50
THE URBAN MYTH
Why is it that these days a person can’t pick up a magazine or switch on the telly without
hearing that word ‘urban’? Jessica Wilson kicks up a fuss.
W
e don’t just get garage, hip hop and
R’n’B artists now, oh no they’re all
urban. Do you wear gold chains, Evisu
jeans, Adidas trainers? Then you’re rockin’ urban style.
Are you a break-dancer? A beat-boxer? Then you too
are of the urban breed, my friend. Urban has become
a way of classifying what is overtly cool and implicitly
black. The urban label is outselling Levi’s and being
stamped on more things than the Queen’s head. It
seems a symptom of this strange double-platinumMoet-on-ice-‘pass-the-Courvoisier’, superficial ‘bling
bling’ culture that has been consuming the media for
a while now. That one nondescript, two syllable, too
collective term is spewing out of presenters’ mouths
and peppering the pages of newspapers. But what is
this thing called ‘urban’ and how did it become so far
removed from its intended meaning?
For me, the word calls to mind geography lessons
where it was truly rinsed out in full effect. My lardy
teacher (I shall refrain from identifying the witch)
taught us the differences between the urban and the
suburban. Ah, how I yawned through many a lesson
on urban habitats, overpopulation in the capital etc.
(somebody pass me the Pro-plus). Even through the
haze of sleep, I managed to gather that the term
suggests something relating to the city-centre or
originating from the heart of the metropolis. In
whichever context, the text-book version of ‘urban’
is a spatial referential and unquestionably relates to
location.
Nowadays, however, the
word has floated away
from its roots and
become more racially