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Paper short abstract:

In Kilburn, London, young people involved in crime and violence often attempt to transform their lives by making music. For them, the potential of music trades ambivalently on a romantic notion of music as transcendent – where music generates phenomenological, cultural, and socio-economic excess.

Paper long abstract:

On a poor council estate, in the London neighbourhood of Kilburn, the harsh realities of marginalization often drive young people toward crime and violence – where, as part of a broader street or ‘road’ culture, they are able to recover an ambivalent sense of dignity, community and agency. Road life, however, can come with weighty costs, and youth often dream about and work toward breaking free from crime and violence. Many of these dreams and efforts centre around making music, especially rap – seen as a potent means of moving beyond or transforming road life.

This paper unpacks the power of making rap within road culture. It argues that this power plays on a romantic notion of music as transcendent. The transcendental capacity of rap is staged and experienced in three overlapping ways: phenomenologically, through evoking charged emotions and a sense of immediacy; culturally, where music serves as a means for pursuing diverse ends, from escalating violent rivalries, to facilitating cooperation and understanding; and socio-economically, where making rap evokes the prospect of breakaway success.

Kilburn’s would-be musicians, however, remain closely attuned to the constraints of life on the margins. Rather than treating music as transcendent in its own right, young people stage music’s transcendental possibilities in a recursive relation with harsh material reality – where each contains and generates the other. Through this recursive relation, making rap allows young people to probe the ethical and political affordances of everyday life, and thus to cultivate small but genuine prospects for change.