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We Asked Promoters About Exactly How an Outdated Form Polices Grime Gigs

“Basically it’s saying, ‘we aren’t going to protect you – we’re going to treat you all like suspects’."

When politicians let us down, we vote them out – or at least we're supposed to. With the police, it doesn't really work like that. And that's where a device like Form 696 – the paperwork used by London's Metropolitan Police to assess whether a DJ or MC set meets their safety standards – gets uncomfortable. The risk assessment form is a prime example of a simple solution being applied to a complicated issue, making the innocent people caught at the centre of it feel powerless.

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Introduced in 2005, Form 696 is used to measure the risk of violence at music events in London by gathering the personal details of artists and promoters. But the small print on the type of shows it's used for means it tends to impact nights when genres such as grime, garage, R&B and house are played. This week it's back in the news because a Conservative MP, culture minister Matt Hancock, has written a letter to London mayor Sadiq Khan, suggesting it might be time for a rethink. While the direct causal (and not coincidental) link between the form and less violence has never been prominently argued, 696's continued use clearly illustrates a fear. It's not a fear of "urban" genres per se. After all, that music's eagerly consumed by white/mixed audiences now more than ever before, and in the last two years grime has seen its popularity rise to a scale compared to punk. Rather, it demonstrates the insidious sort of prejudice that permeates British society and how a need to police one "deviant" part of a population then ends up tarring bystanders with the same brush.

Speaking on the BBC's Victoria Derbyshire programme earlier this week, grime artist P Money described his sense of how the form works: "In my experience when it's normally a night where it is predominantly black people, without fail 696 Form comes out of nowhere – you have to do it. But when I've done shows where it's not predominantly black people, I don't have to do the form." Indeed, it's only applicable to events with "DJs or MCs performing to a recorded backing track" – and those have historically tended to be attended largely by people of black and minority ethnic (BAME) backgrounds. And so, on multiple occasions, the form has been used to shut events down. This isn't a new idea. We've seen a moral panic rise around black art before, from the reaction to the radical politics of jazz to the sexuality of blues. Now, this feels like the latest iteration of that idea.

Writer Dan Hancox has described grime as a "unique incarnation of Afrofuturism – the African diasporic aesthetic that takes science fiction as a tool for discussing oppression and freedom", and in the book More Brilliant Than the Sun Kodwo Eshun draws attention to the importance of sound within that aesthetic. In another book, Steve Goodman's Sonic Warfare, black music is further characterised as "a sonic weapon in a postcolonial war with Eurocentric culture over the vibrational body and its power to affect". All of which is to say that being able to express yourself through art becomes an important part of your identity. And when that's stifled, it hurts. Speaking to several promoters, I get the sense they feel black music is only allowed to exist on the terms of the majority – so long as it doesn't get too big for its boots.

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