About a quarter of the way into Where We Come From, music journalist Aniefok Ekpoudom’s debut book, the text suddenly contracts to a thin strip of staccato sentences — a stark column of internal dialogue that is more like something you’d find in a chapbook of poetry. Deployed to visually mirror the moment when one of the book’s real-life protagonists struggles for breath in the depths of the Mediterranean, it is a heavy clue that, figuratively speaking, we are not in Kansas or even Kennington any more. That, really, this is a work experimenting beyond the formal genre boundaries of what could broadly be described as a music scene biography.
Ostensibly an account of the birth, evolution and ever-cresting mainstream breakthrough of UK rap and grime, Ekpoudom’s book is, in fact, a far more socially inquisitive, ambitious and wide-ranging reading experience than that straightforward elevator pitch might suggest. Do you know about the significant impact that the Birmingham-based, Eighties-era pirate radio station PLRC had on a generation of Midlands musicians? Or the unexpected but vital connective role that a Sky call centre had to play in Croydon’s post-grime renaissance?
Over the course of 300 or so pages of unhurried, meticulously researched sociohistorical writing, Ekpoudom sifts through all this and more. He weaves seemingly disparate threads of British migrant history into an affecting, coherent whole. And if it is not always completely obvious where his determinedly novelistic narrative is going, if the acts he chooses to focus on can seem a little scattergun, then, for the most part, this feels like an endearing feature rather than an enervating bug.
Part of that appeal comes from a bold narrative structure. Where many recent chronicles of grime and its related genres often default to a London-centric, relatively linear recounting of the rise and fall of the scene’s biggest names, here, Ekpoudom chooses a different path. Perhaps conscious of the books that have already successfully documented grime’s twitchy, post-millennium birth (most memorably, Dan Hancox’s hugely entertaining Inner City Pressure), he instead focuses on the key figures and contextual forces in three highly specific regions: the West Midlands, South Wales and what he calls “Deep” South London.
There is the sense that Ekpoudom — a veteran of influential platform SBTV and seasoned chronicler of UK rap’s tangled digital era histories — has carried established relationships and rapport over into a more longform medium. But, whatever the precise reasoning, his decision to largely focus on unexpected grassroots stories, on the tumultuous, trauma-racked lives of non-household names often operating at the margins of an exploding scene, serves to give the book distinctiveness and a wholly compelling, slow-build poignancy.
As chapters leap from region to region, trailing three distinct musical acts through boom and bust, Ekpoudom expertly braids rigorously researched historical context (Windrush, Grenfell, So Solid Crew’s emergence) with the kind of characterful, richly textured street vignettes that The Wire’s David Simon would be proud of. Phil “Traxx” Davies, founding member of genre-blurring Newport collective Astroid Boys, makes an epiphanic trip to his native Cyprus; Despa, a former drug dealer turned music mogul, fields business calls at a Birmingham climbing centre. And then there is the story of Blaine “Cadet” Johnson — the beloved, Gypsy Hill-raised MC whose untimely death in 2019 left a deep scar on the community and is recounted here with affecting, lump-in-the-throat clarity.
All these sharply observed moments, perhaps more than anything, serve to showcase the flaring pyrotechnics and deep soulfulness of Ekpoudom’s writing. In fact, throughout, the propulsive lyricism of Where We Come From’s prose is one of its most persistent pleasures. Grime aficionados in South Wales have their “lives briefly illuminated in the trailing headlights of street memoirs”. The continents of interlinked diaspora communities “brush fingers” on Streatham High Road. And trauma is either buried in a “shallow grave” or something that “travels… a restless shadow hounding across time sea and land barriers”.
Yes, some of these florid compound metaphors can occasionally stray towards schmaltzy clunkiness (can you really “open a blank canvas for [a] new branch of the family tree”?) And, relatedly, there is perhaps an argument that Ekpoudom’s closeness to the scene and palpable affection for it can occasionally elicit a degree of incuriousness when it comes to the less flattering (but no less interesting) aspects of his interviewee’s characters. But the fascinating cultural detail, groundbreaking form, and swelling, almost orchestral sweep of Where We Come From wins out in the end. Though grime may be famed for claustrophobic soundscapes and hectic swagger, this very human chronicle is a testament to community, struggle and the value of patient storytelling. It brims with life and reverberates, long after you have closed its pages, with a quiet, lasting power.
Where We Come From: Rap, Home and Hope in Modern Britain by Aniefiok Ekpoudom (Faber & Faber, £20) is published on January 18
