George Musgrave’s new book contextualises the power of rap in Middle England

In The England No One Cares About, the musician-turned-academic reflects on his younger years bouncing around several suburban towns, identity on the peripheries, and using lyrics to ultimately understand himself.

When George Musgrave was growing up in the early 00s, he moved often. Seven different houses, while attending five primary schools and two secondary schools. There were different areas, too – Tuxford in Nottinghamshire, Louth in Lincolnshire, Fetcham in Surrey and the Norwich outskirts. Yet despite the hundreds of miles separating them, each place felt similar. There were the same post-war semi-detached houses, identikit shops, chain restaurants and supermarkets on high streets, and a shared feeling of being on the periphery, both geographically and culturally.

“I moved house every time my mum got promoted, but all of the places are actually very similar,” he says. “We have these stories and narrative myths of these ideal types of England, like rural idylls and inner-city multiculturalism. But there’s lots of England that’s just sort of there – it’s nothing and everything.”

Musically, he had grown to appreciate hip-hop, and particularly the art of rap. But it also felt very distanced from the life he lived. The genre was centred around US coastal powerhouse cities. Closer to home, while there was a nascent movement of UK rap and grime bubbling under the surface, it was mostly an inner-city London affair. In content and energy, the music was swaggering, confident and macho – a far cry from the insecurity of a teenager from Middle England.

But in 2002, a car ride completely changed his understanding of rap’s possibilities. While travelling to their grandfather’s funeral, Musgrave’s brother plugged Original Pirate Material – the freshly released debut album from The Streets – into the car’s CD player. “I remember being like: ‘What is this?!’” he recalls. “It was the first time I’d heard the voice of a rapper speak about an England I recognised. He was talking about fights and kebabs, playing Nintendo, smoking weed and walking through an estate. I thought this was maybe something I could do.”

Musgrave soon embarked upon his own musical path. Rapping under the moniker of Context, he penned bars about the world he knew and built a burgeoning career that saw him poll in the 2012 edition of MTV’s Brand New unsigned talent competition, alongside names including Lana Del Rey, Charli xcx and Michael Kiwanuka. After eventually moving away from the music industry, he went into academia, and is now a lecturer at Goldsmiths, University of London. His new book, The England No One Cares About: Lyrics from Suburbia, explores those lyrics within the England of his childhood that is so often forgotten about. Ahead of its publication on 23 July, we caught up with Musgrave to chat about countryside raving, culture in the peripheries, and the complexities of class identity.

Can you talk about getting into rap?

When I was growing up listening to rap music, I loved how it sounded because it was cool, but they don’t talk about a world that people in England know. Hearing Mike Skinner changed everything. I started writing rap songs for rap battles in Norwich, and it was just after [Eminem starring film] 8 Mile had come out. It was kind of like how people started skateboarding because they’d watched Back to the Future or played Tony Hawk Pro Skater. Norwich isn’t diverse at all, but in the nightclubs you’d get people in Akademiks tracksuits and New Era caps rapping with American accents. I was doing that, and then after a while, I tried bringing in things I was listening to like dubstep or other ephemeral sounds in the 2010s.

I had some tunes out that Radio 1 was supporting and I got put onto the MTV list. I was still living in Norfolk and realised that I couldn’t do this there, so I moved to London, got signed to Sony, performed at Leeds and Wireless, MC’d for people like Andy C, and then I lost interest in it for a variety of reasons.

In your book, you talk about rap’s framing as ‘urban’ music.

Yes, it used to be called urban and was seen as being of the city. It originally does come from the city, like 1970s New York, but it was not only of the city once it became global. In France, for example, rap music is of the suburbs – it’s from the banlieues because no one can afford to live in the city centre of Paris.

Globally, rap music emerged as a mechanism for people who were marginalised. Obviously I’m white, male, middle class and not marginalised, but one thing that informed the rap music I was writing about was this idea of being peripheral. It’s an idea that’s mirrored in France with the ring road that exists around Paris being called the [Boulevard] Périphérique. That idea can be geographic. Where I grew up is physically on the periphery and is on the periphery of culture because it’s not an artistic place. But there’s also a kind of psychology of what it means to [come of age] when you are peripheral, which I call the perceptually marginal – being on the margins of England, culture and class. Music became a mechanism through which I could try and understand those things.

You were labelled as the “new Mike Skinner”, what do you think the similarities are between the England you rapped about and his?

The thing with Mike Skinner is that even though he would reference places in London like Brixton because he lived there, you could hear in his accent that he’s not from London, he’s from Birmingham. So you could project onto him whoever you were. It wasn’t like how when rap music in Compton is talking about Crenshaw, it’s only talking about Crenshaw, or when Mobb Deep are talking about Queensbridge, they are talking about that place. It was of the place. But Mike Skinner’s wasn’t – it was of this ‘ordinary’ England.

Part of the point of this book is that there are lots of different Englands. What I’m trying to do is to say, ‘How do you understand a place?’ A place doesn’t have one identity, and the people that inhabit it will see different things from it, so partly what the book’s doing is [asking] how we can use lyrics as data and ethnographic insight to share a textured, qualitative experience of a place.

How do you think the music is still relevant today? Are those experiences of suburbia still the same for gen Z audiences compared to the early 00s?

When you go back to these parts of England where I’m from, they’re the same now as 20 years ago. They’re not getting gentrified, there’s no Costa, no new block of flats. So this notion that we’re living in this pluralistic society, with a rapid pace of change, maybe [that’s relevant] if you live in London or Manchester, but lots of England doesn’t change.

How do you think the age of streaming – where algorithms dominate what people listen to and are more likely to favour music from a cultural centre like London, rather than in ways that are hyper-local – will affect music from suburbia?

I think there’s two things here. One is the fact that when you come from a place you perceive as unexciting, you can look for forms of culture from elsewhere. When I was growing up, people spoke like they were from London in Norwich, so lots of London spills out culturally anyway. Even with me, in some of the early rap tunes I wrote they have a grime flow. I tried to talk with this patter from a world that has clout, because you think that where you’re from doesn’t. Then at the same time, there’s a lot of regionalisation that’s going on in Europe in particular – people rapping or singing in their native languages, and really centring where they’re from because they’re proud of it. Both of these things can happen at the same time.

You MC’d for Andy C and Benga, can you talk a bit about the intersection of rave culture and rap outside of cities? That’s quite a unique cultural phenomenon.

In Norfolk, they used to have these raves called Planet Yes. You would hear about where it was taking place and then you’d get a text, and then convoy out in cars to this place. It was insane how culture is produced and consumed and enjoyed by people outside of dynamic city spaces, where people come together to do the things that liberate them from the places they live in. Raving, and drum’n’bass in particular, were big things throughout the whole of my 20s – it’s a world that exists outside of places like fabric. You don’t have to get a train to bring you into London or the middle of a world you’re not a part of.

Trying to sustain forms of culture in these really peripheral places, you have to find alternative ways of making it work. Raving is a big part of the story for lots of young people’s participation in culture. If you ask people in Norwich what they think clubbing is, [they will say] it’s putting your school shoes on, dancing to chart music and getting punched in the face.

I was struck by the lyric in your song Off With their Heads (ft. Vertex of Marvell), which goes “My background’s a mining town/ So you will never see me give up or start lying down”. Within the context of rap where artists talk about where they’re from to legitimise their art, it was interesting to hear about a mining town.

My grandparents are from Worsbrough, which is a mining community outside of Barnsley, and my granddad is a fifth-generation Barnsley coal miner. What I try and talk about in the book is how complicated the notion of where we understand ourselves as being from is. What I was reflecting on is what it’s meant to reflect on where I’m from, because I’m not from anywhere. I had a conversation with my father and he said there were three things he could remember from his childhood: the smell from the slaughterhouse at the end of the road, the sound of the siren from when there was an accident at the colliery, and the fire he could see on the ceiling of his bedroom that bellowed from the colliery. He said that even though he moved away, “the mines don’t leave you”. I’m not connected to that place in any way, but the idea that they lingered from my dad was something I wanted to explore in the book – what class means across generations.

What does The England No One Cares About mean to you personally?

The book is about the relationship between stories and music. It’s based around a really simple question, which is: “What does music have the capacity to do?” It’s about what music can reveal about places and people. But it’s very baring; it talks about my childhood and my parents’ lives. It’s very vulnerable. What I hoped I could do is blend the intensely personal with the socio-political and geographic.

The England No One Cares About: Lyrics from Suburbia by George Musgrave is published by Goldsmiths Press.