1. 1
“Just Type My Name in Google and See What Comes Up”: Creating an Online
Persona in The Urban Music Industry.
Drawing on empirical evidence gathered from a five-year ethnographic research project undertaken in
London and Cyprus, this paper explores and examines digital media use specifically as it relates to the
urban music industry, with a particular focus on Grime music.
Grime music is a predominantly male, black Atlantic creative expression that has broken free of its east
London origins to have a global socio-economic significance.
The traditional recorded music industry, based on a centralised model and heavily reliant on tight
control of distribution, has evolved from a local and personal activity, shared with co-present others, to
a space where immediate audiences can be established for artistic output without the need for an
intermediary. It is within this context that Grime music artists create and market online personas in
exchange for sales, recognition and feedback. Grime music came of age in the YouTube era, quickly
adopting Web 2.0 technologies, such as YouTube, Facebook and Twitter to enable the formation of
new identities as recording artists and entrepreneurs.
This paper explores how, in this sector, accessible and affordable digital technologies have been
utilised by urban music practitioners to construct public, performing identities with a local, national
and international reach.
Key words: grime music, digital technologies, identity, YouTube
Introduction
This paper comes out of a five-year ethnographic research project that used Grime music as
a lens to explore the extent and nature of entrepreneurship in the urban music economy.
Grime music, a core component of the urban music sector, is a predominantly male, black
Atlantic creative expression. It has evolved from its east London origins to have a global
socio-economic significance. By way of introduction to this genre, I have prepared this
short clip of extracts from four videos; Pow, She Likes To, That’s Not Me and Wiley’s
Snakes and Ladders tour (BlimeyworldGrimetube 2008; urbanuncovered 2009; hypetraktv
2014; BRMG 2015).
Drawing its influences from Jamaican Reggae Sound Systems, Hip-Hop and RnB, Grime
emerged from east London in the early years of the 21st
Century. Therefore, Paul Gilroy’s
black Atlantic concept is a useful way to analyse and explore the hybrid forms of creative
expression produced predominantly by those from the black diaspora. (Gilroy 1996). Grime
is a black Atlantic creative expression that comes out of an inner city environment where
the offspring of Caribbean and African migrants intermingle with a white working class
population and its linguistic canon reflects this.

2. 2
The crew – a collection of individuals with a shared interest, common location and/or
family tie - formed an integral part of the early Grime music scene. Two Grime crews, Roll
Deep, from the London Borough of Tower Hamlets and N.A.S.T.Y crew, from the London
Borough of Newham are viewed as pioneers of this genre (Tang 2005; Hampson 2009;
Petridis 2003). DJ Geeneus, started Rinse FM - a former pirate radio station - when he was
16 years old (Topping 2010). He stated that it was on Rinse in 2002, that Grime began to
evolve from UK Garage, ‘[…] we kind of converted the scene, into a darker sound…Grime
started in east London […]’ (Hampson 2009).
The ecology of this music scene is formed out of a complex series of interactions with and
between practitioners and their environment - the inner east London Boroughs of Tower
Hamlets, Newham and Hackney. These areas still contain some of the poorest
neighbourhoods in the United Kingdom and indeed Grime sounds like where it is from –
the housing estates and street corners of urban east London.
Creating an online presence in the urban music industry
Four decades ago, in the pre Internet days, urban music events were publicised through
flyers in community settings, record shops and barbershops. Performers relied on these
mainly word of mouth pursuits to promote their public image and forthcoming activities. As
Lloyd Bradley states in Bass Culture:
A blues dance, late at night, in the heart of the black neighbourhood, […]
was about as far underground as you were going to get in mainland
Britain in 1970 (Bradley 2000, p.378).
Moving forward to 2008, during the primary phase of my research project, I interviewed an
18 year-old MC from Plaistow, an inner city east London neighbourhood. Towards the
close of our discussion, I asked him about the fanbase for his music and he said: “Just type
my name in Google and see what comes up…”. When I did this, what was revealed was an
audience for his creative output that went far beyond the east London borough that he lived
in.
From this simple act of searching for a performing name on Google, it is possible to
observe how the utilisation of Web 2.0 technology has enabled young people in the urban
music economy to establish an online presence and to disseminate their creative output.

3. 3
Music videos, shot cheaply and uploaded on YouTube and then promoted via social media,
support the creation of an online persona as an MC, DJ, beatmaker, producer and/or
entrepreneur. On YouTube generally, and on niche online channels such as SBTV, Linkup
TV and GRM Daily, in particular, young people from impoverished backgrounds use
performance to construct identities that showcase and highlight excellence, innovation,
oratory and humour. Nevertheless, this transition into an online persona has not been
without its challenges.
Grime, as a genre, can be viewed as later iteration of the UK Garage music scene and in the
late 1990’s and the early years of this century, UK Garage had been dogged by violence –
sometimes fuelled by postcode affiliations.1
Soon, what had started as an innovative UK
take on US House music, became a highly marginalised practice – with very limited
opportunities for practitioners to perform (Mason 2008, p.212). Politicians were concerned
about how this music – particularly the lyrical content – encouraged brutality and gang
membership. The regulating authorities – police and local councils – waged war on an
activity that they felt encouraged criminality, and the media reported incidents in a way
which fuelled anxiety (Plunkett 2003; First Sight 2002; BBC News Channel 2003; Heartless
Nigga 2002). Eventually, public performance of UK Garage became so problematic that it
faded from view (Jackson 2005).
The UK Garage scene evolved into Grime, and as it did so the authorities remained anxious
about how to control and contain it. Live performance therefore became problematic for
Grime artists also and events were often curtailed. A blog entry on MySpace in 2006
bemoans the number of Garage and Grime events that had been cancelled or shut down
during the preceding six years and these articles Grime Banished from Physical London and
Police Defend Club Check Forms provide examples of how events were cancelled due to a
perceived threat of trouble (Hancox 2010; Hancox 2009; Izundu 2010; The Grime Report
2006). The fact that Grime could not be performed live is perhaps why in Pirates Dilemma,
Matt Mason – called this genre a meme without a scene – because it was difficult for Grime
to be performed live in urban London and therefore it had nowhere to go (Mason 2008,
p.211).
1The ‘postcode wars’ and the related knife and gun crime has been a persistent refrain in UK inner
cities in recent years. The articles by ((Glendinning 2008) and (De Castella 2007) provide an outline of
the problem.

4. 4
However, Grime did not vanish, instead advances in technology enabled performance of
this creative expression to spread outwards from inner London and to establish audiences in
the surrounding counties and across the UK. The Sidewinder events in Swindon are an
example of this (Sidewinder 2006). In Europe– Grime DJs Spyro and DJ Mak 10 play UK
Funky on Nissi Beach in Ayia Napa, Cyprus (SelectaLimit 2007), in North America –
Wiley’s radio set in Toronto is one of many he conducts that year (ninkyrooz 2013a) and in
Africa – one can read about Marcus Nasty discussing his experience of performing in the
Gambia (Clark 2009).
It is this international dimension that is in evidence when, in 2007, Jay-Z rapped over
Lethal Bizzle’s iconic Grime track Pow (queenofclubz 2006). Therefore it can be argued
that what the Internet has done is empower these artists, allowing them to transcend
distance and reach large audiences without the intervention of the big four record labels. A
space has been created where it is possible for UK urban music artists to achieve creative
acclaim and economic success. Urban music artists create and sell online personas in
exchange for recognition and feedback. According to Nancy Baym, this exchange between
artist and audience can be reciprocal or circular (Baym 2010). It is entirely possible for
independent recording artists in the urban music economy, such as JME and Griminal to
establish an audience and a fan base through having an online presence (ManBetterKnow
2011; 360records09 2009). JME, for example, has almost 300,000 followers on Twitter, and
his Twitter profile reads:
“Philanthropist / Musician UKG (Grime). No label, No pr, No publisher,
No manager, No pa, No stylist, No Instagram, No meat, No dairy, No
egg” (JmeVerified account 2008).
The “No label, No pr, No publisher, No manager” aspect of his profile is significant here
because it shows how, through technological advance, an artist can have a direct exchange
with their audience.
JME also featured on the track German Whip by Meridian Dan, a recording that was
initially promoted entirely online via Twitter and YouTube. German Whip got to number 13
in UK national chart in May 2014 (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/User:ItsLuke 2015). To date

5. 5
the video has just under 6 million views on YouTube (via SBTV) and a further 1.9 million
on Vevo (MeridianDanVEVO 2014).
Participants in the urban music economy were early adopters of emerging technology
particularly social media. Grime came of age in the YouTube era when it became easier and
more accessible for people to film and broadcast their own videos, now there is connectivity
and convergence between digital media with smartphones used to share beats by email, take
photos, connect to social media, record film footage and note down lyrics. This is Wretch
32 in the video for the Game Over remix (tinchystrydertv 2010), performing the lyrics that
he has typed up on his phone.
Technology also allows Grime to travel unaccompanied by the participants. The
practitioners can go or not go to where their creative expression is being heard. Grime, in
particular has a global reach that includes Denmark, Japan, Croatia and Canada (ObiEsDK
2012; Grime JP 2014; SBTV: Music 2012; ninkyrooz 2013b). For example, there is
YouTube footage of a Danish MC, spitting his lyrics and adopting the gesture, swagger and
pose of the early Grime canon while wearing a Slew Dem T Shirt – Slew Dem are an east
London Grime crew (ObiEsDK 2012).

6. 6
To conclude, if we type into Google just some of the names featured in this paper, namely:
Jammer, Ghetts, Wiley, Marcus Nasty, Griminal, Lil Nasty, DJ Mak 10, Lethal Bizzle,
JME, Solo45, Skepta, DJ Spyro and Wretch 32, what comes up is a wide range of highly
visible performing identities that have been made possible by the adoption of Web 2.0
technologies. YouTube, Facebook, Soundcloud, Instagram and Twitter form an influential
and integral part of the marketing and promotion of urban music of all kinds, including
Grime. It is evident, therefore, that independent artists in the Grime music scene have used
the Internet to create an online presence and in so doing have an artistic reach that
transcends national borders.

7. 7
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9. 9
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10. 10
Dr Joy White
Research Fellow – Independent Social Research Foundation
E:joywhite176@gmail.com
T: @joywhite2