Chapman professor brings Black-British music to education with new book

While growing up in London, Monique Charles listened to Black-British music that wasn’t taught in her music curriculum. She hopes her new book, “Black Music in Britain in the 21st Century," brings a more diverse look at music into schools. Photos courtesy of Monique Charles. Collage by EMILY PARIS, photo editor

Growing up in the Harlesden area of North West London, Monique Charles adored music with her first favorite songs being "Karma Chameleon” by Culture Club and “Ain't Nobody” by Chaka Khan. 

Mirroring the diverse city of London, Charles would listen to a wide array of genres including jungle, grime, reggae, garage, soca, and Caribbean music. 

“My ancestry is through the Caribbean, but you've got Cypriot communities, you've got West African communities, you've got the Irish, you've got Brazilian communities, so they all migrate and bring their musical influences and they start to mix and meld and that's how you get these unique sounds coming from London or from Britain,” said Charles, a sound therapist and sociology professor at Chapman University.

In March, Charles released her book “Black Music in Britain in the 21st Century," which covers the diverse genres of music that have arisen from Black-British culture. 

“Because the types of music being made (in Britain) are so diverse, I opened up and threw the gauntlet down and was like, ‘This is Black music in Britain,'" Charles told The Panther. 

In the hustle and bustle of London, there was always sound around Charles — from daytime parties where kids under 18 could dance to proper clubs that played an assortment of music and the passing of tubes and buses. During her doctorate at University of Warwick, she started thinking about how this soundscape influenced music. 

“At some point, some U.S. artists were really into grime, and they couldn't quite get the flow,” Charles said. “I think it's a lot to do with the kind of architecture and the soundscapes that are created through grime, that kind of intonation of speech, the ways in which Caribbean and West African influences merge into a language that create the curves and the flows and in the actual way people speak and the ways that sounds are heavily layered on top of each other in London.” 

Although London is filled with a variety of music, the genres Charles was taught about in highschool often centered around classical music, which she enjoys, but isn’t the only type of music she grew up with. Some of her favorite artists included Super Cat, Mary J. Blige, Beenie Man, Machel Montano and Oasis. 

In order to give a holistic look at Black British music, the book is broken up into three parts that cover diaspora music and the Black Atlantic, 21st century Black British music and socio-political and economic issues in regards to Black British music. 

“You could look at different genres of music or different kinds of issues and social factors that influenced the music, or you can at least start to delve into it,” Charles said. “There's obviously a lot more than a book can cover, but it's kind of like opening up a new world.”

Charles wrote the introduction and one of the chapters while 15 other people — each with their own expertise in music and sociology — contributed to the rest of the book. Charles edited all their chapters together into one cohesive collection. 

“I made it an edited collection because then I could ask other people to write different chapters around areas where they already have expertise and knowledge,” Charles said. “If I was to go around and do all of it, it would take too long.” 

Being part of a minority community made Charles very interested in race and the ways the world was presented through different lenses. This interest led to her receiving a bachelor's degree in sociology from Middlesex University. She went on to earn her master's degree from the University of London, Birbeck in which she focused on representation in hip hop.

During her doctorate program, which she finished in 2016, she specifically wanted to analyze Black music in the U.K. because Black people had been in the U.K. for a long enough time to form their own Black-British culture. She focused on grime music, which she describes as a British version of hip-hop, and other Black-Britsh genres to bring this music to people's attention. 

“I thought, ‘this needs to be in the curriculum,’” Charles said. “I saw that if politicians here in the U.S. would vilify (hip-hop), there'd be academics and scholarly work that could kind of talk about the music, the contribution and things like that. I wanted to start to bring this into the curriculum, bring it in and enable it to be understood as a discipline.”

While the U.K. teaches music from a more vocational standpoint, she found the U.S. already integrated more sociological aspects of music into their curriculum. She realized that there was space for her work to develop and be supported in the U.S., so she moved to California in July 2022 and started teaching at Chapman University in August 2022.  

“Because of America being such a cultural superpower it will have impacts going back to the U.K., for people to say, 'Oh, yeah, actually, we could do this sort of thing,’” Charles said. 

The idea for this book was born five years ago as a means to bring Black-British music to the masses. However, the COVID-19 pandemic got in the way and prolonged the creation of the book. 

“There was more writing time, but it was just so many other things (like) worrying about other people and worrying about yourself,” Charles said. “(A pandemic), it's a major thing, and we have to obviously respect that. Writing can be quite challenging and then on top of that, in a pandemic, you have to give people some grace."

Now that the book is out, Charles completed a book launch at the School of Oriental and African Studies (SOAS University) in London, England at the end of March. The book will be incorporated into sociology, music and cultural studies curricula in New Zealand, Australia, West Africa and other European countries. 

Ultimately, Charles said she hopes to bring awareness to underrepresented music in the academic world.

“Hopefully it will inspire more and more academics to come in and do this kind of research, because at one point, when I mentioned, ‘Oh, I'm doing my (doctorate) on grime,’ people were like, ‘What, why would you do that? That's just music?’”  Charles said. 

Charles' book, "Black Music in Britain in the 21st Century,'' is available for purchase on Amazon.