Publication Type
Journal Article
Version
acceptedVersion
Publication Date
3-2020
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.
Keywords
Digital media, urban space, right to the city, grime, power, hierarchy
Discipline
Communication Technology and New Media | Digital Humanities
Research Areas
Humanities
Publication
Social and Cultural Geography
Volume
21
Issue
3
First Page
293
Last Page
313
ISSN
1464-9365
Identifier
10.1080/14649365.2018.1491617
Publisher
Taylor & Francis (Routledge): STM, Behavioural Science and Public Health Titles
Citation
WOODS, Orlando.(2020). The digital subversion of urban space: Power, performance and grime. Social and Cultural Geography, 21(3), 293-313.
Available at: https://ink.library.smu.edu.sg/soss_research/2506
Copyright Owner and License
Authors
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.
Additional URL
https://doi.org/10.1080/14649365.2018.1491617