est. reading time: 40 mins
It was in 2020, during a confidential Zoom call between myself and the now ex-editor of a prominent music outlet that I first encountered it. After challenging them on their history of anti-blackness they responded first with, the claim that tears were shed in a group session with a work book called "Me and White Supremacy".[1] Secondly, that they were the biggest fans of AceMoma.[2]
This is a peculiar defence. It opens the door to white guilt and claims that white supremacy has been internalised and made aware of. Then comes the variation of "but my friend is Black", with the enthusiastic support of a trending Black dance music duo.
The mindset behind this response was only recently given a name, Anglo-Pessimism, as defined by Mathys Rennela in his piece titled "Negrophilia in club culture".[3] Through his framework we can see how the editor displayed the first three of its nine tenets in perfect order.
(1) Ontological bigotry:
Anyone who wields privilege is bigoted towards those who don’t; in particular, white people are irremediably racist.
(2) Acknowledgement is absolution:
Acknowledging that one’s identity or part of one’s identity is irremediably bigoted is enough to absolve oneself from the moral burden of being an oppressor or holding privilege.
(3) Diversity in socialisation:
Failing to develop (para)social relationships with people that one wields privilege upon is a form of bigotry.
This framework is best explained by the author themselves.
The focus on Negrophilia, white guilt and visible Black representation has crystallised in what I call Anglo-pessimism, an anti-racist ideology which capitulates to racial capitalism and its institutions, in favour of a status quo. Anglo-pessimism seems very progressive on the surface but it actually ignores the difference between the lived experiences of marginalised people, promotes standardised marginalised identities, and avoids any form of wealth redistribution... It is a framework which helps maintain the same people and institutions on top, while diversifying the workforce at the bottom. In short: Anglo-pessimism is social justice in name only.
(Negrophilia In Club Culture, Mathys Rennela, 2022)
In the wake of the cultural shock caused by the 2020 Minneapolis uprising against police brutality, white actors in the dance music industry found themselves in the crosshairs. They had to answer previously unconsidered and ignored questions about race, class and privilege.
The response by those in power was to make concessions that were wholly performative and in reality, changed nothing. Crying into a workbook about their privilege and using the (para)social fandom of Black artists is the last line of defence for inaction.
We are now in the age of Anglo-Pessimism and so my current assessment of the UK dance music landscape echoes that of the one found in the Technomaterialism manifesto.[4]
Liberal hegemony in the political landscape has led to a reinforcement of representation politics, which favor feckless and anecdotal representation of marginalized groups over an improvement of their material conditions, which would necessarily pass by actual systemic change. White-owned talent agencies using the likeness of Black artists and tokenizing them to show how progressive they are, all while holding a monopoly of the means of production, is not liberatory.
(Technomaterialism Manifesto, 2022)
One of the most prominent and influential of those white-owned talent agencies is One House,[5] owned by Napper Tandy.[6] It has risen since 2020 from a run-of-the-mill booking agency to managing some of the fastest rising stars in UK dance music. They work with names you will rightly recognise, including: Eliza Rose, SHERELLE, Yung Singh, Ahadadream, SUCHI and Call Super, to name just a few.
Their rise has coincided with some significant shifts in how the industry works over the last two years.
Firstly, the influence of traditional dance music media has waned, and instead management agencies and artists are more likely to turn to brands and sponsors to propel themselves. This pairs with an increased acceptance in the commodification of the industry by fans of "underground dance music" as necessary to artist growth/survival.
Secondly, younger generations are more likely to see forms of discrimination as abhorrent, and are more aware of racial inequalities than ever before.
Finally and unexpectedly, communities, particularly racialised communities,[7] are being given the space and opportunities that they had not been given before. In combination with collective action, they have taken the industry’s concern with neoliberal optics and its scramble for an un-activated audience to muscle in on once gate-kept sectors.
These changes have been carefully observed by white-owned talent agencies and none have been better at cynically adapting to this change than One House.
Daytimers, the UK South Asian collective of DJs, producers and artists, launched in 2020 with a charity compilation and Twitch charity stream. In the midst of lockdown, it leveraged South Asian solidarity to put on a 48-hour stream of talent from the diaspora and raise money for the Farmers Protest in India [8] - the world's largest protest of collective working class demands in the 21st century.
This was followed swiftly by the second compilation. These were curated, mastered, illustrated, promoted and shared by South Asian hands. A point that will become important later.
They received broad coverage from press outlets, the sort of coverage that some previous industry actors were struggling to get.[9] The press were now in a frantic bid to show that lessons had been learnt by supporting initiatives from racialised groups in the industry. Some outlets even temporarily stopped accepting paid pitches by white freelance writers. It allowed the South Asian diaspora to seep through on the BIPOC quota.[10]
Then the "Yung Singh presents Daytimers" Boiler Room happened.[11] While Yung Singh came out the star of the show, it catapulted Daytimers and the larger British SA diaspora as participants of dance music culture into the limelight. The benefit of which is still being felt by Daytimers to this day. The momentum and 'brand' recognition by being featured on such a prominent platform mean that opportunities continue to arrive into the Daytimers inbox, opportunities that benefit in real terms, the wider diaspora.[12]
But occasionally these offers by white institutions begin to border into co-option and subtle agreements to exploit, delivered with a friendly, well-meaning face.
Let's first outline something important. True allyship is in invisible, meaningful actions done without the expectation of reward.
Anything more is a gross overstep that reveals a fundamental unwillingness to relinquish social capital and a desire to exploit marginalised people as a middle man. In October 2020, Yung Singh's Punjabi Garage mix was posted on the Shuffle'n'Swing SoundCloud as part of their mix series.[13] It started to gain a massive following, gathering support through blogs, reposts & word of mouth. Around this time, it became clear that clubs might open up soon, and not one to miss a viral opportunity, One House came calling.
In the earliest conversations between Yung Singh and Barry Davies of One House in February 2021, the benefits that One House could offer Daytimers were hawked. Senior members of One House spoke to a few of the Daytimers team days after reaching out to Yung Singh about how One House could be of service. This service was, and always is, conditional and in opposition to the model of true allyship. Otherwise, the connections, social capital and opportunities would not need to be agreed upon, they would just be given.
One House couldn't get a piece of Daytimers because they were resistant to it. At the time this was mostly due to concerns about a collective being treated like another artist on an already large booking roster. For me, it was because I knew what relinquishing the future of Daytimers to white middle men would mean. So instead they used the self-interest of artists and the promise of stardom to pull individual talent into their pool and now, without the Daytimers name, they could get their cut of the South Asian diaspora.[14]
A key part of that was the use of Josh de Silva, a mixed race South Asian man who is a junior agent at One House. He was the first point man sent to Daytimers. This was done entirely to subdue the concerns around racial dynamics artists like SUCHI and Ahadadream might have had in signing to an agency run by an overprivileged white man.[15] It worked, with one artist saying to me, "I felt more comfortable knowing Josh was there." This, despite Josh de Silva being absent from any community events.
With Yung Singh they had something that up until now they failed to stimulate through the chain of institutionally white structures. They had now, an activated racialised community at their fingertips, which also allowed them to fake the pretence of community for their other artists more convincingly than ever before.
"Community Pillar"
That's how the One House-managed artist SHERELLE was marketed, as she modelled the 2022 Season Arsenal Kit in their social media announcement that couldn't even be bothered to spell her name right.[16]
Just days before, an Arsenal midfielder was accused of rape. (Which was shortly dismissed by the Crown Prosecution Services for lack of evidence.)[17]
What does it mean to put a queer Black woman as the poster star for the launch of a football kit during a rape allegation,[18] for a club in a football league that has no openly gay players, because they fear for their lives and their careers?[19] Here One House have engaged in a risky game of liberalism where the marginalised identities of its artists have been used to whitewash the lived experience of those who exist in the sport and the potential of those that come in contact with it. Perhaps the fact that they kept the announcement to just "Community Pillar", without ever stating which community that might be, should have been sign enough that this was a bad move.
Or perhaps the fact that the community was not defined is a mirror to the other issue at play. That in the case of SHERELLE and many of One House's other marginalised artists, the ties to community that their identities supposedly represent, do not exist - at least not in the forms that they pretend to.
Turning to the Anglo-Pessimist tenets, we can see a number of points about how the mere existence of a marginalised identity is enough to warrant reward, accolade and achievement.
(4) Blackness is the Rosetta Stone:
Blackness is the blueprint for any marginalised identity.
Black activism is the blueprint for social justice work.
(7) Empiricism:
Marginalised people have an innate knowledge of their marginalised conditions.
This knowledge escapes rationalisation and does not need to be supported by any data.
(8) Identity is performance:
Any action taken, word uttered or work produced by a marginalised person is a political statement which impacts their community and reshapes the world.
It is these tenets that One House banks on when they push SHERELLE as a leading queer Black liberatory activist. But being queer or Black or both does not automatically make anyone a community leader and such a thing should not be tied to the number of press opportunities or gigs your white owned management company have secured. Community leadership necessitates being elected leader by the people you supposedly represent. After all, it is surely up to community to decide, not an artist development manager.
One House have empirically marketed her as such based on identity alone. This could be mistaken as an individual faux pas, an overzealous marketing tactic in the face of an increasingly neoliberal optics game. But it carries genuinely harmful consequences, as Ari Robey-Lawrence noted in her piece for Technomaterialism earlier in the year.[20]
Hyper-visible scene actors with multiple marginalized identities can sometimes become complicit in the erasure and co-optation of the community they identify with, while actively benefiting from positioning themselves as liberatory, activist, or abolitionist thought leaders, and using that as currency in their creative-professional environments. Individuals or groups of individuals with institutional access become hoarders of resources by weaponizing their identity, at the expense of the Black community they claim to represent.
(Sweetheart, All Justice is a Dead End, A. Robey-Lawrence, 2022)
Most importantly when SHERELLE wins, there is no identifiable community structure that benefits as there was in the case of Yung Singh presents Daytimers Boiler Room.
To illustrate this issue further let me take you to 2019, where I had the privilege of playing Panorama Bar twice. Once in February at Klubnacht and again in September as part of a REKIDS showcase. Neither time did I take a picture outside the venue and neither time did I claim to be the first British Asian to play there.
(6) Existing is activism:
Being visible in spaces which historically lacked diversity is activism.
Being the “first one” to enter such spaces is revolutionary.
Anglo-Pessimist ideology warrants that I must make the claim where I can that my existence and being the first one in a space is meaningful, when in actual fact it is meaningless. How does playing Panorama Bar, through the joint support of Laurent Garnier and Su my manager, have any impact on the reality for South Asians also looking to play the prestigious venue? This is at most a personal victory. I do not own the means of success, nor have I made any claim to. The means of success are owned by my industry supporters who have a historical relationship with these institutions. This opportunity is not shared with the diaspora, and so they will receive no material benefit.
What's most odd about this strategy is that the dance music industry constantly touts itself as being on the edge of progressive values, ahead of the rest of mainstream society. But even in British politics, the limits of identity have been blown wide open by years of conservative brown faces dolling out policies that diminish the material circumstances of Black and Brown people in Britain.[21] It has proven to be a pointless farce, yet dance music lags so far behind this understanding that the whiplash is lethal.
Racial justice has become about including people of colour into the winners category of the status quo, then using them as evidence that the system works if you are brilliant and hard-working enough.
(Nesrine Malik, The Guardian, 2022)
But this is precisely the strategy that One House dabbles in with every marginalised artist. As Napper Tandy, its owner illustrates.[22]
Eliza is the first female DJ to reach the top of the charts since 2002 when Sonique did it with It Feels So Good...
...An independent music company taking a new artist to the top of the charts with their first single feels like a fairytale but it isn’t.
This is not a moment, this is a revolution, and we’re in the middle of it.
(Napper Tandy - Founder & CEO of OneHouse)
Team members towed the Anglo-Pessimist line, highlighting this absurdly niche fact that almost none of the listeners that got Eliza Rose's BOTA to number one in September 2022 would have cared about or been aware of, despite its last minute inclusion in the PR roll out.[23] Simply calling it, "The song of generation TikTok" would have sufficed.
The notion that another overprivileged white man becomes the vector of success for a racialised woman to reach number one is about as far from revolutionary in the music industry as you could get.
What is the purpose of spinning every meaningless identity politics trope they can find into something meaningful? In the intro I noted that post-2020, younger generations were more likely to see forms of discrimination as abhorrent, and are more aware of racial inequality than ever before. The key to this is in tenet three.
(3) Diversity in socialisation:
Failing to develop (para)social relationships with people that one wields privilege upon is a form of bigotry.
This is the centre of One House's strategy. To sell feel-good optics of progress through racialised artists to a concerned, well-meaning white audience, whose white guilt can be absolved through the celebration of entirely performative wins by their (para)social champions.[24] Wins that are meaningless to the material circumstances of the racialised people that are supposedly represented. Wins, that are entirely internalised by One House.
How can you be anti-black if you love AceMoma?
After patiently waiting for the short-lived hysteria of recognising the existence and importance of Black people,[25] the white structures resumed as before.[26] The real gatekeepers of opportunities have created the perfect spectacle, where the people who run dance music venues, curate its spaces, books artists for club gigs and festivals, run the most industry respected PR agencies remain steadfast - while the colour of the front of house is shuffled to accommodate a tokenistic agenda.
The reality of existing under this spectacle has ramifications for the communities it effects.
I was advised by another South Asian who had experience in the European house and techno scene to market myself as "The Biggest British South Asian DJ in Techno." And to pursue a "big room" path, doing guest mixes for BBC radio DJs and the like. This is a symptom of how the Anglo-Pessimist reality limits the imaginations of racialised people. We are handed a reduced scale of success with exploitative tokenism on one end and "empowerment" through visibility on the other. We are, in our self-interest, forced to trample over each other to fight for its gaze. A gaze which ultimately finds us as interchangeable as our identities.
In Yung Singh, One House have found their racialised golden goose. There are few ethnicities from the South Asian diaspora that have the strength in solidarity that male Punjabi Sikhs have. This is down to their immediate visibility and all the hardship that entails growing up in white society, the length of its religious history, and the history of persecution from all sides, both within and outside the subcontinent.[27] Yung Singh has also been a passionate and informed proponent of Sikhs in the music world long before One House swooped in. Because of all of these factors, he has activated a generation of hyper engaged fans from his diaspora, where even the lowest bar of identity politics theory of being "seen" is a major win thanks to the historic dearth of Punjabi Sikhs propelled into almost-mainstream youth culture in Britain up until this point. He is pushing the limits of what can be gained from the reduced scale of success. Even still, the core criticisms that Ari Robey-Lawrence make in reference to hyper-visible scene actors remain a concern here.
These limits of what is possible under the current narrative is perpetuated by industry initiatives to ‘fix’ it. We are presented by its main actors a reduced scale of 'solutions'; nothing radical is ever on the table.
Take for example the "Progressing Gender Representation in UK Dance Music" Jaguar Foundation report.[28] In a piece that detailed extensively the risks and abuses faced by non-males in the dance music industry, it came as surprise that the offered solution was to instead put more non-males in danger through a form of self-tokenisation. Its recommendation to artists was an inclusion rider, telling promoters that they should book a more inclusive line-up. This is despite the report having a section dedicated to issues of tokenism and multiple quote excerpts from women in the industry who understood the importance of behind the scenes change.[29]
Its other recommendations for change included equally tepid calls for more music & production workshops, and the equivalent of unconscious bias training on trans & non-binary people so that industry actors might treat them with dignity.
There are no explicit calls by the report, funded by Sony Music UK,[30] for more women behind the scenes because that would necessarily mean the displacement of established men. However, in the DJ booth as the token support act, where the turnover can remain high, women can fight for the meagre financial pickings between each other.
It might be argued that this is a first step. But it prevents real change by design, as I will outline later. It also opens up the door for One House, and other male owned agencies to exploit this initiative by presenting artists that fulfil a surface level optics need for promoters with minimal effort. These guys stay winning.
The solution must be more non-males owning the means of production and creating a system that materially benefits communities.[31] Not a diversity quota. Not something driven by identity alone. Otherwise, it will continue to encourage putting more non-males, and racialised non-males, in danger in the hope that their lived experiences will be the wakeup call for change.[32] Starting with a self-tokenising inclusion rider is the wrong order of operations.
Representation is supposed to be reflective of an underlying system. If you skip the change in system part then you are left with a solution that perpetuates a hollow, meaningless spectacle. As Mathys Rennela wrote in Abolish DJ Idolatry:[33]
Club activism and DJ/producer-focused unions fail to tackle structural problems in dance music by not centering the majority of the dance music industry’s workforce. Take for example the very liberal concept of inclusion riders, which only address the symptoms (lack of diversity on line-ups) and not the cause (lack of diversity behind the scenes).
If change can happen, it has to happen across the whole industry, and not just in highly visible roles. In essence, trying to quantify diversity on lineups and rankings is really an outdated metric, as it only quantifies diversity among a very small subset of the workers involved in the dance music industry. Who are the stage managers, the agents, the bookers, the artistic directors, the light artists, the PR agents...?
(Abolish DJ Idolatry, Mathys Rennela, 2021)
Internally, the hiring of racialised people by One House goes beyond making them appear more attractive to other racialised artists and exploiting them for their owners. It is also designed to defend against valid criticism from those whose understanding of identity politics is more than surface level. This trick has been pulled by the white California investor/tech class for years. Stack your hiring with minority bodies at the bottom of the chain so the group photoshoot looks good, but the actual decision makers and owners are still the same as they always were.[34]
For the racially diverse staff at One House, they have shown themselves to be deeply seated in the thinking of Anglo-Pessimism. They actively facilitate the cynical plays to undermine their own communities and push liberal solutionism. Actions count more than their identities. This deliberate ethnic meat shield is tissue thin. They work for Napper Tandy. Rishi Sunak works for the Tory party.[35]
Anglo-Pessimism becomes a tool for maintaining the status quo in supposedly progressive spaces, where institutions and individuals feel that because they are contributing in some way, or taking part in a progressive cause that they are beyond criticism. This results in them using their proximity to Blackness and other racialised people as tokens in defence. For a harrowing example about how this impacts racialised people outside of the elevated few, look no further than Ifeoluwa's essay on their treatment within the Bristol scene.[36]
Across other booking and talent agencies in the same industry, the picture is not much better. I've received reports of racialised workers witnessing the blatant tokenising thinking that goes behind artist outreach. Questions of artistry are thrown out in favour of optics for them to capitalise on. Obviously these conversations are kept secret from the artists once they try to sign them. Almost always these agencies are owned and founded by the overprivileged. It is no surprise to hear that racialised workers also experience racial discrimination by their peers and are bought on developmental schemes with moving goal posts of performance to exploit them.
What does it mean for a talent agency in this industry littered with alleged racists, that exploits its racialised workers to have a diverse roster? In the UK, whenever white elite gatekeepers are the owners of cultural institutions, sub-genres of postcolonial exploitation are to be found.
In summary, the limits of what is possible under the guise of Anglo-Pessimism creates division between communities, fighting on the front line for gigs and being prevented from owning the means of success for the benefit of a larger marginalised group. Tokenising is not only limited to DJs and performers but also to the staff that are bought in to these historically white institutions. The only accepted proposition so far has been the perpetuation of the spectacle of change.
Among all of this, it feels like we have forgotten why we are even having these conversations in the first place.
In 2018, 26-year-old accountant Botham Jean, a Black Man, came home to his apartment in Dallas, Texas. He wanted to wind down after a long day at PricewaterhouseCoopers and decided to eat ice-cream on the sofa while watching TV. An off-duty officer, Amber Guyer, finished her shift and headed to what she thought was her apartment on the 3rd floor but was actually Botham Jeans' on the 4th, who had left his door unlocked. Upon entering and sighting Botham Jean, on a sofa in a living room that was not even her own, she drew for her firearm and shot Botham in his own apartment.[37]
Amber Guyer would claim in her testimony that the encounter was "not about hate," she said, "It's about being scared."[38] But the murder of Botham Jean by Amber Guyer in his own flat is fundamentally a story about a Black man who is perceived as an outsized threat by a white woman in a space that belongs to him.
Since the murder of George Floyd in May 2020 until the current time of writing there have been 41 more extrajudicial killings of unarmed Black Americans in the United States.[39] Almost all of them are men, and in the rare case when they aren't,[40] women are not the initial target by police, such was the case for Breonna Taylor.[41]
Immediately after, dance music press outlets rushed to retell the history of house and techno and highlight its Black roots. Roots that it had mostly failed to highlight in the decades before to obvious effect.[42] It was a reminder about who should rightly own the space.
Despite all the promises to do better, meaningless pledges and Black squares, this industry's response to the 2020 uprising against police brutality and the killing of a Black man is most accurately summarised in Anglo-Pessimist tenet 5.
(5) Hegemonic gender roles are racialised:
Racialised women will save the world.
All racialised men yearn for assimilation into whiteness.
It is the white man’s burden to protect racialised women from their barbaric men.
Across the industry Black men, and for parts of Europe racialised men more broadly, face discrimination in underground techno clubs.[43] Here they are subjected to increased surveillance from security staff both before and after they enter the venue. Once inside they are subjected to a visible othering, and the only meaningful interaction they’re likely to receive is the incessant request for drugs by majority white patrons.
In the context of the UK this is particularly dangerous, the Metropolitan Police is consumed by an internal systemic racism and misogyny problem that effects every level of its operations.[44] These same police were given powers to patrol nightclubs in plain-clothes in a government response to the death of Sarah Everard. A woman who was kidnapped, raped and killed by an off duty Metropolitan police officer while walking back from a friends house.[45]
For artists, this results in Black men having to make themselves into something more approachable to reduce their perceived racialised threat. This is often through constant reminders of their approachability or through queer baiting.[46] This, "coded" behaviour isn't exclusive to the dance music industry. But it renders itself quite clearly in the increasingly diminished presence of Black men as artists.
On a fundamental level, Amber Guyer and the dance music industry share a common idea: that Black men pose an outsized threat that warrants a disproportionate preventative response. In joining with that premise and demonising Black men, they concede to the ideological ground that allows extrajudicial killings to happen in the first place.[47]
Increasingly racialised women and non-males capitulate to this Anglo-Pessimist premise either through racialised heteropessimism,[48] white feminist theory or a highly racialised understanding of male privilege,[49] without understanding that it is a perverse form of self-hate. Its purpose is to elevate the supposed supremacy and civility of white men as saviours,[50] even when it is clear that misogyny has no racial boundaries in our industry. The colonial tactics of divide and conquer are plain to see.
Anglo-Pessimism warrants that the lived experience of marginalised people can only be understood through the framing of hierarchy - resulting in the most efficient form of performative allyship to be in the tokenisation of racialised queer women. I am not suggesting that Black women have it easier, I am merely highlighting that Black men face a very specific form of discrimination that is different from the queer South Asian, that is different from the trans and so on. However, under its gaze marginalised people are forced to make needless comparison between our experiences, instead of understanding that our experiences are separate and specific to the annals of history as it relates to our identities.[51] Solidarity can be found between us if we understand that we face specific challenges, that when fought together, result in overlapping wins. Ending the demonisation of Black masculinity would impact all racialised non-males that do not conform to a white/western ideal of femininity. The improvement in the material conditions of one will always benefit another.
In 2020 a Black man died. When another extrajudicial killing inevitably happens again, and shock from its blatant injustice causes the industry to investigate its own relationship with anti-Blackness, One House and other Anglo-Pessimist institutions are poised now more than ever to benefit from Black death.
(8) Identity is performance:
Any action taken, word uttered or work produced by a marginalised person is a political statement which impacts their community and reshapes the world.
This tenet has been the main load bearer for how the industry goes about the work of maintaining the status quo. With this thinking there is no difference between a South Asian capitalist and a Black socialist, and regardless of community outreach, they both miraculously command the respect of their peers and have something affecting to say. The Anglo-Pessimist weaponises this to create the spectacle of change. Who gets a say on panel talks? Whose voice is most effectively promoted? Under which brand activation do these proclamations of urgency happen under?
The status-quo thrives due to the encouraged para(social) relationship and ontological white guilt. Under it, we see well-meaning white audiences nodding their heads in approval to any racialised viewpoint and supposed "win". Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò, associate Professor of Philosophy at Georgetown University observes this as "elite capture".[52]
So the elite capture problem with identity politics as I see it is the fact that some people are using identity politics as a weapon against consolidated group interest, against building solidarity. Using it for representation only.
(Emmanuel Midy, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò - RxC 2020)
One House's presence is so monolithic that it comes to play an outsized role in writing the narrative of what UK dance music is. For a younger audience entering the space, it is One House artists that are their most likely entry into the scene.
When artists are given the choice to sign with One House as a booking agency the question is not usually, should I go with A or B, or do I go with One House at all. Artists, who usually have no bargaining power of any sort are actually presented with the choice, do you want gigs up and down the country, at every festival you've ever dreamed of or not?
This illuminates something I touched on earlier, that these relationships between booking or management agencies and those who curate spaces, venues & festivals have remained largely unchanged for years.
One House weaponises identity politics for the benefit of its owner and to the detriment of all other marginalised people in the industry. But it also does it with contempt for its well-meaning white audience, providing solutions to their concerns for inequality and racial injustice that is hardly solution at all.
Increasingly we're seeing individual artist-led initiatives making headlines in music outlets. This usually means launching workshops that benefit whatever 'community' an artist's individual identity most closely aligns with. Community in quotes here because there is very rarely an identifiable structure directly related to the artist in question; it is through identity alone that assertions are made. This is evidenced when earlier One House-managed artist initiatives couldn't get enough of the artists' supposed 'community' onboard, so had to open it up to people outside it to fill out spaces.
These artist-led solutions and attempts to flirt with feel good personal brand optics often require assistance from outside facilitators in combination with brand partnerships. On closer inspection these initiatives find themselves limited in length and scope. There are no real attempts to distribute a meaningful ownership of success to their communities or to exist for long term development.
Since the launch of Bandcamp Fridays,[53] One House has managed to get their foot in the door with what I would call faux-community compilations, once again centred around an individual artist and not a community. Any other association is purely branding.[54] Their markings are obvious: relatively few tracks, or padded with "allies" because they can't find the community members they supposedly represent.[55] Often they're linked to big brand western institutions whose work or initiatives on closer inspection is ineffective but is a safe recognisable choice.[56]
At first glance this appears to be a spurious complaint, regardless of length, scope and level of sponsor - these initiatives are surely a good thing? But this limited thinking is how management companies get away with cynical optics plays, increasing their artist value in an environment where performance is more valuable than change. Spotlighting individuals as saviours is itself a technique used to disarm real solidarity movements.[57]
In a 1963 televised panel discussion, Malcolm X cautioned against the very idea of Black entertainers’ leadership on social issues, as their class interests do not necessarily align with those of the Black working class. Nearly sixty years later, Black entertainers are still expected to be community leaders, in industries which exploit the entertainer-turned-activist narrative.
(Negrophilia In Club Culture, Mathys Rennela, 2022)
There could be a thousand artist-led initiatives and still marginalised people would be no closer to owning the means of their success in this industry. This is by design and illustrates the limits of individual solutionism.
One House, by using the individual artists that it controls rather than the community that it couldn't, creates two issues.
Firstly, privilege and whiteness begets social capital, which in turn begets access to funds. As deliberate white middle men they surely understand that under the rules of White Supremacy, their very presence in the culture space is detrimental to the real and active marginalised communities that they pretend to care about.
Secondly, community systems will always have much broader points of access than individuals. By focusing the role of uplifting community to artists it narrows the benefit to those who have proximity to individuals and limits effectiveness to individual reach.
One of the most fascinating aspects of Daytimers as someone who has seen its working from the inside, is its ability to cater to the needs of people within its community are far beyond any individual's capacity. In the space of two months there will be multiple charity drives by members for the floods in Pakistan, or for food banks, solidarity posts with political movements, workshops giving people the confidence to create their own media, evenings dedicated to poetry and spoken word from the diaspora, festival stage takeovers giving DJs some of their most formative experiences, multiple radio shows across multiple stations, bespoke shows in London's most prestigious spaces - the list goes on.
Marginalised artists that rely too heavily on the co-option and support of white institutions to amplify themselves will miss their intended audience entirely. You cannot procure a racialised, or even marginalised audience through institutions owned by the overprivileged. The result of this reliance is in headline shows that have to ramp up the list of 'allies' in support as ticket sales don't hit expectations, or just half empty venues entirely.
There are a host of communities in UK dance music that exist outside the Anglo-Pessimist gaze that have been built through decades of sweat.[58] I investigated the impact that a lack of coverage on Black and Working Class communities means in part two of "A Letter to RA"[59]. Here I noted the ineffectiveness of the press to represent anything happening on the ground.
We can see how specifically in the case of a community that was largely oblivious of systems their white middle class peers had access to; How valued you are by the press, as awarded by the amount of coverage - bears no relationship to the communities value, as awarded by the number of gigs. Or in other terms, the press’ coverage bears no semblance of reality compared to actual scene activity.
(Measured: The Scale Of Ignorance, 2020)
Is it any wonder that these same institutions can't speak to any marginalised community of any sort?
For those communities their growth depends on real groundwork, constant outreach and fostering of relationships that cause a meaningful tangible benefit. It is through the group effort of private DMs, group chats, locked off Discords and Slack groups, private emails, texts, late night calls, and Google meet discussions that these grassroots communities are formed. These actions cannot be sufficiently replicated through shortcuts, through optics and through white-institutions that do not represent your communities' interest.
You cannot sustain a community through the tenets of Anglo-Pessimism. White guilt, Blackness alone, immutable identity as achievement and corporate sponsors form the weakest foundations. There is no brand partnership on the planet that can accelerate real solidarity. Only the iron will of traditional forms of solidarity can hold the weight.
My advice to any marginalised person looking to find their place in the dance music industry is not to seek out individual performers that match your identity, because ultimately their wins mean very little materially to your lived experience. Instead, seek out a real community that represents your interests and work with each other to uplift, educate and develop a mode of working that doesn't rely on the co-option of the Anglo-Pessimist.
Over two years after the cultural shock in the summer of 2020. One House and other talent agencies have learnt nothing about the principles of true allyship in the wake of George Floyd and instead have sought to co-opt racialised communities and take a cut from racialised labour. On top of this they fabricate the spectacle of community as a form of personal branding and serve their racialised artists as absolvers of white guilt. Through 'Artist-as-saviour' rhetoric they undermine the activities of real communities and promotes tokenism that, in turn, limits the spectrum of wins for all racialised people. They weaponise identity both externally and internally to act as meat shield to criticism, whitewash brands and to profit from Black death.
At the end of the year One House look to reach the final stages of clown make-up application, launching their "Manifesto" in the Mecca to white cultural commercialisation, London's Shoreditch House.[60] Given Napper Tandy's understanding of the word "revolution" we can expect liberal feel-good solutionism dripping in Anglo-Pessimist mentality. An elevation into white light for their racialised chosen and maintenance of the status-quo for everyone else.
Being white does not automatically make you an Anglo-Pessimist, and being a racialised person does not stop you from internalising its dogma. But the key boundary preventing white self-declared progressives from unlearning its behaviours is tenet 9.
(9) Achieving equality is a corporate-style exercise:
Structures of oppression can only be atoned for and dismantled through corporate-style procedures: it is through scripted dialogues, listicles, reconciliation and complaint management processes that true equality will be achieved.
To truly rid themselves of this thinking it requires them to be radical. For the overprivileged, whose divide in class interest is so vast, this is incurable, as the current status quo benefits them so greatly.[61]
A lot of what I've written here will be deeply uncomfortable for many people. To find out that your thinking and actions, swayed by the dominant conversations around race and privilege, are actually steeped in a faux anti-racist ideology is defeating. But there is an inevitability in this step, this con, this last final defence against change. It is the last breath of a dying system.
For those who read Negrophilia, this piece hopefully spells out the justification for its closing lines.
The social justice focused segment of this industry has no intention to challenge this status quo. It pursues a feckless and self-serving assimilationist agenda which perpetuates the lie that it is possible to change dance music institutions’ from the inside. Industry actors appoint obedient Black community leaders to shield themselves from criticism. Institutions have perfected the art of “raising awareness,” without ever getting anywhere near any action which would lead to structural change. Anglo-pessimism is the new normal.
(Negrophilia in Club Culture, Mathys Rennela, 2022)
We must surely imagine a place where in UK dance music, something that started as a movement of genuine community and solidarity between working class people, can elevate itself beyond the self-interest of individual liberalism. No single individual should encapsulate the culture.
An individual has two arms while the community has many, and while one hand may not know what the other is doing, it can be certain that all parts of it are working to an aligned goal. Working through these structural communities is the only way for marginalised actors to gain power on their own terms.
Here I propose a model for communities that works to counter institutional narratives and progress to own the means of production in the industry.
1. Own The Means Of Success
Preserve gains in capital made by individual members, so they are shared with the rest of the community. This includes social capital (emails, contacts, opportunities) and financial capital (cut of earnings from bookings of top artists).
2. Educate & Archive
Preserve the history of collectives that have come before and share the importance of solidarity movements to anchor the collective in a political grounding.[62]
Share knowledge that allows members to be best equipped against the Anglo-Pessimist and serve the interests of their community.[63]
3. Solidarity Union
Join with other grassroots collectives to share social capital and resources.
Join in collective action that amplifies each other.
4. Aggressive Expansion
Take the lead on opportunity sourcing, and intercept the Anglo-Pessimist. Avoid middle men facilitators wherever possible and reject conditional help.
5. Externalise Community
Increase the activity and impact on the community you represent outside the cultural industries through collective labour and action.
6. Attack
Publicly shame institutions that maintain the status quo. PR and narrative is the weak foundation on which they are built on. Once that is gone they cannot survive. People who act in self-interest will naturally fall in line when you provide no other reasonable avenue.
As mentioned at the top of this piece, Daytimers started out with very political intentions.[64]
“Everything we’ve done to date is a form of protest, that’s the only way you can get to be on any sort of level playing field.”
(Rohan Rakhit, The Guardian, 2021)
In an incredibly short amount of time I have witnessed a unity in the South Asian diaspora that just two years ago I would have cast off as pure fiction. The model I outlined above is already here, it has already been tested, and is already working. Daytimers is not without its problems and its own internal struggles, but those are its problems to solve and learn from, there is power in ownership of all things.
To close, a scene from recent memory. I am at a Mehfil, an evening of spoken word and poetry run entirely by members of the community as an offshoot of Daytimers. The work of many South Asian hands is evident all around me. Above, projected visuals of Mehfil sites from the subcontinent evolve over the course of the evening from day to night. The balconies are decorated with a specific arrangement of hanging fabrics that mirror the muted tones of traditional ceremonial garments. The topics covered through the art of performance range wildly from Islamophobia, dhal & rice, loss & grief, the rights of Iranian women and reflection on privilege. The event has steadily grown since 2021 and is now in its largest venue yet, Conway Hall near Holborn. Its promotion is possible through the tireless work of everyone who contributes to the awareness of Daytimers as a collective. Before the intermission two bansuri flute players and a complement of traditional instruments remind us of Bollywood films we were made to watch as children. I am looking around at the joy on the brown faces across from me on stage, all around me on the balcony and below in the stands. It is packed and the sound of South Asian hands coming together for applause is resounding. It continues, for so long and with such unrelenting force that the flute players become overwhelmed with gratitude. I look around once again, among the cacophony of community. The Anglo-Pessimist gaze is nowhere to be seen.
Finally,
I can breathe again.
'Me And White Supremacy' Helps You Do The Work Of Dismantling Racism (NPR) link. Somehow I feel that using this book as defence against being called out on your anti-blackness was not the authors' intention. ↩︎
Black artists Acemo & MoMA READY's collaborative project. Around 2020 they were particularly trendy among the white hipster crowd. (Discogs) link ↩︎
This is a foundational text to this piece, although I will pull in the necessary quotes from it to make understanding easier. Recommend reading when you can. Negrophilia In Club Culture (Technomaterialism) link ↩︎
Technomaterialism Twenty-Point Manifesto (Technomaterialism) link ↩︎
Napper Tandy Companies House Director Appointments (Companies House) link ↩︎
"Racialisation is a sociological and political process by which ethnic and racial identities are associated to social groups and practices, for the purpose of maintaining structures of domination and social exclusion." - (Negrophilia in Club Culture, Mathys Rennela, 2022). For more information see the Appendix section of that piece. (Technomaterialism) link ↩︎
“Farmer protests against new agriculture laws exploded across India in November, with an estimated 250 million people participating across the world – the biggest protest in human history. Pioneered by families in the northern states of Punjab and Haryana, it gave added international impetus to Daytimers’ revolutionary spirit. In March, with no budget and only a few weeks of coordination, they organised a 24-hour livestreamed DJ set to raise money for Khalsa Aid, an organisation supporting farmers in India. It was listened to by members of the diaspora all over the world, who gathered in the comments section to share outbursts of appreciation and relatable stories.”
(Dance music collective Daytimers: ‘Brownness isn’t a hype – it’s who we are’, The Guardian, 2021) link ↩︎
Dance music collective Daytimers: ‘Brownness isn’t a hype – it’s who we are’ (The Guardian) link
Daytimers: The new kids on the block (Crack Magazine) link
Meet the Women of Daytimers, the South Asian DJ Collective Reclaiming Their Musical Identity (Pop Sugar) link
Get To Know: Daytimers – the Asian Underground’s latest incarnation (New Wave Magazine) link
London’s South Asian community revive the daytimer (The Face) link
WHAT DO YOUR PARENTS THINK?: 4 SOUTH ASIAN DJS SHARE THEIR FAMILY'S RECEPTION TO A MUSIC CAREER (mixmag) link ↩︎
An Update From RA's Editors (ra.co) link
DJ Mag: our pledge to you (DJ Mag) link ↩︎
This isn’t to give Boiler Room a pass; it makes the bare minimum effort to support those communities and the transaction involved means they can sell the culture and affiliation to advertisers.↩︎
Clarification: I am not suggesting that Daytimers has ownership of the South Asian diaspora. Rather, I'm making the very clear link between the pursuit by One House of Daytimers as a collective, along with the pursuit of South Asian artists in general, was a deliberate attempt to capture as much of the diaspora as possible. ↩︎
"Overprivileged" here meaning, holding a combination of privileges many times greater than those who created house & techno music in the first place. Middle/upper class, white, male, cishet (being born the gender you identify with), heterosexual. ↩︎
Sherrelle models the latest Arsenal Kit (Twitter) link img ↩︎
Footballer allegedly accused of rape by his Moroccan girlfriend (GhPage) link ↩︎
Gonna make a statement about the rapist you currently employ lads ? (Twitter) link ↩︎
Only doing so in secret for fears of further torment and that there is no adequate support system in place.
(Daily Mail: Premier League star says he is gay in an open letter) link ↩︎
Sweetheart, All Justice Is A Dead End by Ari Robey-Lawrence (Technomaterialism) link ↩︎
Yes, Sunak at No 10 is a ‘win’ – in exposing the emptiness of elite diversity rhetoric (The Guardian) link ↩︎
snapsfromnaps (instagram) link img Napper deliberately misses explicitly stating that One House used not-so-independent Warner Records to release the track. His claim is nonsensical. ↩︎
How DJ Eliza Rose Wrote The Biggest Hit Of Summer 2022 (Vogue) link
How Eliza Rose made the song of the summer (Dazed) link
There are a lot of issues here as it relates to Anglo-Pessimist mentality, individual liberalism and how successful racialised artists reduce the impact of their white benefactors. But we'll get into that later in the piece. ↩︎
"Guilt is not a meaningful way to enact change. Guilt is an uncomfortable feeling, and those who are uncomfortable with race generally cannot sit with it. They cannot speak of it. Therefore it must not exist."
(Put Your Hand Up If You've Felt Personally Victimised by Yewande Adeniran) (Black Artist Database) link ↩︎
"Was on a panel for Unsound this year about running a label and I’m pretty sure one of the other panellists said she’s advising her artists not to release this year because only a certain type of person is getting any coverage because of the current climate." (Mr Mitch, Twitter) link img ↩︎
Black dance music without Black people: a data analysis (Technomaterialism) link ↩︎
See the 1984 Anti-Sikh Riots as just one example of this. (Wiki) link ↩︎
Progressing Gender Representation in UK Dance Music (The Jaguar Foundation) link ↩︎
“Ideally we'd have more women and non binary promoters, managers, agents and business owners. I would love to see women setting the agenda in terms of dance music and how it's run.” - Annie Mac
“It's always been a boys’ club, and that’s not just in terms of DJs, but the people behind the scenes as well. I think if the people behind the scenes from the managers, the people running the labels, all of these are majority men...That isn't going to encourage more women to come forward.” - Michelle Mannetti
- Progressing Gender Representation, p15 - N.Davies (2022) ↩︎
This point will become relevant later.
Report exploring Gender Representation in UK Dance Music published by the Jaguar Foundation, funded by Sony Music’s Social Justice Fund (Sony Music UK) link
They also have a gender pay gap. (gov.uk) link ↩︎
In the one part that hints very vaguely at putting more non-males behind the curtain it finds shared identity to be the driving reason to do this, nothing more. ↩︎
another weekend gone and The Black Madonna involved in another racist incident? (Twitter) link ↩︎
"its staff of 225 is made up overwhelmingly of the sort of bright young things iterating the future at startups in Silicon Valley. Katzenberg made sure to note his team's diversity numbers (high) and ages (low), while taking pains to emphasize that more than 50 percent are women." We need to be the audience," Katzenberg explained. To capture a young, ethnically diverse audience, Quibi is presenting itself as a young, ethnically diverse company. (Pay no attention to the Boomers in the C-suite.)"
Quibi Is Jeffrey Katzenberg's $1.7 Billion Gamble (inc.com) link ↩︎
Racialised people, you too might be granted the opportunity to work for the benefit of the white man against the interest of your own community.
(Britain’s first Hindu prime minister is destroying Tories’ pitiful vision of diversity) (The Guardian) link ↩︎
"Using your proximity to Blackness, your whiteness and your POC friends as tokens in this way, to publically engage with white supremacy in an attempt to remove the agency of a Black person who challenges you on your racism, is pure violence, and an act of racial terror."
And later in the essay.
"Scott uses his night – where he pays Black and brown people to perform for majority white audiences – as proof that he cannot be racist. Despite the evident colonial framework his nights operate within, it’s an absurd statement."
(Put Your Hand Up If You've Felt Personally Victimised by Yewande Adeniran) (Black Artist Database) link* ↩︎
Ex-Dallas Officer Who Killed Man In His Own Apartment Is Found Guilty Of Murder (NPR) link ↩︎
List of unarmed African Americans killed by law enforcement officers in the United States (Wiki) link ↩︎
California woman fatally shot by police was victim of 'shocking' excessive force, lawyer says (NBC News) link ↩︎
Initial warrants were to investigate Jamarcus Glover who listed Taylor's apartment as his home address. (Courier Journal) link ↩︎
A Letter to RA and the rest of the music press, Works Of Intent, 2020 (Works Of Intent) link ↩︎
There are countless testimonies by Black men of the discrimination they face in the industry, where do you want to start
DJ S Resident Advisor Exchange (ra.co) link,
Steven Cee Resident Advisor Exchange (ra.co) link,
NIGHTCLUBS AREN'T UTOPIA FOR EVERY BLACK RAVER (mixmag, Joseph Patterson) link,
FOLD turning away my mate who is a regular at UNFOLD. Knew it would be a matter of time b4 they start moving fuckery with black ppl who don’t look and dress like everyone else 😐 (Strappa, Twitter) link,
More allegations of racism and maltreatment emerge against staff at Berlin venue Revier Südost (ra.co) link,
De School responds to criticism around racial justice, faces accusations of sexual harassment by security (ra.co) link, ↩︎
Huge failings kept hundreds of corrupt officers in the force, admits Met chief. (The Guardian) link
Baroness Casey's report on misconduct (Met Police) link ↩︎
For those outside of the UK, yes, you read that right. (The Guardian) link ↩︎
The deliberate use of queer aesthetics or sexual ambiguity by straight men to appear more interesting and approachable. It turns the lived experience of homosexual people into purely a form of spectacle for commodification. ↩︎
"Often when we talk about diversity we talk about it as if it is a political mandate, that you have to have the right liberal politics to incorporate certain bodies. Black male bodies, Black female bodies, Muslims. You have to be on the right side of the political spectrum. But what concretely changes about the way society is organised? Very little. The way that institutions legitimise themselves is through the ideological effect of saying "Yes, we're inclusive" because that allows even people who are fundamentally discriminated against and killed by the police state, by people that don't want certain people on collage campuses, or in the same neighbourhoods, to appear as if they didn't pull the trigger themselves, or put the person in jail or stab them... but at the same time you're not fully absolved, because the mandate for why the police act the way they do, the mandate for why certain institutions act the way they do, is to preserve the certain kinds of ideology that have already been established amongst their white citizens, their specific clientele."
(Tommy J. Curry opening statement on the motion "What's the Point of Diversity?") (YouTube) link ↩︎
On Heteropessimism (The New Inquiry, Asa Seresin, 2019) link ↩︎
The Black-Feminist Combahee River Collective in 1977 really set the record straight on this and showed how even then, white women were attempting to sever joint racial solidarity. (Jstor.org) link
“We reject pedestals, queenhood, and walking ten paces behind. To be recognized as human, levelly human, is enough. We believe that sexual politics under patriarchy is as pervasive in Black women’s lives as are the politics of class and race. We also often find it difficult to separate race from class from sex oppression because in our lives they are most often experienced simultaneously. We know that there is such a thing as racial-sexual oppression which is neither solely racial nor solely sexual, e.g., the history of rape of Black women by white men as a weapon of political repression. Although we are feminists and Lesbians, we feel solidarity with progressive Black men and do not advocate the fractionalization that white women who are separatists demand. Our situation as Black people necessitates that we have solidarity around the fact of race, which white women of course do not need to have with white men, unless it is their negative solidarity as racial oppressors. We struggle together with Black men against racism, while we also struggle with Black men about sexism.”
(The Combahee River Collective Statement, 1977) ↩︎
"...because we always think about them [Black men] as the excess of white men's toxic masculinity. So whatever a white man did, Black men do it worse. They do it more savagely. They do it to inflict greater harm and injury."
"How Do We Reimagine Black Men?" (Tommy J. Curry University of Edinburgh) (YouTube) link ↩︎
I've written about how British colonialism impacts the role and treatment of South Asians in the UK today. (A Time For Change, Works Of Intent, 2021) link
Dorlin's "What A Body Can Do" (Radical Philosophy) link makes the connection how violence committed on Black bodies of the past comes to exist and be reflected in the state violence of today. ↩︎
Identity Politics as Elite Capture - Emmanuel Midy, Olúfẹ́mi O. Táíwò - RxC 2020 (YouTube) link ↩︎
The online music retailer initiative that means on certain days in the year Bandcamp would waive all processing and admin fees. ↩︎
A social media handle for a brand and a bandcamp page isn't a community. ↩︎
"Allies" here meaning artists not belonging to the intended community but ones that sit within the industry wheelhouse of managers and agents connected to One House artists. You'll see the same names carted out for these compilations and added onto events as headliners when their marginalised artists can't sell enough tickets. This is so the press/exposure benefit is kept, well... all in one house. ↩︎
Take for example One House managed artist ELKKA, and their compilation charity drives for United Nations Women UK's HeForShe initiative. The UN, well known to be strapped for cash, has a performative arm promoting gender equality. If that Sony backed justice report was ineffectual then imagine the amount of money getting poured into a drain for people to write surface level data reports about how the UK Police and McKinsey & Co can "do better". I'll touch more on this issue when we get to AP Tenet 9. I recommend reading Anand Giridharadas' "Winner Takes All" if you're confused about the dynamics at play here particularly the chapter, "Generosity and Justice". ↩︎
[59] …Complacent acceptance of the status quo may also coexist with purely spectacular rebelliousness — dissatisfaction itself becomes a commodity…
(The Society Of The Spectacle, Guy Debord, 1967) ↩︎
Might be a good time to explain why I'm not mentioning any collectives other than Daytimers explicitly for a number of reasons:
I don't want my inclusion to sign post communities for Anglo-Pessimists to exploit.
I don't want to get this bogged down into the politics of who is and isn't mentioned.
I don't want to assume that any additional communities mentioned would be in agreement with the premise of the piece. ↩︎
Measured: The Scale Of Ignorance, Works Of Intent, 2020 link ↩︎
"The white liberal and the progressive believe so strongly in the moral force of their ideas that they overlook the material, they overlook what the social scientific evidence points them to. Because that is a fate that they don't want to endure, having their world undone, they say well it becomes impossible or fatalistic."
(Dilemmas of the Black male identity | Tommy Curry) (YouTube) link ↩︎
For racialised communities this necessarily means a corrective re-telling of your history outside of the western canon. ↩︎
[121] A revolutionary organization must constitute an integral critique of society, that is, it must make a comprehensive critique of all aspects of alienated social life while refusing to compromise with any form of separate power anywhere in the world. In the organization’s struggle with class society, the combatants themselves are the fundamental weapons: a revolutionary organization must thus see to it that the dominant society’s conditions of separation and hierarchy are not reproduced within itself. It must constantly struggle against its deformation by the ruling spectacle.
(The Society Of The Spectacle, Guy Debord, 1967) ↩︎
Dance music collective Daytimers: ‘Brownness isn’t a hype – it’s who we are’ (The Guardian) link ↩︎
