“I Am Not Anti Black Music But …”: Popular Music, the NME , and Race in Late Twentieth-Century Britain

Abstract

Popular music culture has often featured in postwar British history as a site of tolerance and inclusivity, of multicultural exchange and anti-racist activism. This article, while not denying music's intersections with progressive causes, presents a different narrative. I use the pages of Britain's most prominent weekly music paper, the New Musical Express ( NME ), to demonstrate the important role that music has played in perpetuating wider processes of racialization in the late twentieth century. Surveying contestations over race in the mid-1980s and early 1990s, it highlights the ways in which popular music institutions such as the NME could function as sites of racial formation, reproducing the social power of whiteness even when providing space for what was often referred to as “black music.” The article underlines the degree to which popular music could produce hegemonically white cultural spaces, despite the diversity of musical culture at large. In so doing, it indicates the significance of popular culture for understanding patterns of racialization into the latter years of the twentieth century and beyond.