The British pop Establishment has shown a long-standing resistance to black musical influence

"Reggae is vile," the former Smiths singer Morrissey once infamously declared. The principal character in Tippa Irie's 1985 song "Complain Neighbour", now re-released on the compilation An England Story, would have agreed. Tippa Irie, one of the UK's first home-grown reggae MCs, recounts the experience of a young black family living next door to a man who hates them and their bass-heavy music.

Over a backing track that sits somewhere between Jamaican dancehall and the old theme tune to Grange Hill, Tippa Irie switches from patois to a cockney twang as he parodies the man who sits at home "watching Coronation Street and da East-end-ah" after throwing a brick through his neighbours' window. Not only is it furious, funny and celebratory, it's a sharp metaphor for the resistance white mainstream pop has shown to black music in the UK.

The fast-talking ragga MCs, loud-mouthed rappers and teenage grime upstarts featured on An England Story, which traces the influence of Caribbean MC culture through the past 25 years, have been a driving musical force over the past few decades. From the late Seventies, British-based musicians like Tippa Irie and Papa Levi, whose 1984 "My God My King" features on the album, began developing their own take on Jamaican sound-system culture, in which DJs would improvise lyrics, or "toast", over records they were playing. Its development was similar to, but separate from, that of hip-hop in the US. The British MCs developed their own "fast chat" rapping style and wrote lyrics that reflected the experience of "English upbringing, background Caribbean", as the rapper Tricky once put it.

The tracks from this early period don't sound all that different from Jamaican reggae, but by the end of the Eighties, a wholly unique style had developed. The dancehall genre known as ragga, composed on cheap electronic synthesisers, was quick and easy to produce, which meant that British MCs and producers soon exploded in numbers and made it their own. General Levy's "Champagne Body" is an exhilarating example, his rapid-fire vocals skipping over a basic but infectious rhythm. And if "bling" is everywhere in today's pop culture, it's got nothing on Glamma Kid, who took self-aggrandisement to surreal levels on tracks such as 1995's "Fashion Magazine".

MC culture in the UK was an outward-looking movement that took on influences from and inspired other cultures. The vocal inflections of ragga found their way into rave music via jungle and drum'n'bass. General Levy later had a number-one hit in 1994 with the jungle act M-Beat, and the Birmingham-born Apache Indian mixed ragga with Indian bhangra music (there are nods to these styles on An England Story in "Ruffneck" by Navigator and the Freestylers and in Ty and Roots Manuva's "So U Want More?").

The early Nineties are often remembered as a musical wasteland, but that period actually marked a high point in pop, one where working-class, urban youths formed a culture that crossed ethnic boundaries without seeking permission from some official arbiter of "Britishness". It was not to last. Morrissey may have claimed that his comment about reggae was misinterpreted; it nonetheless tapped into a misery-guts, revisionist sentiment in the British Establishment that sought to cleanse itself of this immigrant influence and return to an imagined era of "classic" guitar bands: Britpop. Britpop's all-white cast shut black and Asian kids out of the UK mainstream and pushed them towards American hip-hop and R'n'B, which have since been sectioned off into their own TV channels and radio stations. The influence of MC culture may be audible in mainstream pop acts from Lily Allen to Groove Armada, but this is rarely acknowledged.

Yet it is not all gloom and doom. A new generation mixes hip-hop styles with the Caribbean-inflected vocals of its forebears. Riko's "Ice Rink Vocal" is produced by Wiley, a pioneer of the grime sound. It is typical of the genre, which fizzes with exciting, fresh ideas, but still hasn't been able to move beyond an "I'm-tougher-than-you" outlook to capture wider attention.

There are also, on this male-dominated compilation, a few signs that women are getting to have their say on the mike. Doctor and DaVin Che's "Gotta Man?" is a boy-girl lyrical battle reminiscent of Dizzee Rascal's "I Luv U", and there is an outstanding track by the Heatwave with Warrior Queen ("Things Change"), who in recent years has been lending her formidable vocal skills to everyone from dubstep producers to avant-garde noise artists.

The British pop industry is in terminal decline, eaten away by private equity firms, a failure to cope with the digital age and a total lack of imagination among its higher echelons. The future is a fragmented and uncertain place where the next big idea is as likely to come from a hotshot kid remixing a forgotten, decades-old seven-inch as from some Svengali-like record-label mogul. The electrifying, grass-roots creativity on An England Story hints at just how great this future could be. Bigots of all colours will hate it.

"An England Story: the Culture of the MC in the UK 1984-2008" (Soul Jazz) is out now

Post your comment

Please note: you will need to login or register before you can comment on the website