IN FOCUS
BLACK BOYS IN ROCK
Back in 1983, David Bowie was interviewed by MTV. He posed the important question of why black artists were under-represented on their network, why are there “so few black artists featured [on MTV]?”. “I think we're trying to move in that direction,” answered Mark Goodman- but it’s been almost 30 years since and the unrequited sentiment of Bowie’s concern chime louder than anytime since. “Should it not be a challenge to try and make the media far more integrated especially in, if anything, in musical terms?” The only contrast between 1983 and 2020 is the video resolution of inequality. You see in real-time the symptoms of inaction; you may call it a far stretch to suggest that the chasm of black rock bands, the deaths of unarmed
black men and systemic racism are dichotomised, but I’d suggest otherwise. We still have huge underrepresentation of BAME artists in the rock and indie music scene.
I’m Jim, lead singer of the Leeds based alt-rock duo Blue Kubricks. I have a story worth hearing: my brother and I write and record all our own music and have been rigorously gigging the Yorkshire circuit for upwards of three years. We are black boys in rock; our mother is from Finland and our father from Ghana, and in light of the recent Black Lives Matter movement it is time for our voices as black rock artists to be heard. Too often we are mistaken for rappers; we joke too often that 68
when we tell people that we’re musicians, their response is almost always "So what kind of rap music do you do?’. People are surprised to see two black boys playing rock music rather than rap or drill, and this stereotype needs to end. We want to inspire the next generation of black kids to not succumb to the cultural pressure dictated by the colour of their skin, but instead know they can too pick up a guitar. If young black boys are pushed into drill, the central message of drill being violence and misogyny, it only perpetuates these features within black communities; the perception of them and the objective corollary of knife crime becomes embedded within these groups. It can be easy, if not educated, to view the two as inextricably linked. H. L. Mencken said that “For every complex
