A groundbreaking history of a very British music genre

ABOUT a quarter of the way into Where We Come From, music journalist Aniefok Ekpoudom’s debut book, the text suddenly contracts to a thin strip of staccato sentences — a stark column of internal dialogue that is more like something you’d find in a chapbook of poetry.

- Jimi Famurewa

Deployed to visually mirror the moment when one of the book’s real-life protagonists struggles for breath in the depths of the Mediterranean, it is a heavy clue that, figuratively speaking, we are not in Kansas or even Kennington anymore. That, really, this is a work experimenting beyond the formal genre boundaries of what could broadly be described as a music scene biography.

Ostensibly an account of the birth, evolution, and ever-cresting mainstream breakthrough of UK rap and grime, Ekpoudom’s book is, in fact, a far more socially inquisitive, ambitious, and wide-ranging reading experience. Do you know about the significant impact that the Birmingham-based, Eighties-era pirate radio station PLRC had on a generation of Midlands musicians? Or the unexpected but vital connective role that a Sky call centre had to play in Croydon’s post-grime renaissance?