Representation, Now! East Man

The reason why I was insisting on that is the following: especially at the moment, especially in the UK—I can’t speak for elsewhere—I feel like everything is dominated by the middle classes. Even when there is a conversation about class, and we’re talking about working classes, there is never any… I don’t want to use the word marginalization, but the media, or political commentators, especially in the creative cultural sector, are always speaking for us. I do feel that there’s a lack of representation of certain experiences at the moment. The whole idea and evolution of the East Man project is about personal experience. Hopefully, that experience is representative of other people’s experience and they can connect with it.

In music, the zeitgeist is that everybody has to be kind of pseudo-intellectual and pretend that the music you’re listening to makes you clever, this kind of commodification of identity politics. At the same time, the people I talk to and work with are working-class musicians, but they get no coverage, they don’t get the chance to speak. So, whenever I get the opportunity, I always talk about class and the representation of class.

Yes and no—well, I know what you mean. But I feel like this kind of cultural, sociological swamp in music… I don’t believe most people when they’re talking about this stuff. It feels so superficial, so crass, so surface-level. I remember reading an interview with a producer and he literally said: “I watch a TED talk before I’m going into the studio.” You fucking wanker! You sit down and take notes during a TED Talk, and then make the most generic-sounding fuzzy dubbed whatever?! What the fuck has that to do with anything?

I try to be honest: when I’m asked about my music and the meanings behind it, I’d say, well, I just make a track that sounds good, that I get a vibe from. I work by intuition. Then, I retroactively add titles or apply these kind of ideas to it. Like, “ah, that makes me think of this or that.” You put the different elements together and the whole body starts to create something else. It starts to provoke a thought.

Most producers that say that they are thinking about intellectual stuff, sociological concepts for example, and then go to the studio, I don’t believe them. Because their tracks are quite well-formed and just dancey. I don’t see the connection. I do believe some producers that say they sat down and read these things and had this intellectual idea about what they’re going to do because their music is often really dull and boring—hour-long drone stuff. They are not allowing the music to lead them, but instead they are trying to lead the music.

I feel there was an earnestness to it 10 years ago, while now it seems very trendy. A lot of people seem to be taking this American approach to identity and to the sociological. But still, what I find more often than not is that nothing happens. Because, it’s an affectation and it’s a commodification to sell a fucking album.

I think that has become quite problematic, but it has become problematic across the board when dealing with, shall we say, identity politics [see mail exchange with Terre Thaemlitz in zweikommasieben #16]. It’s just been consumed, it’s the neo-liberal commodification of identity politics. One perfect example of this, that I have been using a lot when talking to people, is NFL player Colin Kaepernik. He took a knee in protest against police violence towards African-Americans. That was a powerful, powerful statement. A couple of months later, what is he doing? He’s selling Nike trainers.

With the album, first and foremost, it had to be about making something that people would want to listen to. But I also wanted to make a statement about what is going on in the UK. I’m not saying that what we did has changed anything, but the album has a solid image and it said something just through the cover alone. And if you listen to the music… I think the whole thing was greater than the sum of its parts. I feel like at least that gave a kind of voice or reflection of London, a little snapshot of a particular part or aspect of London.

I question the validity of a lot of these references to intellectual concepts in our scene. More often than not, the people making these references are not inviting people from the scene they’re taking from, or giving a platform or voice to these communities who they are supposedly talking about. I feel like a lot of it is meaningless and, at worst, condescending and patronizing to the people they’re professed to be talking about. It is often formulated by very privileged individuals, who are, I think, quite blasé and quite unknowing about the circumstances of other people.

The problem is that there is none. But maybe the best way to answer this question is to talk about how the album Red, White & Zero came about and the process that let to Paul Gilroy adding his text to it. Let’s go back: Before I started the East Man project, I was already recording under various aliases, still finding my sound and whatnot…

I had been living in London most of my life. My mum was from East London originally, so were my grandparents. I was born in Hastings, a seaside town in Sussex, but we later moved back to London. My older brother and sister’s dad was from Jamaica; my younger brother’s and mine was from Canada. Both fathers left, it was just my mum and my three siblings. So, I was brought up in this working-class family: my mum worked a lot, we didn’t have loads, but you know. And it’s a mixed family, or what do you call it? A mixed heritage family? My older brother and sister are mixed-race, and then there’s me and my little brother. I had been living in London for the best part of my life and had become fed up with it. I had plans to leave and live in Sweden. On the way up to knowing that I was leaving the country—and at the time, I thought for good, leaving all my family behind—I started subconsciously to drift towards reading stuff about London. I started with books like Patrick Hamilton’s 20’000 Thousand Streets Under the Sky. Literature that is sort of fiction, but happens in real places and is based on people’s experiences, very London-centred, UK-centred. In all this, I started to think about—or rather drift towards looking for—a representation of my family. Because, my family, I think, is a fairly typical working-class family in its cultural and ethnic make up, in its inherited culture.

I also started to remember things from when I grew up. Back then, we did have a representation of the working classes. On TV, for example, you had a show called Only Fools and Horses. That was a representation of a predominantly white working class. But still, I could recognize it: these people looked and spoke like my family. But you also had other sitcoms like the Desmond’s that we used to watch as children. It started in the late eighties through to the early nineties, featured a Guyanese cast and revolved around a Guyanese family who now lived in Peckham. There was a representation of different ethnicities and working classes. But then that kind of faded…

More and more, I realized that there is no representation of my family—a “mixed” family. But I kept searching, and my search started to come up in my work as well. First, it was just simple things; like track titles, stuff that I was drawing from. Then I started to look more and more, I was trying to find anything that would be a representation of the kind of family I grew up in. And I just simply couldn’t find anything. The only stuff I could find were films like Pressure from 1975, and books like The Lonely Londoners from Samuel Selvon. But they were speaking about the experiences of young Caribbean men that we’re moving to London, as part of the sort of Windrush generation or a little later. I could relate to a lot of the experiences of these young men, living in the circumstance they were living in—but only up to a certain point. A big part of their experience was racialized. So I started to look more and more and I stumbled upon sociologist Stuart Hall. I still haven’t read anything from him. The only thing I read about him was his biography. But I watched a few lectures… And I thought this is really interesting.

Looking around online, literally just Googling specific phrases. So, I found Hall and I was watching these videos from him. The “Spectre of Marxism,” I think is one of them, and it’s all really interesting stuff. Still, it wasn’t the representation I was looking for.

Then Paul Gilroy’s name cropped up because he was a student of Hall, as well as Les Back, who is writing liner notes for the current album, and Vron Ware. And then it turned out they are still contemporary, active, live in London—and have social media accounts. So, I followed and messaged them. I was like “hi, sorry to bother you, but I’m looking for representations of this, my family, that I grew up in. I know that you all write about identity, race, and class, and social constructs of these things and blah, blah, blah. I was wondering if you could point me in the right direction for anything that would be representative of this.” So I wanted to start searching inside academia, as I thought that would be where somebody’s writing about that. And Paul’s reply was “no, nobody’s writing about this, nobody’s talking about what you want to talk about. And in my experience, quite often the first people to talk about that stuff are musicians.”

I thought that was a really interesting reply. Then, we kind of got chatting a little bit… And Paul suggested that we meet up. And this was just before I was going to move away. At the same time, my music had started to fine-tune itself—I started to streamline it, stripping away all the extraneous things that didn’t fit. And I started to toy with the idea of working with MCs, so I messaged a few and….

This was probably like six years ago, like 2014, roughly. So, anyway, I was already talking to a few MCs, but my tracks weren’t quite right…I wanted to go back to my dance music and pirate radio roots. I wanted something to mix—for me to mix, for DJs to mix, something for people to dance to.

Anyway, Paul and me ended up meeting and we just had a chat about my family and our backgrounds—just about stuff. Paul is a really nice guy. And he’s just interested in people, obviously, that’s what he does. I hadn’t read anything from Paul at that point. We just chatted, or he was just asking me things and I would come up with a phrase and he would be like “ahh I like that. That’s interesting.”

Then I moved away, I ended up living in Stockholm. That was quite a depressing time… But also during that time, my music starting to come together. The tracks I started to send to the MCs I was happy with. Then they were happy with them, some recorded vocals. Then I flew back a couple of times to play on radio stations and do a couple of shows with the MCs. That was a great learning experience. And I ended up being signed to Planet Mu, they wanted an album from me. Mike [Paradinas] from Planet Mu liked the tracks I had already done with MCs. Also my friendship with Paul continued during that time. I still hadn’t really read anything that he gave me (I still have his books to get through). What I’ve been reading was stuff from James Baldwin, or I sort of stumbled across people like Frantz Fanon or the Black Audio Film Collective. Again, this was mostly speaking about a Caribbean sort of experience. The points of connection I make are essentially about being a working-class male, it’s about masculinity. But obviously, there’s the extra factor of the colour of their skin that the main characters of these books or films are dealing with living in the country they moved to. But my experiences in Stockholm gave me a glimpse of living somewhere where it isn’t your own, where you can’t quite fit in. That started to make me understand the UK more, or my experiences with the UK.

Eventually, I ended up moving back to London. And Planet Mu gave me a bit of money so I could pay the MCs to get into the studio, which meant I could record more vocals. The album started to come together… Meanwhile, Paul and I, our friendship had grown. Originally, I asked him to write something that could be used as a spoken word for the album. But as the music kind of took shape, this first idea didn’t fit anymore; it seemed a bit heavy-handed or could come across a bit corny. So I said to him, “actually, would you like to write some liner notes? Like a couple of paragraphs, connect the tracks to the stuff that we were talking about?” So he wrote the amazing thing he wrote, which encapsulated a good part of what we had been talking about over the last few years, and quite a lot of things that I’ve been saying, too, and obviously, all the things that he feels, thinks, and writes about.

I’ve seen a lot of people who listen to the music, skim-read the press release and then flip it the other way around. I was inspired by Paul’s writings—when it’s actually the other way around. But the roots of it all was a desperate search for representation. Because there isn’t a representation other than a fetishization… You don’t see yourself reflected: you don’t see yourself on the TV screen, you don’t hear yourself on the radio…

It is not an expectation. I don’t expect representation because you don’t really get it. I want it, I demand it.

Paul said something to me that stuck. That was long after the album came out and we were still going for walks and talks. I mentioned that when I grew up, I felt like there was some kind of representation and how this kind of disappeared… And Paul turned around to me and was like, “yeah that’s because now, our current system is deemed to be a meritocracy.” The system we inhabit is saying, well, class doesn’t exist anymore, race doesn’t exist anymore, sex doesn’t exist anymore; if you work hard enough, you’ll get representation. And that is not true. The underlying mechanism of the system we inhabit, they’re still in play, they are not broken, they were never dismantled.

For example, Stormzy was considered the first black artist to headline Glastonbury. Well, yeah, actually, a few years back Beyoncé did it. Now, one could argue that he’s the first black British Artist who did it. But if you go back to the nineties, Skunk Anansie headlined Glastonbury, whose front woman is a black British artist. For younger generations, figures like Stormzy are really important because they haven’t grown up seeing themselves reflected, seeing themselves represented. I was fortunate—up to a certain point—to see that representation. And then it’s just gone. So that’s… It’s also a desire for representation. Because, I think, we all need to… It symbolizes that people acknowledge that you exist in the world, that you are the same, on an equal footing. And the way that it stands at the minute, in this country, people really like to think class doesn’t exist anymore. And it’s basically because they banished it from being represented or talked about.

On the very base level: you, as a magazine, have an audience that I don’t have. And I have an audience that you don’t have. Arguably, it’s mutually beneficial. If we do this interview, the conversation is broadening, it’s reaching out to more people. That’s why for me it’s important to have these conversations and to use other kind of platforms for this conversation. Otherwise, there’s an element of preaching to the choir. Because if everybody is following me because they know what I do and because I say these things—a bit like the fucking lost Labour campaign, because all Jeremy Corbyn was doing was preaching to the choir.

Maybe most people will just read it and be like, “whatever,” or they would be like, “ah, that’s interesting”—but nothing would come out of it. Still, there’s always the hope that the things you do might have some kind of impact. That maybe, and just maybe, on some level, it will make a tangible change in the way that people look at an experience, or in the way they experience certain aspects of the world. I’m trying to convey these ideas to people that maybe don’t connect with my music. These conversations are more important than the music.

It’s really complicated. I did like two shows last year, and they were both really bad. I was booked essentially to play at kind of experimental music gigs…

I’d come from pirate radio and then drifted to the experimental area—and I was really unhappy in doing that music. Creative wise, it’s a musical a cul de sac, as far as I can see. Most of this music is anything but experimental. Also there’s a real class element to it. I was getting booked to play at places for experimental music, showed up there, and then I did not connect with any of these people. They were all middle class, they were all quite… I had other experimental musicians say things to me, like, “oh, I didn’t expect you to talk like that.” That is a really fucked-up thing to say! In this example, me and said musician spoke a couple of times over email. There, I had correct grammar, punctuation, and whatever. So he expected me to be another middle-class guy—which says a lot about his assumptions about working-class people, right? These are the worst kind of gigs and they suck the life out of me…

The best gigs I’ve done have been club-based. They are the ones I enjoyed most. Even the kind of hipster kind of clubs, like when I played Berghain’s main room. That was enjoyable because it was literally a fucking massive room full of people that just wanted to dance. One of the best gigs I did, was, ironically, at Berlin Atonal—so a festival for experimental music. When I played there at Ohm, people were losing their shit.

I think it can happen because the music comes from that, you’re bringing that sound, that identity. But let’s be honest: I’m not going into a club to enlighten people about working-class struggle and what it is like to grow up poor. I’m going in there for people to have a good time. The presentation of an album, the interviews, that kind of stuff is where…

Yeah, so I’m playing almost exclusively to a middle-class audience. I don’t know how this is going to change. The only fully working-class kind of music movement in the UK, or in London rather, is drill. But these kids, they don’t have events… They can’t do the stuff that we used to do when we were young. The young drill producers and MCs do a few tunes and make a video. They put it on YouTube and hope that it will pop, and that they become some sort of popstar, playing BBC 1Xtra radio, earn a lot of money out of it—get some sponsorship deals… A lot of the young MCs I was working with for the first album, they were asking me to get them clothes. What the fuck—how could I get you track suits? They want sponsorship deals with Nike or whatever. And I know this sounds like really corny, but this really is the knock-on effect of neoliberalist capitalist culture… The only people that can actually afford to take the risk financially to, say, start a night, run a record label, put these things on, are middle-class kids. They have the money and the sort of financial cushion to fall back on if it flops. Every promoter I deal with, they’re all middle class and they’re almost all white as well.

I don’t know how to remedy this. I’m just doing what I do, trying to talk about these things. I can’t say that I particularly sit here all day, every day, drawing up a plan of action. This is just who I am, it’s not forced… It’s not me sitting down for an interview for Wire Magazine, saying, “oh yeah, I watch a TED talk and then go to the studio.” But I can’t really do anything else, I don’t know what else to do.

Oh, yes. So, Paul suggested I should write a book. And first, quite self-deprecatingly and embarrassingly, I said, “oh no, I can’t, blah, blah, blah.” But the idea stuck in my head for a long time and then eventually, I guess last year at some point, I started writing. The idea for the book is this: I want to write about class and race in the UK through the prism of my family and through the perspective of my lived experiences.