lame black media
by simone bresi-ando on jul 10, 2003, 09:49
'why is the black british press so lame' asked the email. the feeling of 'oh my god someone else thinks the same' was, relieving since i'd already made my feelings known. namely that the current state of black media in this country is more an embarrassment than a beacon of achievement for black britons.
choice fm radio and the voice and new nation newspapers are the 3 main players in this game. positioned as the mouthpiece for britain’s black minority they are failing miserably. having a roster of djs with an average age of 40 playing for an 'urban' london that is largely young and a show schedule which resembles itself 15 years previously. the newspaper layouts look like a school newsletter...
the voice newspaper began in the east london flat of the (now deceased) founder and owner val mccalla. it was mccalla who saw the need for the british black community to have a media depiction of black people away from the usual sexual and criminal stereotypes. the voice gave black britons this but has since steered away from its revolutionary roots.
to be truthful i am a little young to remember the arrival of the voice on our newsstands but i can recall my sisters promising to 'buy the paper every week, even if its crap!' you see, i grew up in thatcherite britain, where the black face portraying something positive was a rare phenomenon. a few got through: trevor mcdonald, lenny henry, rusty lee, floella benjamin. however it's questionable as to whether their contribution was positive or just a rehash of stereotypes that went before them. this at a time where there were hardly any multi-racial pop bands with the black kid thrown in to appeal to the street like blazin’ squad and s club. instead there were plenty of over used stereotypes of black folk looking stupid, incoherent and just plain silly (alan in eastenders springs to mind for some reason).
the voice was a welcome relief for all the fist clenching agony that hard working black britons went through every time they heard a news report detailing a robbery, murder or rape - my parents and sisters clinging to the tablecloth, eyes closed in hope it wasn’t a black man. sometimes we didn’t get our wish and the effects were soul destroying, but the voice gave us hope. even though we believed we weren’t all muggers, rapists and murderers, sometimes you started to question when you saw a black person with a nice car or clothes - you started to think, 'how did they get that money, is it drugs?' of course there was every reason for that person to have obtained their wealth legally, but the mainstream media ignored black britain, and we had only their version to accept.
and the choice is what?
the voice helped us see weekly, in full colour that successful black people do not exist only in the pages of the american essence magazine but in hackney, catford, edmonton and beyond. we were here, like it or not and we had our own paper to show it.
personally, it seems that black british media hasn’t grown with the people it was made for. choice fm is still stuck in a time warp with more or less the same dj line up and roster as when it first went on air in the '90s. the musical direction is still heavily focussed on reggae, ragga and r n' b from america and a snobbery towards homegrown talent. there was hardly a blip when the jungle and garage phenomena’s blew up, if you were lucky commander b would drop 3 tunes from each genre of the moment as a token gesture on saturday nights. by and large choice missed the boat on the underground musical movements led by black britons.
instead they stayed in the '90s fighting a struggle that had redefined itself in more ways than one. black folk were no longer concerned solely with race relations and rioting in brixton. according to a few documentaries screened late last decade, black british activists had embraced house music's one love feeling and abandoned politics for the chemical influenced life. it wasn’t all hunky dory but that’s the picture they like to paint so let's indulge in it for a while, for arguments sake.
when choice and the voice started, we, as black britons were just happy to have anything, good quality or just plain crap. we had come to a point where we could really have something, but black british media organisations started falling away and have not grown with their readership. the generation who would religiously buy the voice regardless of quality had grown upwards and outwards, they had kids who are now most likely to be bringing home mandy and sally instead of keisha and charmaine, so the struggle became largely irrelevant. in the multimedia age the flow of information had mostly learned from the old divisions, our media lagged long behind and inferior.
it does!
with the emergence of mainly american black media (bet, vibe, one world etc) the black british attempt seems to be a tacky, shallow reflection of what it was modelled on. focussing on news that titillates rather than stimulates, and using 13-year-old language reminds me of another best-selling daily british red top - good for the money men no doubt! choice uses its ad space to promote racial stereotypes, the incessant use of exaggerated accents and peculiar sound bytes from mainly west indian theatre, stops me in disbelief that in 2003, this can be used to promote something for black enjoyment. sometimes i wonder whether bnp leader nick griffin runs the ad agency!
so what’s the solution? scrap it, sell it, revamp it? well, a substantial percentage of choice has already been sold to capital radio and there’s now talk that capital are to take it over fully. hmm, what great diversity in choice us radio listeners will have. capital radio works by ‘keeping their enemies close’, buying out xfm and part of choice is a clever move, especially as these stations were set up to oppose everything capital radio stood for! the money, the sound of money, so sweet to the ear!
however black british media cannot carry on like this. instead - kick out the djs that have been on the radio for over a decade and replace with fresher, more open-minded faces, revamp the look of the newspaper, change the colour, make it look like it wasn’t done on someone’s home computer. give us more in 2003 dammit!
there are other courses on the black british media table, magazines like nine, pride, touch are as bad as the above whereas blues & soul, echoes and to some extent trace (which started in london but is now based in nyc) give the reader a sense of real diversity, forged in multicultural britain. they themselves have a long way to go but are showing signs of hope in bleak multicultural media saturated britain.
the 2003 black briton does not have to accept anything. they can buy with earnings from the city job, slum it with their childhood bonafides or eat the very best black cuisine london has to offer. i doubt that it is these types of black britons the black media establishment is trying to sell, but shouldn’t they be striving to include these types? these people have pushed back the boundaries blacks have lived by for so long and who represents them? the struggle which the voice, new nation and choice were born from has drifted from the black british psyche. i don’t believe that this is necessarily a good thing or an indicator of ‘how far we’ve come’ but rather an indicator of the affects of social mobility and sophisticated global marketing.
with the suits and ties worn by the ‘owners’ of choice, do we really believe that it can be brought into the noughties? my guess… not likely!
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