The digital subversion of urban space: Power, performance and grime

Abstract

Digital technologies play an increasingly prominent role in the reproduction of society and space. Rather than being studied as a separate category of understanding, the ways in which such technologies intersect with and inflect upon the real world has provided a recent focus of research. Urban music is inherently spatial, but the ways in which digital technologies have enabled artists to resist injustice, to reproduce space and to reclaim the right to the city has not yet been considered. This article fills the lacuna by exploring how grime artists harness digital technologies to resist marginalization by the mainstream and create new expressions of power. Specifically, it shows how digital enablers have led to the democratization of music, which in turn has empowered grime artists to reclaim the right to represent the spaces of the inner city, and, in doing so, to challenge and subvert more wide-ranging structures of power and inequality. Accordingly, I argue that grime is more than music and is as much a channel of social activism as it is creative expression.