Blackness, Britishness, and “Black Music” in the mid-1980s NME

Reflecting on his early months as inaugural editor of Black Music in 1973, white future NME editor Alan Lewis remembered just one moment of significant awkwardness. In an effort to drum up publicity, he found himself being interviewed on the BBC World Service by Black British activist and writer Darcus Howe, who began editing the influential Race Today that same year. “[He] gave me quite a hard time,” Lewis remembered, “Basically because I wasn't black, and what did I think I was doing editing a magazine called Black Music. I found it not easy to answer. He said, ‘You're a cultural imperialist’—and I could see what he was driving at.”Footnote ²³ Such a state of affairs was hardly new. In Britain as elsewhere, imperially rooted ideas of expertise meant that white analysts had long been presented as the most appropriate interpreters of Black musicianship.Footnote ²⁴ Black Music stemmed from Lewis's genuine desire to increase the representation of Black artists, but its very existence pointed not only to patterns of segregation in Britain's music press but also to the curatorial power of white critics who simultaneously endorsed and othered “black music.”Footnote ²⁵ Segregation and othering in the music press also reflected patterns of institutional racism. Neil Spencer, NME editor between 1978 and 1985, recalled “[getting] in a lot of trouble for putting black people on the cover” of the paper. Apparently, staff and publishers expressed their opposition by declaring, “There's too much ink on the cover this week.”Footnote ²⁶

The NME's increased emphasis on Black artists in the mid-1980s can be read as a direct rebuttal to this racism. As critic Lucy O'Brien emphasized in one 1987 edition of the weekly letters page, the increased space assigned to “black music” came both from “genuine love” and from a desire to counteract the ways “it has been ignored or trivialized by the white rock-oriented music press.” Underlining the complexity of the racial dynamics in play, this explanation was offered in response to a Black reader, writing to accuse the paper of being patronizing in its dramatic shift toward covering Black artists.Footnote ²⁷ Yet it would be remiss to ignore the wider political context provided by increasingly vocal calls for Black British representation and a broader politics of discontent and socioeconomic upheaval.Footnote ²⁸ The sense of decline across urban England and the riots of 1981 were narrated in the music press largely through the lens of race. Homegrown reggae acts like Aswad and Steel Pulse—along with multiracial “2-Tone” ska groups like The Specials, The Selecter, and The Beat—played crucial roles. These association of these artists with working-class urban environments in London and the West Midlands, alongside their oppositional politics, was emphasized prominently in coverage by the NME and other weeklies.Footnote ²⁹ Interest in less overtly political Black British musicians was, however, limited. “Silly Games,” Janet Kay's major 1979 hit, did not prompt sustained interest in the emergent “lovers rock” subgenre, for example.Footnote ³⁰

The NME's expanded coverage for Black British artists in the mid-1980s did, however, emerge from musical (as much as political) developments. A new generation of British artists were showing the influence of “black music” genres that the British music press had tended to associate more strongly with the United States: funk, soul, and R&B. These artists, often making prominent use of keyboard and synthesizers alongside guitars, prompted critics and musicians to identify an increased “blackness” in British popular music. It was actually white acts that were often the focus of such commentary. “It was never very revolutionary but there were very few white acts trying to play black music in an interesting way. Whereas now everybody wants black-sounding players in the group,” observed Heaven 17's Martyn Ware in a 1984 NME interview.Footnote ³¹ Some white bands effectively passed as Black to unsuspecting listeners. The debut single from pop-soul group Living in a Box impressed the legendary Black American singer Bobby Womack so much in 1987 that he set about a cover version, all the while under the erroneous impression that the band were Black. This chain of events earned the group a mild interrogation in the NME.Footnote ³² For some music press observers, the appropriation of “black music” sounds by white acts amounted to an attempt to exploit commercial trends. Kris Needs, editor of the monthly ZigZag, attacked “bank-clerk copyists desperately grabbing black music udders.”Footnote ³³ One white NME reader and jobbing musician, meanwhile, highlighted a noticeable industry preference for “black sounding singers,” telling the paper that they had frequently responded to trade ads for such performers that “Without exception” sought white vocalists who met this description.Footnote ³⁴

All these perspectives rested on a conviction that music could communicate race: that its “blackness” could be heard, imitated, and commercialized. In the process, of course, they also constructed whiteness as normative: the whiteness of an artist only needed to be spoken if—like Living in a Box—they convincingly approximated “black music” for the listener. This partly implicit politics of race was further complicated by issues of national identity. For the NME's Paolo Hewitt, writing in an early 1986 soul music history feature, the problem was that “no British soul sound” had yet “really come into being.” He accused prominent white soulsters like Spandau Ballet and Paul Weller of leaning too far into impersonations of their Black American influences. It was “only young British black artists” who were doing “something a little less predictable.”Footnote ³⁵ Hewitt's emphasis here on the need for Britishness should not be surprising. It fed back into a long-term music press tradition of emphasizing the authenticity of artists, itself influential in shaping wider social attitudes toward popular music and its function within British society.Footnote ³⁶ The NME predictably both inferred the inauthenticity of white British soul acts and cast Black British artists as the authentic solution to soundtracking a national soul music.

In keeping with this diagnosis, the mid-1980s NME provided a platform for Black British artists to express their perspectives on the relationship between national identity and their own variant of “black music.” One prominent example was South London soul singer Junior Giscombe, who briefly threatened transatlantic stardom at the start of his career. In 1982, the NME had not only made him a rare Black British cover star but also dubbed him leader of a new “British Invasion” (a reference to the 1960s dominance of British acts across the Atlantic).Footnote ³⁷ Giscombe credited his early success to the un-American qualities of his music, stressing that his breakthrough single “Mama Used to Say” was “not a typical American soul record” and was “just so English.”Footnote ³⁸ By 1985, it was clear Giscombe's success would be far more modest than some predictions had suggested, but his ambition remained. In an NME interview that year he asserted his wish to make music that truly reflected his Black British identity while also speaking to a mainstream audience: “I'm trying to build a sound from Britain which is a universal sound that will sell black music from Britain in a completely different way than it's ever been sold before.”Footnote ³⁹ His hopes reflected a common desire amongst many young Black Britons in this era to forge a Black British identity, one example of what Stuart Hall, in an influential 1988 essay, branded “new ethnicities.”Footnote ⁴⁰

At the same time, Giscombe's emphasis on universality and on selling Black British music ran counter to the ways in which “black music” subcultures in Britain had positioned themselves against the commercialism of the mainstream music industry. Famously, in his classic 1987 analysis, Paul Gilroy stressed the anti-capitalist dimensions of music's role in Black British culture.Footnote ⁴¹ The desire of artists like Giscombe to “sell” Black British music in the mid-1980s might be read through the lens of neoliberalism and Black enterprise culture.Footnote ⁴² In the pages of the NME, however, we can also see that this desire was one of the only routes toward establishing Britishness in a music press and industry context that understood “black music” most of all as an American cultural form. Interviews with Black British artists in the paper frequently focused on the perceived need to escape this perception. Ironically, for some, this meant turning to the United States for industry support. Paul Johnson, another would-be Black British soul star of the time, told the NME that he had landed a record deal with American major label CBS by insisting to executives that he wanted his music “to have a British identity” to stand out from the crowd. It was this approach, he insisted, that would get Black British artists “the airplay” they needed to “make [a] point.”Footnote ⁴³ For others, the rationale was to demonstrate the viability of a Black British music culture vibrant enough to do without American influences. Few acts took this as literally as the unambiguously named multiracial funk group Black Britain. The group's core goal was baked into their name, with band leader Ron Elliston aiming “to create a new black-oriented music” so as to “encourage others away from the American mainstream.”Footnote ⁴⁴

Attempts to emphasize individuality and Britishness by Black British artists were not always taken seriously in the music press, however. Enormously successful Anglo-Nigerian soul pop singer Sade Adu (frontwoman of an otherwise white male band bearing her first name) emphasized her Britishness, for example in relation to her accent when singing, yet was routinely dismissed by many critics. In one particularly uncomfortable 1984 NME interview, writer Richard Cook not only derided Sade's music but also openly mocked the singer's claims to be offering a fresh, individual sound. The interview was patronizingly headlined “Educating Sade,” as if the singer needed to be corrected as to her true position.Footnote ⁴⁵ A later cover feature for the paper was problematically framed around tabloid rumors regarding the singer's mental health. She critiqued the way papers like the NME presented her as an inauthentic pop star manufactured to conquer the American market, and complained about endless comparisons to Billie Holiday and the inference that her music soundtracked a vacuous (and implicitly white) yuppie culture of “wine bars and health clubs and boutiques.”Footnote ⁴⁶ Sade's treatment in the NME was undoubtedly shaped by gender as well as race, pointing to one of the more obvious limitations of the paper's interest in championing Black British musicians. Ultimately, despite achieving the kind of commercial success that peers like Giscombe had so openly targeted in their appearances in the paper, she paid a price for winning over what the NME saw (in her words) as “a naff audience.”Footnote ⁴⁷ This set the tone for music press coverage of many other commercially successful Black British artists in the years to come.Footnote ⁴⁸

The NME's rejection of Sade underlines the degree to which the paper prioritized its own constructions of authentic Black British musical culture. At its most awkward, this led to determinist exercises in cramming together artists with divergent approaches and interests. A January 1987 “Soul Britannia” cover feature, for instance, brought together four bands with strikingly different sounds on the confusing basis that they were not part of a movement but were still united by “stretching soul apart” in service of “Britain's persistent fascination with black American music.”Footnote ⁴⁹ The Black artists interviewed for this piece were clearly reluctant to play along with this strange framing. Each acknowledged the influence of Black American musicians, but they were less accepting of being categorized by the paper as “soul” artists. Heather Small, singer of Hot House (later of M People), was dismissive. “I don't know what ‘British Soul’ is,” she stated bluntly.Footnote ⁵⁰ For Russell Christian of The Christians, the term was only being used because of race: “I don't know why we should be called soul just because we're black.”Footnote ⁵¹ His assessment was, of course, spot on. No matter how many white acts performed soul, the term was still perceived to refer to part of a wider “black music” landscape, and its use was understood to convey a particular idea of race and difference.

No matter how well-meaning they may have been, attempts to use the NME as a platform for Black British musicians in the mid-1980s were stymied by long-established music press tendencies to categorize and define artists around genres that were, themselves, racialized. Troublingly for the cause of Black British music, this meant that attempts at definition often relied on applying Britishness to an overarching framework of Blackness that had largely been created by white critics. This was true even in articles that gave an overtly critical perspective on the challenges facing Black British musicians, like the damning Hewitt feature “Slaves to the Rhythm.”Footnote ⁵² Such an approach not only framed coverage of Black British artists around an already problematic music press idiom but also skirted uncomfortably close to identifying Britishness with whiteness and “black music” as an American import. It is unsurprising, given this context, that many Black British acts in the 1980s had little interest in trying to conform to institutionalized music press constructions of genre or identity and, as a result, were left underrepresented.Footnote ⁵³ Equally, it is not difficult to see how the NME was unsuccessful in challenging audience preconceptions of the links between race, genre, and identity. As one astute reader noted in a July 1986 letter to the paper, “the kind of person who reads the NME” was likely to subscribe to “concepts of alternativity and trendiness” that situated “music by black people” as part of an inauthentic commercial music landscape.Footnote ⁵⁴ This conflict reappeared in the paper in the context of intense debates that focused on a radical new style emerging from Black America: hip-hop.

Race, Audience, and the NME's “Hip-Hop Wars”

When hip-hop first caught the attention of the British music press it was widely dismissed as a novelty, a reaction to the prominence it afforded to the DJ (and their creation of new sounds from fragments of old records) and to the rapper (and their uncompromising embrace of the street lexicons of Black America). “DJ music,” as one Melody Maker journalist branded it in the dying days of the 1970s, was destined for “the land of lost fads.”Footnote ⁵⁵ In May 1981, the NME broke ranks by devoting a cover feature to “rap.” The write-up offered a bolder interpretation, insisting that this “form instigated by black teenagers in the South Bronx is becoming indispensable for blacks and whites.”Footnote ⁵⁶ Despite this optimism, it was not until the middle of the decade that sustained enthusiasm for hip-hop could be detected in the NME or its rivals. As late as 1985 critics who praised hip-hop records were having to rebut charges that the genre had been a flash in the pan. “Hip-hop is not dead,” one February 1985 NME review protested.Footnote ⁵⁷ By the end of that year, the genre's rise had become increasingly difficult to ignore, and the NME became embroiled in what its writers semi-jokingly referred to as the paper's “hip-hop wars.”Footnote ⁵⁸

As such a moniker implies, tensions over hip-hop ran high. This was a time of relative sales decline for the paper, and editorial debates over the genre were thus partly motivated by commercial concerns. At the same time, however, they were clearly understood by writers as being at least partially about race. As Deputy Editor Stuart Cosgrove (a hip-hop advocate) put it in a 1986 retrospective feature, “Jokes were cracked, blood vessels burst, and charges of racism and counter-racism ricocheted around the office.”Footnote ⁵⁹ Of course, liking or disliking hip-hop was not intrinsically racist or anti-racist, but that this was even a semi-serious point of discussion among NME writers is revealing, demonstrating the degree to which they saw themselves as active agents in an explicitly racialized cultural sphere. Long-standing NME contributor Barney Hoskyns, summarizing the “hip-hop wars” as akin to a clash of cultures, recalled Cosgrove and Hewitt arguing that “the paper should cover anything that was black,” while their opponents insisted “the NME was about the white underground and that the readers didn't want to know about Run-DMC.”Footnote ⁶⁰ These positions both reasserted race-making as a core function of the NME, with the latter explicitly reinscribing a normative whiteness at the heart of the paper's audience and purpose.

Ultimately, the conflict more or less boiled down to hip-hop versus “indie,” a loosely defined rock subgenre rooted in independent record label culture. Hip-hop often stood in here for a wider conceptualization of “black music,” including aforementioned styles like soul and new movements like house and techno, but it had particular qualities that made it comfortably the most obvious and most consistent target for critical NME writers and readers. It offered an alternative vision of authenticity, rooted in its own highly distinctive patterns of lyricism and sound manipulation.Footnote ⁶¹ Perhaps more importantly, however, it was revolutionary and was thus set to upturn the popular music landscape. “Hip-hop is the space ghost, the music that haunts rock, doing it, dismantling it and finally destroying it,” declared a euphoric Cosgrove review of New York rapper LL Cool J's 1985 debut album.Footnote ⁶² When hip-hop acts incorporated rock sounds into their musical attack, this rhetoric became more explicitly racialized. Hewitt, for instance, argued that New York hip-hop label Def Jam Records had fundamentally “changed the sound of black music” through the mix of “rock, funk and rap” produced by its artists. Aside from the Beastie Boys (a Def Jam act), however, “White groups who attempt it end up sounding feeble and weak.”Footnote ⁶³ The gulf between the appeal of hip-hop and that of much rock music was undoubtedly overstated in these interpretations but, crucially, writers veered all too easily toward rendering genre differences in racial as much as in musical terms.

As these examples indicate, positive coverage of hip-hop in the NME presented the style as extraordinary in comparison to the paper's more traditional music of choice. The indie scene, by contrast, was constructed in terms of ordinariness. Indie bands promoted by the NME in the mid-1980s were regularly praised for their perceived realness and down-to-earth qualities. Such emphasis reflected wider tendencies in British society toward using ideas of ordinariness and authenticity as forms of knowing, platforms for critique, and bases for identity.Footnote ⁶⁴ The ordinariness and ostensible independence of indie enabled musicians and critics to position it as genuine and representative of audiences, with other styles dismissed as consumerist and irrelevant. “All the hits nowadays,” bemoaned David Keegan of Scottish indie group the Shop Assistants, “have a silly little synthesizer bit that always sounds the same, and it's bloody annoying. Supermarket music.”Footnote ⁶⁵ Keegan's group soon disappeared from view but not before they were branded by chief NME indie patron Danny Kelly as “the best and most important independent group in Britain today,” despite their relatively unremarkable indie pop guitar sound.Footnote ⁶⁶ The Smiths were perhaps the definitive “real” and “authentic” indie alternative.Footnote ⁶⁷ Frontman Morrissey was at the forefront of this narrative, proclaiming (at the dawn of the band's career) that they stood out because “for the first time in too long a time, this is real music played by real people.”Footnote ⁶⁸ Fans often expressed similar sentiments. “These particular songs,” wrote one admirer in a Smiths fanzine “touch so close to the realities of life, which many other artists are frightened to do.”Footnote ⁶⁹

Indie's whiteness—all twenty-two of the acts on the NME's scene-codifying C86 compilation cassette were white—was predictably left unspoken and implicitly presented as normative.Footnote ⁷⁰ This effect was brought into sharper relief by hip-hop coverage that dwelled on the style's most extreme elements. One particularly problematic cover story focused on “Yo Boys,” a Black American youth subculture originating in West Baltimore, billed on the front page as “teenage … they listen to nothing but rap … they'll shoot you for the hell of it.”Footnote ⁷¹ Inside, the story was relayed mostly without any socioeconomic context. It also bought (albeit with some skepticism) into the mythology behind Yo Boy-beloved rapper Schoolly D, then rumored to have gained his record deal by putting a gun to the head of a label boss.Footnote ⁷² Reporting of this kind risked rendering hip-hop all the more extraordinary and alien by comparison to indie (or British popular music more broadly), playing into stereotypes of lawless Blackness that were then still at the center of moral panics around “mugging” and urban crime in Britain.Footnote ⁷³ Equally, it allowed critical readers to argue that hip-hop's Blackness prevented it from receiving due reproach. Some accused the paper of romanticizing the Yo Boys and giving them the “soft sell.”Footnote ⁷⁴ One correspondent speculated whether writers were “worried that it's uncool to criticise anything emerging from black America?”Footnote ⁷⁵ Similar critiques were later made of reports on other hip-hop groups. A May 1987 interview with militantly Black nationalist group Public Enemy, conducted by young Anglo-Nigerian writer Dele Fadele (a rare Black British NME contributor), was attacked for supposedly letting the band's “racist bullshit”—alongside their homophobia and misogyny—pass “unchallenged.”Footnote ⁷⁶ Public Enemy coverage consistently met with attacks of this nature.Footnote ⁷⁷

NME readers were not necessarily alone in calling for stronger critiques of hip-hop's controversial dimensions. Some other sections of the music press adopted a similar attitude. In a scathing 1985 review of New York rapper Kurtis Blow, for example, Melody Maker's Simon Reynolds lambasted the tendency for white fans in Britain to give problematic hip-hop gender politics a free pass: “Black subculture tends to get uncritical approval from white middle class boys, who go on and on about dignity and pride. Forgetting that more often than not this is black male pride, and the victims of its assertion are usually women.”Footnote ⁷⁸ In mid-1986, Reynolds (who also wrote positively about numerous hip-hop acts) wrote a longer essay critiquing “guilt-ridden white liberals” for insisting on seeing hip-hop in “proto-socialist, or at least humanist” terms.Footnote ⁷⁹ Melody Maker also showed a willingness to undercut hip-hop's presentation of itself. Bronx rapper Just Ice, for example, was introduced at the start of an interview as “hip-hop's numero uno misogynist guy.”Footnote ⁸⁰ A cover feature on Schoolly D, meanwhile, took a dry jab at the NME (as well as its subject) by sardonically observing that “If Schoolly is the ‘rising star of the Yo Boy scene’ as the NME would have it, then he's hip hop's first yuppie Yo Boy.”Footnote ⁸¹

Unlike the NME, Melody Maker refused to allow its letters page to host sustained conflicts over hip-hop coverage. By contrast the NME writers who took it in turns to edit the letters page seemed determined to give a platform to broader anti-hip-hop attitudes within its readership. Many published letters presented hip-hop as being at the forefront of a “black music” incursion upon the implicitly white music culture the NME otherwise focused on. Combatants on both sides of the “hip-hop wars” would have had their reasons for including such letters, whether to fight back against the arguments they contained or to promote views by proxy. However, the frequency with which anti-hip-hop views appeared—and the rarity of Black voices—also amounted to a tacit editorial acceptance that the paper remained a fundamentally white (and predominantly male) publication with readers who were entitled to feel threatened by the Black masculinity at the forefront of hip-hop. White readers thus used the letters page to defend their claims to what they understood as a hegemonically white male space, a process that mirrored similar patterns in local and national newspapers up and down the country.Footnote ⁸² This process also resembled similarly gendered and racialized contestations over access to physical spaces, something that Camilla Schofield has recently identified as a significant part of the social history of race in postwar Britain.Footnote ⁸³

Some letter writers went to significant effort to present their anti-hip-hop views as reasonable rather than prejudicial. “Of course it is right to present a complete range of all music,” one reader observed, “but the large number of rap and funk bands must be driving even the most loyal reader to despair.” This correspondent insisted they were “not anti black music,” but also branded the paper too “keen” to cover Black artists, the result being “that horrors like Roxanne and Howie T and Run-DMC [all hip-hop artists] get ‘Single of the Week.’”Footnote ⁸⁴ In other words, this reader felt that hip-hop acts were not only being promoted to a disproportionate degree but were being promoted because of their Blackness. This was a common accusation in anti-hip-hop letters. One American reader accused NME of covering hip-hop merely as a way of “showing off” the publication's “anti-racist intentions.”Footnote ⁸⁵ Others cast doubt on the authenticity of both hip-hop artists and the critics giving them space in the paper. One reader, pointing to the contrast between hip-hop's problematic elements and its apparent embrace of consumerism, branded it an inauthentic “style cult.”Footnote ⁸⁶ Another accused pro-hip-hop writers of being motivated by careerism: “Paolo [Hewitt] has seen the future of music—it is (for better or worse) black and beat-box based, and Paolo has to bear his job prospects in mind.”Footnote ⁸⁷ Sometimes letters veered into overt racism that mirrored aspects of far right rhetoric by positioning whiteness as threatened by invasion and/or replacement.Footnote ⁸⁸ On one occasion, for instance, some of the paper's most vocal hip-hop advocates were branded as “minority fetishists” who had “submerge[d] whatever independent identity this paper once had” in the name of “black music.”Footnote ⁸⁹

Perhaps more shocking than the racism on display in some anti-hip-hop letters is the fact that, soon enough, these hostile voices won out. Real or imagined commercial concerns were partly to blame. Hewitt recalled the spread of “disinformation,” namely that “if you put a black person on the cover of the NME, sales went down.” Lucy O'Brien cast the entire period as “a fight for the identity of the NME” in which publishers ultimately sided with the most vitriolic sections of the paper's readership.Footnote ⁹⁰ Cosgrove was sacked as deputy editor in early 1987 and by the late summer of that year, a noticeable shift was already apparent. The paper found itself rebuked by one reader for “revert[ing] back to being a predominantly white, rockist and bland student rag” with only the odd “token black music feature.” The editorial team had, this reader lamented, “played it safe, taken no risks, and kept [a] prejudiced readership happy.”Footnote ⁹¹ Two months later another reader felt moved to ask, “What's up with the NME?” Bemoaning the decline in hip-hop coverage—“whether you like it or not, the most original thing happening in music right now”—this letter writer admitted to being “baffled” as to the change in approach.Footnote ⁹² Gavin Martin, editing the letters page that week, replied with a simple “You're not the only one, chum,” indicating ongoing staff divisions around these issues.Footnote ⁹³

The NME did not abandon hip-hop entirely. In October 1988, it even baited a portion of its audience by placing Public Enemy on the cover alongside a headline asking if they were “The greatest rock ‘n’ roll band in the world?!”Footnote ⁹⁴ Nevertheless hip-hop's wider prominence in the paper declined dramatically. With it, the more general turn toward prominent coverage of Black artists, not least of Black British music, also decreased significantly. Almost a third of NME covers in 1986 and 1987 had featured Black artists in some capacity. This figure contracted so much over subsequent years that, by 1991, there was only one Black cover star in the entire year, while multiple white artists appeared on the cover two or even three times.Footnote ⁹⁵ Long-standing practices of allowing reader debate in the pages of the NME thus aligned with conflicts among writers to enable a reassertion of hegemonic whiteness within the NME. This left the path clear for indie to take a position of dominance in the paper's musical coverage, but not entirely without incident. As the 1990s dawned, one of the scene's leading lights would further expose the complexities of the NME's politics of whiteness.

Morrissey, Race, and Nation

“HIP HOP IS A NOISY, REPETIVE, COWARDLY BEAT […] HIP HOP ENDORSES TYRANNY […] HIP HOP IS INARTICULATE, INFANTILE AND UNSEXY,” blared one particularly shouty NME reader's letter in mid-1987. Luckily the writer had a savior in mind: Morrissey, hailed by this self-described “Smiths disciple” as an artist who “cherishes the word and explores the fantastic textures of the English language.” Hip-hop artists, by contrast, were accused not just of a lack of literary flair but of attempting “TO DESTROY LANGUAGE” altogether.Footnote ⁹⁶ Given his role in 1980s British indie, Morrissey was a natural counterpoint to hip-hop and “black music” more generally, but he was not always identified as such in positive terms. In the late summer of 1986, Paolo Hewitt attacked standalone Smiths single “Panic” and its chorus hook of “Burn down the disco, hang the blessed DJ/Because the music that they constantly play, it says nothing to me about my life.”Footnote ⁹⁷ For Hewitt, these “offensive lines” were easily interpreted as referencing “the black music played in clubs.” It revealed “a lot about the music industry,” he asserted, that “a white singer like Morrissey” was treated “as some kind of messiah” while so many Black artists went underappreciated.Footnote ⁹⁸ Predictably, Hewitt was rebuked by readers, and defended himself by urging fans to think about how the “attendant imagery” of “Panic” could be interpreted by The Smiths’ “predominantly white audience.”Footnote ⁹⁹ This only prompted further hostility.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ The ways in which many readers constructed links between race and musical taste were often on full display in these rebuttals. “I am not black […] therefore, for the most part, black music […] evokes nothing in me,” noted one jarringly simplistic letter.Footnote ¹⁰¹

In the late 1980s and (particularly) early 1990s Morrissey became a lightning rod for anxieties about racism and, on a less explicit level, whiteness in the NME. Given his status as a key figure in the NME's curation of indie culture, and as an icon for a sizable chunk of the paper's audience, any suggestion that Morrissey might harbor racist attitudes were keenly felt by writers, editors, and readers. Responses to these accusations, especially during a moment of particularly intense controversy in 1992, thus reveal much about how the NME continued to act as a site of racial formation in the years after its retreat from emphasizing hip-hop and Black British music in the mid-late 1980s.

Morrissey displayed a concern with defending whiteness from the height of The Smiths’ 1980s fame onwards, playing (surprisingly overtly) into a narrative of white victimhood that had been inculcated in Britain through the politics of Powellism—and which, as we have seen, occasionally showed its face on the NME letters page.Footnote ¹⁰² Only weeks after Hewitt had criticized “Panic” in the NME, the singer gave an inflammatory interview to Melody Maker. “Obviously to get on ‘Top of the Pops’ these days, one has to be, by law, black,” he asserted, directly implying a conspiracy to promote Black artists over white.Footnote ¹⁰³ In reality, music television (Top of the Pops included) mirrored the wider industry in its limited coverage of emergent Black artists.Footnote ¹⁰⁴ In the same interview Morrissey branded reggae as “the most racist music in the entire world”; it was, he maintained, “a total glorification of black supremacy.”Footnote ¹⁰⁵ As the anti-hip-hop backlash in the NME implied, views of this nature were not entirely uncommon and, as if to prove this point, no sustained outrage greeted Morrissey's comments. Only one unreservedly critical response made it into Melody Maker's letters page.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ Many of the Smiths’ music press supporters responded only to protect Morrissey, reinforcing the hierarchical racialized dynamics of their papers in the process. Soon-to-be NME editor Danny Kelly alighted upon a particularly appalling turn of phrase in doing so: “On the racism charge,” Kelly asserted, “any judge would declare Morrissey the hapless victim of a lynch mob.”Footnote ¹⁰⁷

A similar pattern continued into the early years of Morrissey's solo career, despite some provocative moves, like the release of two songs easily interpretable as justifying prejudice against British Asians.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ By the time of 1992's Your Arsenal, Morrissey had also established an interest in the skinhead subculture, which—thanks to the actions of a thuggish minority—had become popularly associated with violent racism and hooliganism.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ The skinhead, he told NME, appealed because it was “an entirely British invention,” a flawed interpretation that provided the basis for “We'll Let You Know,” a song depicting skinhead football hooligans as “the last truly British people you will ever know.”Footnote ¹¹⁰ More problematic still was “The National Front Disco.” This song's lyrics narrated a young man's move to the far right and utilized the well-known far right slogan “England for the English” as a chorus hook.Footnote ¹¹¹ Reviewers largely failed to critique the problematics of race and nation championed by these songs, with Q even praising Morrissey for a “bold willingness to re-open old debates.”Footnote ¹¹² The same edition of the magazine saw the singer delve deeper into the Powellite playbook by expressing a belief in inevitable racial conflict: “I don't want to sound horrible or pessimistic but I don't really think,” Morrissey maintained, “that black people and white people will ever really get on or like each other.”Footnote ¹¹³

It was against the backdrop of these remarks that Morrissey performed in London as part of a two-day event (dubbed Madstock), held to mark the reunion of ska group Madness, who had themselves denied far right sympathies early on in their career.Footnote ¹¹⁴ Post-event reports implied that a small minority of Madstock attendees were far right skinheads.Footnote ¹¹⁵ Coming at a moment of heightened political racism, leading to the horrific murder of Stephen Lawrence in 1993 and a brief local electoral victory for the fascist British National Party the same year, the presence of this minority was perhaps inevitable.Footnote ¹¹⁶ Less so was Morrissey taking to the stage against a backdrop of two enormous photos of teenage skinheads, playing a set that included both “We'll Let You Know” and “The National Front Disco,” and waving a Union Jack (still associated by many at this time with its use by the far right) at the crowd. These provocations did not win him many friends on the day. Crowd hostility (politically motivated or otherwise) ended the set early, and a scheduled repeat show the following day was cancelled.Footnote ¹¹⁷ Some initial responses highlighted the irony here. As the NME's review observed, “Here [Morrissey] is faced with what was meant to be his natural constituency, a very English, white audience, and [he] is rejected.” “So much for flirting with white trash and notions of Anglo-Saxon culture,” it continued, and “for wearing a Union Jack onstage.”Footnote ¹¹⁸

For Dele Fadele, the paper's only regular Black contributor, much more needed to be said. Fadele's writing frequently addressed race. He eviscerated Black artists that he felt undermined anti-racist struggles, like Californian gangsta rappers N.W.A.Footnote ¹¹⁹ He raised race in interviews.Footnote ¹²⁰ On the letters page, he challenged reader constructions of “black music” and of Blackness itself.Footnote ¹²¹ Shortly before Madstock, he also attacked the Union Jack: “Ever since the National Front hijacked [it] for [their] own purposes,” he wrote, “national pride has been synonymous with fascism at the very least.”Footnote ¹²² Unsurprisingly, Morrissey's antics infuriated Fadele. He was determined that the paper act, persuading Kelly (then editor) not only to publish a response, but to make it a cover story.Footnote ¹²³ The front page—headlined “Flying the Flag or Flirting With Disaster?”—captured the singer on stage, flag in hand.Footnote ¹²⁴

Inside, coverage reflected a broader societal reluctance to imagine the intersections between whiteness and racism existing outside the far right.Footnote ¹²⁵ Significant space was devoted to explaining the relationship between the skinhead aesthetic and racist politics. Morrissey's past statements on race were recounted without being overtly critiqued and Hewitt's 1986 attack on “Panic” was dismissed as the paper having “made a fool of itself.” The coverage was framed as a warning, in line with the NME's history of standing up to musical flirtations with fascism. Even this point, however, apparently could not be made without criticizing a Black artist: American rapper Ice Cube, described as “a bigoted idiot” next to Morrissey, who was merely being too ambiguous in his patriotism.Footnote ¹²⁶ Only Fadele's contribution had more interesting things to say. It referenced imperial legacies, the Powellite undertones of some of Morrissey's lyrics and interview statements, and the dubiousness of the flag as a pop symbol. His piece was still cautious and avoided any direct accusations. It did, however, clarify that Morrissey's intentions and affiliations were less of a concern than the fact that the singer's actions could be read by some fans as a justification for intolerance.Footnote ¹²⁷ The whiteness of Morrissey and the majority of his fans was left unspoken by Fadele here, even as his article rendered it obvious and pointed to the dangers embedded within a popular music culture that not only drew racialized boundaries between genres and fanbases, but also refused to acknowledge the power of whiteness.

The importance of this assessment was not enough to convince many NME readers that the paper was justified in its approach. Hostile responses to the coverage flooded the paper's office. “Do you really think that Morrissey's ambiguous jingoism is going to turn a nation of free thinking liberals into gestapo commandants?” asked one sarcastic reader. “I'm bloody sick of your right-on, wishy-washy, liberal idealism,” ranted another. A reader from Manchester even accused Fadele of “incredible ignorance” for daring to suggest that the Union Jack could still be seen as a symbol of prejudice.Footnote ¹²⁸ Others denied the singer could have racist views because of his Irish parentage, refuted the idea that musicians should be expected to have coherent political stances, and accused writers of cynically using events to try and sell papers.Footnote ¹²⁹ Some also defended racism or expressed racist views themselves. “We all know racism is a hideous trait, but if Morrissey wishes to dislike blacks, Asians, or even tall people then THAT IS UP TO HIM,” one fan insisted, before reminding the NME that “It is a free country.”Footnote ¹³⁰ The majority of published reader reactions confirmed an unpleasant truth about the paper, previously indicated by negative responses to hip-hop and “black music” in the 1980s. Large sections of the NME audience not only jealously guarded the paper as an ostensibly white domain, but also resented attempts to illustrate popular music culture's own complicity in broader societal racism.

Some Morrissey fans did commend the paper. “Thankfully the NME didn't take their usual defensive, often sycophantic position with Moz, but instead offered an extremely impressive, investigative piece of music journalism on this most urgent issue,” stressed a reader from Hull. Another asserted that it was “about time that Morrissey was confronted on these issues.”Footnote ¹³¹ Several sympathetic letters were deeply emotional, not least those written by fans of color. A self-identified “Pakistani” reader from Huddersfield sounded heartbroken, having become “resigned to the fact that Morrissey, who I once loved and idolised, is a racist.” Another “Asian” correspondent recounted experiences of racial harassment while acknowledging that “The music of The Smiths was a way of life for me and still is.” This letter ended with a plea to the singer: “Morrissey, stop this shit now!”Footnote ¹³² Lawrence Renee, “an Afro-Caribbean Morrissey fan” from North London explicitly placed events in the context not only of racial violence and harassment but also (almost uniquely) of the overwhelming whiteness of indie music. “The everyday reality of racism via physical/mental abuse can't be casually brushed aside when black people are made to feel uncomfortable and unwelcome at indie concerts and clubs,” Renee stressed.Footnote ¹³³ He went on to write an extensive piece for Morrissey fanzine Miserable Lies on this theme.Footnote ¹³⁴ His words had some impact. As one white fan admitted in the following edition of the zine, they “(and probably most white people) [had] underestimate[d] the impact of what [Morrissey] has written and reportedly said on black or Asian people.” Whatever the singer's intention, “The flirtation with skinhead imagery and the Union Jack,” he lamented, “really has hurt people.”Footnote ¹³⁵

The NME's Madstock response did, then, help push some white Morrissey fans (however limited in number) to reflect on their own identities and positionalities, producing a rare moment in which a key constituency of British popular music culture came close to recognizing whiteness as more than just a normative, apolitical condition. It also helped give a voice to fans of color genuinely distressed by Morrissey's activity. Seen in the context provided by the mid-late 1980s coverage of Black British music and hip-hop that preceded it, the controversy helped expose the fragile racialized dynamics that underpinned late twentieth-century popular music culture in Britain by drawing attention to the relative ease with which the ostensibly ordinary whiteness of indie could slip into a more threatening guise. A relatively unique set of circumstances was needed for this to take place—and any destabilization of the NME's hegemonic whiteness that occurred as a result would not have occurred without the efforts of writers and readers of color. Unsurprisingly, there were those who felt the paper had not gone far enough. Cornershop, a rare indie band to feature British Asian musicians, began burning posters of Morrissey on stage at their gigs, partly to express their anger at the singer and partly (as frontman Tjinder Singh later recalled) because they believed the music press was “pussyfooting around the issue and using it to sell papers” and then “leaving it at that.”Footnote ¹³⁶ Eventually, Morrissey's politics would be clarified by support for the far right For Britain party, several years after another run-in with the NME.Footnote ¹³⁷ As the 1990s wore on, however, the resonances of the Madstock controversy were felt most of all in the revival of an unabashedly national popular music.