcast series exploring racial inequality, racial terrorism, and racial justice and reconciliation while honoring the voices and stories of people of color. We take into account the complicated history of our country and humanity in general while examining where we are today, and looking at the challenges that lay ahead.

Through art, storytelling, and education, we can all learn to be allies and engage the world to help evolve to a place of compassion and social equity. In this episode, we connect with Dr. Monique Charles to discuss her musicological discourse analysis research method, and how she uses MDA to explore the UK-based musical genre known as grime. Here is Dr. Monique Charles.

[00:01:29] Monique: It's also my passion of music and singing. That's where I started as a child. Then as I've gone through education, there was no way that I found I could really grapple with it. I'm interested in cultural studies and sociology. Hey, I'm a sociologist. I found that a lot of the time a lot of the work was talking about lyrics, people be analyzing lyrics. Yes, I love lyrics, but I love a good beat. I love a good beat.

There's something that the music itself does, the sonics itself does to you, whether there's lyrics or not. I was trying to get to the sense of how can we begin to articulate or understand what music is and how does it connect to that emotional/spiritual part of a person? There was that. There was also this idea around race and music I was interested in, because when people say, "Oh, that's Black music," people will say, "What is Black music?"

I wanted to look at the role of ancestry, the role of location, and all of these things helped me to understand. I suppose, whilst trying to articulate Black music, it was just a framework that started to explain music more generally because people from different genres have-- I don't know if I mentioned it to you at the time, but the punks. The people who study punk rock, they have been using it and they really love it.

There is something universal about it until someone finds something and says, "Oh, no, this beat is missing." For the most part, different genres have used it or thought, "Oh, I haven't thought about it in that way," and they want to apply it to jazz. They want to apply it to just different genres of music. It was just really trying to find a way-- I don't want to say to intellectualize music, because music is more than just the intellectual, but it was just trying to find a new way to engage with it.

One of the things that I wanted to do when I was exploring music is to try and make sense of what is music. Music is sound, but it's also social and it's a combination of different features of sounds. You might have time signatures, you have timbre, you have technology that makes different kinds of sounds, all these different facets that come together. When all of those sounds are organized in a particular way by a particular culture, they are organized in a way that prioritizes certain sounds, put some in the foreground, and that is synonymous or understood to be a genre or a music form.

Once upon a time, I used to have to explain what grime was. Well, it is a music genre emerged in London in the noughties, the early 2000s. It's a male-dominated genre and the mainstream narrative is that it comes from East London. It originated from East London, in a city area that was being gentrified, a working-class area that was gentrified. It was 140 BPM, so it's quite fast. The MCs were spraying bars, as we would say, or rapping over those electronic beats.

You can hear a predominance of bass so that's one of the sonic characteristics in the sense. They are a key feature when it comes to grime. There's lots of space to enable the rapper or the MC to spray bars over it. I was thinking okay, so how do we make sense of this new futuristic sound that has appeared to come from nowhere in the early noughties? We need to go back and unpack and look at all the musical and cultural influences that came together to form this nexus that made grime what it was.

As there wasn't much scholarly work in the British context about Black musical forms, I have to come over to you guys, hop over the pond and look at some of the hip-hop things to see what is being said. Tricia Rose, hip-hop scholar, who you may or may not have heard of, where in her work, Black Noise, she talks about music coming from different traditions, and Afro-centric music and Eurocentric music prioritizing different sonic characteristics or prioritizing different sounds, putting them together in different ways.

For example, when she talks about music from the African diaspora, it's cyclical, it's repetitive. After a while listening to it, you get the sense of the shape of it, how it's going to go round and round, you can eventually dance to it. Whereas European music traditions, as we think about classical music, in particular, it's quite linear. You'll sit down and you'll watch a piece. You can't necessarily jam along to it. You don't know when the kettle jam is going to come back around again for you to dance to that.

She also makes the point that when thinking about hip-hop, she argues that there are ancestral forces at play and there's also locational forces at play when she's thinking about the emergence of hip-hop in New York. This is something that I began to think about. I began to think, okay, we're in London. This is a London music, a Black British music form. There are ancestral forces going on. I need to trace some of those ancestral forces and think about some of the locational things, the things that are happening in and around London to make sense of this music.

[00:06:45] Host: In exploring the ancestral musical roots of Black music in the UK, Dr. Charles explains the history of Caribbean and West African migration, Jamaica, specifically, and the inspiration those cultures had on modern music.

[00:07:00] Monique: Joe Haynes and also [unintelligible 00:07:03], they come up with the idea that music migrates with people. Yes, believe it or not, there are Black people in Britain but our history in mass numbers is not. Our history is nowhere near as long as the US, for example. Although Black people have always been in Britain, we came in larger numbers after the Second World War. If you don't know Britain, colonized a third of the world and had a Commonwealth. At one point, believe it or not, the US was theirs, Independence Days were part of that sort of thing.

After the Second World War, soldiers from different parts of the world were brought in to fight for the British as well. Indians, people from the Caribbean, people from different parts of Africa. If you are part of the colony, you could get in the army to fight. After the Second World War, Britain was pretty ravaged and bombed and everything else. In 1948, they wanted to rebuild the mother country.

At this point in time, even though all of these different countries, India, Bangladesh, Nigeria, Jamaica, all these countries were their own countries, but the people in those countries were British subjects, so they were still British. Britain, the mother country, called out to her colonies, for people to come and help to rebuild the country. A pact was basically made that such atrocities would never happen again.

With this, I suppose, new vision for Britain, that's when they brought up the National Health Service or the NHS, where everyone was entitled to free healthcare. That's when the London Transport System came, or the public transport system, the buses, the trains, the tubes, we call them tubes, the underground, the infrastructure, that sort of thing. They need people to rebuild the country. They needed nurses. They needed just people to help with the logistics of building the country.

Britain made its call, and the Caribbean was one of the places where the call was made. Jamaica is a larger island. Jamaicans tend to boast that they're one of the larger islands in the Caribbean but they're one of the larger islands. Because of the politics or the dynamics at the time, more people from the Caribbean were invited over to fill those roles, the NHS roles or the transportation roles, and the building, carpentry, all that sort of stuff.

Let's say then the West African. The Caribbeans with a larger in number and then within the Caribbean, the Jamaicans were the largest Black-descended people. They started to come in from 1948, quite consistently up until the 1980s. There's always a steady flow of fresh Jamaican blood, if you want to say. They're coming in bringing that culture and music with it. Obviously, some of their musical sensibilities and musical sensibilities are just sounds with music we listen to growing up, it makes sense to us. They would bring that with them. You're not going to just leave your musical tastes behind when you go somewhere new. Hewitt, his research was looking at the impact of Jamaicans in particular because Jamaicans were the largest Black-descended group of people that had traveled to Britain after the war to make sense of how Jamaican Patois was being used as slang amongst the youth in the '80s and how some of the Jamaican culture found its way into youth culture in the '70s and '80s.

In the '70s, obviously, we have Bob Marley, he was a big deal in the UK. He would go back and forth, you had sound system cultures, reggae music was very much a key feature. Even now, if we talk about, I suppose, youth language today, youth slang, it's known as or Lindner calls it Jafaican Blinglish. It's fake Jamaican language that everybody, no matter your background or ethnicity, might use. Also, sound system culture, people from different backgrounds, usually working class backgrounds, would also be involved in sound system culture.

Which is where you have big speakers, you're playing music to a crowd, two DJs might be crushing or competing, and then you'll have an MC riding the rhythm, or orating or rapping over beats. This is a key feature of sound system culture. Also, that might sound similar for those of you who study hip-hop, because DJ Kool Herc is Jamaican. He went to New York and wanted to recreate sound system culture, and that was an instrumental thing in the birth of hip-hop in the US.

This is another thing, this cultural practice of sharing music through loudspeakers in communal settings, with somebody orating or rapping, or not really rapping, toasting, as it's called in the Jamaican context over instrumentals, DJs clashing, or they're called selectors in the Jamaican context. All of these kinds of practices are things that have migrated with people. All of these things definitely have a place in understanding grime, because some of the pioneers of the grime scene, they were born in Britain by their parents or their grandparents have come from the Caribbean, and many of those have come from Jamaica, or have had people involved in sound systems in the British context.

[00:12:18] Host: Dr. Charles breaks down some of the sonic elements of grime music, and the tools and technology used to create it.

[00:12:26] Monique: Technology is what creates sonic possibility and I use technology in the Greek sense of the mastery of skills. Technology can be a DAW or logic, or Pro Tools, but technology can also be your hands, or your voice, whatever you can access to make sounds. A key influence in developing or in the emergence of grime was experimental music, and the things that can be identified with the offbeatness, it was pushing the boundaries of the 4/4 beat or lots of space, challenging convention, trying to, I suppose, adopt eerie sounds or odd sounds, or a sense of space in the music, pushing sonic limits.

Also, what was quite experimental was the idea of the use of the British accents. Obviously, you hear me speaking in a British accent, but music in a British accent, especially if you're rapping or spraying bars in a British accent is a relatively new thing. Maybe in the last 25 years, it's become a thing because you Americans, you guys are a culture superpower. In Britain, part of I suppose the Black identity took on board some of the stuff that has been sent over to us through the media with African Americans, African American culture that we received, as well as stuff that would be coming from the Caribbean because music migrates with people.

Maybe once the West Africans started to come in in more numbers and Somalis started to come in in more numbers, these sort of things helped to shape our understanding and idea of Black Britishness because making music, Black music in the UK, is, I suppose, comparatively relatively new. We would take on board different accents. We would use an American accent or we might use Jamaican Patois because obviously, it's part of the youth slang, all of these sort of things.

The use of the British accent consistently was really pushing the boundaries in terms of grime music. Also the use of non-musical sounds because a lot of the music was made on PlayStation. I don't know if many of you are familiar with Music 2000 but Music 2000 was a game that was on PlayStation and people would use that to make music, people would use cracks, FruityLoops, and polyphonic ringtones on the Nokia phones in the early noughties and make tracks as well as incorporating folk horns, door slamming, all sorts of sounds that come from the sonic landscape around. Things that make sonic sense would find their way into the music.

[00:15:10] Host: In her musicological discourse analysis, Dr. Charles explores the life cycles of musical genre and which stage the lifecycle of grime music is currently in.

[00:15:21] Monique: I would love to take credit for the lifecycle but the lifecycle is Jennifer Lena. She's at Columbia, I think she's at Columbia University. She does a lot on genre theory herself. Her work is really, really interesting, because it talks about a genre over its lifecycle, or teleologically, as I say. In its early stages, it's a new sound that no one's ever really heard before. It's this new, trendy underground thing where seven people know about it.

It's not quite a scene yet, and that's known as the avant-garde stage. That's when it's really, really new. It's more speaking about, I suppose, music that comes about organically, rather than the music industry, per se. Then, after a while people start to cotton onto this thing, or catch onto this thing and then a scene develops. As the scene develops, it's still underground, it's not in the mainstream, and people start to have different roles within the scene.

Some people are the artists, some people are the fans, then if you think about punk, people start making zines, or blogs, or capturing what's happening in the scene, then there's different locations, there's that hip club that everyone goes to that likes that genre of music. All of that sort of stuff happens. Then sooner or later, industry comes along. That's the scene base I was talking about there. Then industry comes along, sniffing around, "This is a new thing that we can make some money out of."

Then the industry come in, and they get involved and then the sound changes. They change the sound. It sounds a bit more commercial, it's a bit more palatable to the mainstream. At this point, when it shifts from the scene-based phase to the industry-based phase, you have all the diehards and all. This genres dead, it's not the same. What they're playing isn't really punk, grime, hip-hop, reggaeton, whatever. The people in the scene, they really want to go back to the scene before people sold out and crossed over and did all that sort of stuff.

Then because the industry phase does that, the industry is the music industry phase., then you have diehard traditionalists that don't want the genre to change in sound, they want to preserve the really, really early stuff. You have the traditionalist phase, and I suppose my work kind of contributes to that because I suppose I'm documenting what it first sounded like, where it first came from. Then if a genre of music, because not all genres of music make that full lifecycle either, but if they do make that a full lifecycle, then you have maybe scene-based people that want to police the boundaries of it.

They have an idea of what a traditional thing is. If I say, "Oh, yes, I like hip-hop." Somebody says, "Oh, yes, I like Pop Smoke or Macklemore." That's not real hip-hop, real hip-hop is Big Daddy Kane, or it's LL Cool J. That's where all of that sort of stuff comes in because they are hip-hop, but they're different, but traditionalists want it to be as close to the scene base or avant-garde base as possible. That's the kind of lifecycle, if a genre is successful enough, can go through, but some never get to the industries phase. They're always still underground.

Grime is really interesting. It's definitely the industry phase because it has crossed over as mainstream and the Black population in Britain, and even though it is a Black music form, it's a British music form. It's a very working class music form. By me saying working class, that means the white working class, as in, I suppose, let's say Waspy kind of white working class, but also Greek, Turkish working class, Eastern Europeans, because we have lots of different white people here, as well as different types of Asian people here.

When we refer to Asia, in Britain, we refer to people largely from the Indian subcontinent, whereas I know that when you refer to Asian it's usually about Eastern Asian. That's my understanding. Although we do have people of Eastern Asian descent here as well. It's a working class in that everyone gets involved in even though a lot of its cultural heritage does come through the Caribbean and also influenced by the US superpower cultural superpower self.

That is definitely very much of a influence as well. When it started out, I suppose it was, let's say in the avant-garde stage, if we're going to start to use Lindner's terminology. It was very Black in that respect, but again, the way that Britain is and the British history, Black people came over in larger or more significant numbers since 1948. Our history here is a lot shorter than in the US, obviously. Even in the Blackest areas in England, it's still going to be less than 50%. On one road, you will have an Asian person from any of the Asian countries, from the colonies as well as Turkish or Cypria as well as Eastern European.

It can still be quite diverse. There's this class identity. When it comes to race, it's quite an intricate and interesting dynamic because if you are a known white person from their ends who lives that grimy life and has that working class connection and you're a good MC, then that's okay. If you're someone we don't know very well and you're not really engaging with us and you're a white person that we don't know, then we might look at you with suspicion.

In my PhD, I call that random acts of policing because if it's somebody that you're familiar with, there's a certain thread of authenticity that runs through grime, this kind of working class living existence. Yes, you're white, but you live that grimy life like me, and you spray bars and you're good at spraying bars, but you from the suburbs, what are you doing here? Why are you getting involved? There is a very interesting dynamic. Even white people that are in the working class spaces would still look at the white suburban person and say, "What are you doing here?"

The class dynamic is really-- The way that race and class intersect is really, really interesting when it comes to the scene. As time moves on, it becomes more and more diverse as we go along, but I suppose the archetype or the avatar still remains, that Black male figure. Yes, it's definitely crossed over to industry.

People in the scene will probably say, "Yes, Stormzy doesn't make grime, this isn't grime, that isn't grime," and it fits with what Jennifer Lena says, the diehards or the underground people, that's mainstream. That's commercial. We're not interested in that, but yes, technically, it is in the industry phase and now scholarly work is starting to come around it. There's a traditional phase beginning to take shape around it as well.

[00:22:27] Host: With all the elements of musicological discourse analysis together, it creates what Dr. Charles calls a sonic footprint timestamp. She examines grimes timestamp from its birth to where it is today.

[00:22:41] Monique: Thinking about these things, if I just quickly fast forward, this is when I did my PhD and I observed, I had to go to grime, raves, and clubbing to get a sense of how people responded to music. When I think about affect, for example, I interviewed people. I interviewed MCs, I interviewed events organizers, DJs, just different people in different parts of the scene, and I listened to some of the songs, particularly the songs that were recommended by the people I interviewed and the songs that drew the biggest reactions in the events that I went to.

It gave me an opportunity to think about music, how it sounds, because music is-- Jennifer Lena talks about this. She says that music is sonic, how it sounds, but it's also social, how the people come together to make this music and get meaning and affect from it. I thought about all of these different aspects. Obviously, music generates cultural capital.

Also, I have things like NILA, which is I suppose lyrical analysis, trying to understand the ideology of a genre of music, so R&B is always about love, for the most part. Rock might be about, I don't know, something else. Different genres tend to have a general thing that they may talk about. That gives you an understanding of what is important in that genre of music and what people relate to in that genre of music.

If we begin to start to unpack or look at musicological discourse analysis and look at all the different things that were in that diagram, when we look at a couple of maybe key songs in a particular genre, we get an idea of the sonic footprint timestamp, that's what I call it, so it gives you an understanding of what was happening socially, what was happening in terms of technological availability, what was important to that group, because there's ideology if the songs are all talking about bling bling and I'm the hardest man out here, and all that stuff, you get a sense that masculinity and the alpha male is really important to this group of people that share this music. You get a sense of many different strands.

It's almost like the songs are archival material, capturing a moment in time. My master's background is race and ethnic relations, but as a political science master, so I suppose my viewpoint is, in many instances, is the personal is political. When I saw grime coming up and making a scene for itself, basically from scratch, I saw this as a political act, even if the people in the scene were always overtly aware of it.

What I think has happened is, it's grown up, let's say it's almost 20 now, the young people that-- Their children or the young ones growing up along in that music, grew up in these working class conditions where they felt really disconnected from politics or anything that was happening around them or the legislation or policies that rolled out that would adversely affect them.

The lyrics may start by talking about the hardships, the daily lives, the reality. It's like reality stuff being spoken about, but I think what happened is there was like a conscious awareness of, "Oh, actually, we've already built this network. We have authentic connection with our fans, and they have a position of influence."

In 2011, Mark Duggan, a Black man, was shot and killed by the police, and there were all sorts of questions about how he was killed. They were suggesting that he was going to shoot a police officer and that sort of thing. Guns are not commonplace in the UK at all. Our policemen don't walk around with guns either. It's the special armed forces that have guns. This was a big thing in the UK context, and things leading up to that as well.

As a result of that, there were riots all over England. In fact, some of the grime MCs were saying, "You need to listen to us." They wrote in newspapers. It was coming up in some of the lyrics as well, but I think with the general election, the snap general election in 2017, when Theresa May called it, it was a low-cost way or a low personal cost. You're not going to be criminalized for voting. You're allowed to vote now, and you're an adult. If we're going to just go with the idea that grime was born in 2000, these people have grown up with it and they're now adults, first-time voters, they can actually do something in a more tangible and personally safe way to try and change things.

The reality included in the lyrics, the moments where artists would say something or maybe write an article in the paper or include it in their lyrics, this was a moment where you could put that capital P on the lowercase p politics that was moving and happening. I think it became more consciously aware of itself and artists became more consciously aware of their capital P political power and sway and influence that they could have in making national changes.

[00:27:46] Host: If you would like to continue the conversation, visit chapman.edu/wilkinson to hear the entire lecture with Dr. Charles. For more socially conscious content, visit publicpodcasting.org or follow us at Apple, Spotify, or wherever you podcast.