‘MADE IN LDN’: Young People’s Production of Rap Music in the Neoliberal Youth Club

Abstract

This chapter draws on ethnographic research conducted over ten months at Bass Youth Club’s music studio in East London. It explores the way in which youth clubs support and shape rap culture through the example of the youth club’s record label and partnership with multi-national corporation, Apple. Underpinned by neoliberal logics of aspiration, opportunity, individual responsibility, and success, the record label and Apple’s ‘Made in LDN’ programme supports their ‘higher tier’ of artists to take up performance opportunities through which commercial success can be acquired. In the same breath, the chapter demonstrates the tensions between ‘keeping it real’ and ‘making it.' The chapter fundamentally asks what is at stake when opportunities for social critique are removed from a society in which structural violence permeates the lives of young people, and social mobility is an ever-increasing distant reality.