The Urban Myth 5 1
loaded than geographically significant. The expression,
in fact, bears no relation to its former meaning and
seems to have drifted off to some as yet unknown
planet of brand new connotation. If urban still meant
urban, all MCs would be born and bred on the streets
of inner-London. There would be a training school
right slap-bang in the middle with courses like ‘Rhymes
galore: finding the flavour for your flow’ and ‘Choosing
a name: J-Lo, P. Diddy and the Art of Abbreviation’. If
you were a soul singer from East Dulwich, you better
go down the jobcentre or something because where
you’re going artistically would be determined by where
you’re at geographically. There’d be no such thing as
Craig David because living in the sticks in Southampton
just wouldn’t cut it if you’re gonna be considered a
true urban artiste. The only people he would be asking
to tell him their flavour would be customers over the
ice-cream counter at Tesco.
Now, you may think I’m getting a bee in my bonnet
over this but I stand as a great believer in the importance
of language. Words can call entire realities into being.
From the beginning of time until the present day the
spoken word has been a means of creation. In Genesis,
it is only when God annunciates light that there is
light. By the same token, Bush’s ‘War on Terror’ is a
rhetorical blurb that’s called its very self
into being. George W., that
ignorant gimp, uses his
vacuous phrase to beat
out anxiety in the
hearts of the
population at large
and give justification
to unjustifiable atrocities. The fact that people are now
hyper-alert to terrorist attacks proves that how we
describe the world around us determines how we think
about it. The gulf between Bush’s choice of signifier
and the actual signified uncovers his twisted
motivations. In the case of the ‘urban’, I think what’s
going on is more of a marketing manoeuvre than a
How urban became the buzz
word for black music and culture
political ploy. When black music and culture were
subsumed by the term ‘urban’ someone somewhere
found a verbal loophole and a way to market certain
elements of ethnicity. ‘Urban’ is a term that ‘deracialises’ and de-stigmatizes when it comes to
marketing people who lie at the ethnographical margins.
It’s as if some PR guru jumped on the back of that
other misplaced word ‘street’ (don’t even get me
started on that one, somebody hold me back!) and ran
off into the consumer sunset. My point is, without
getting too PC, we need to be a bit responsible about
the way we use words. In a nutshell, ‘let your yeah be
yeah and your no be no’: don’t say something when
you mean something entirely different. If the world
operated on this principle you’d leave the house to
buy a lawnmower and come back with a chicken chow
mein. Words shouldn’t be used to disguise the truth
but should indeed accentuate it. Langu vR6