This chapter centres Paul Gilroy’s warning at the dawn of hip-hop studies against a scholarly trend wherein “the phenomenology of musical forms is dismissed in favour of analysing lyrics, the video images that supplement them and the technology of Hip hop production.” This chapter is thus a methodological overview examining how leading journalists and scholars have approached the tricky job of writing about hip-hop’s musical sound. Drawing examples from the history of writing about rap music, it offers tips on how to develop our sound writing toolkits and challenges us to improve our understanding of the relationship between the sonic and the social. Because “music” remains such a conservative frame in the university, this chapter approaches the topic with a broadly decolonial, practical, and sound-centred approach. Such an approach opens us up to the important sonically minded contributions of arts practitioners, journalists, and scholars outside of music departments, while focusing in on the recent methods of scholars in the increasingly interdisciplinary fields of musicology, ethnomusicology, music theory, popular music studies, and sound studies. The chapter is a resource to help hip-hop scholars enrich their thinking (and feeling) about sound and make their research and writing more musical.

Grime music emerged at the turn of the millennium in the United Kingdom. Performed by MCs and DJs, it is a vital and vibrant form with unrelenting energy. This chapter focuses on live collective performance in grime music. In particular, it explores the spaces where grime is performed, paying attention to the specificity of these contexts, and their impact on group practice. It is split into three sections. Firstly, it positions grime as genre, demonstrating how antecedent forms—principally hip-hop and Jamaican dancehall—inform its collaborative, yet competitive nature. Secondly, it will offer an overview of these key arenas (radio, raves, record shops), unpacking how grime thrived within a “Black Public sphere” outside of heavy censorship and racialised policing of mainstream public fora. Finally, it will focus on a performance that captures grime’s improvisatory framework. Taken from 2007, this acclaimed “Birthday Set” for East London MC Ghetts possesses many hallmarks of grime performance. The analysis addresses competitiveness within MCs, intergeneric allusions (lyrical or otherwise), and the DJ’s technical cachet. This chapter therefore demonstrates dense interconnectivity within grime’s contexts for performance, offering insight into the ways in which the live domain acts as the pivotal ground for new creative work.