Policing The Beats: Black music, racism and criminal injustice

Lambros Fatsis

Manchester University Press

Calling all HJ massive: here is a terrific, vivifying guide to your record collection, and a political kick up the bum. Within ten minutes of engaging with this book, you’ll sprout a fresh pair of ears and a fifth lobe, or your money back.
This is a riveting, bracingly militant account of the racist British policing of Black Atlantic musical culture, from slavery days bang up to date. Extended sections consider the suppression of African drumming and dancing; calypso, and reggae sound systems; rap and drill.
The writing is deep, wide-ranging and richly erudite, but accessible and unstuffy. Compellingly, Lambros takes it all personally, and crucially his book blazes with love for a bunch of our favourite music: a long, diverse playlist in the back ricochets from Count Ossie and Salah Ragab through to A Tribe Called Quest and 24-Carat Black.
It joyously celebrates Black music as a reparative safe space, but also a key to getting to grips with the world; a contagion of ‘creole planetarity’, in the words of Paul Gilroy’s foreword, ‘capable of facilitating and intensifying political mobilisation, collective refusal and acting in concert. It can do this because it has promoted and amplified meaningful, relational life amidst a general haemorrhaging of meaning…’
‘The healing force of the universe,’ in Albert Ayler’s phrase. ‘My sanctuary… my life,’ as Gary Bartz put it. ‘Songs in the key of life.’

Very warmly recommended.