Among the many reasons not to be cheerful in the year of Covid-19 is the fact that this has been a bleak time for those used to finding individual solace and collective joy in music. At the back-end of eleven months of quiet evenings in for patrons of the night-time economy, and unprecedented material hardship for those who strive to make a living catering to their needs (compounded by the disdainful double-dealing of a government with other fish not to fry), it’s a challenge to conceive of any form of positive outcome emerging from that period of enforced reflection.

But if the pang of live music’s sudden and extended absence could have an upbeat corollary, it might be an enhanced appreciation of the value music adds to the life of the city, and a deeper awareness of the inequities of access which stratify this supposedly universal healing force with class divides as deep as any other form of human endeavour.

Over the last two years, a sequence of four slim volumes (unconnected but overlapping) have redrawn the map of London—at least as far as music-writing is concerned—with a new emphasis on the socio-economic conditions which facilitate or undermine freedom of musical expression. The fact that all of them have black and white covers with at most a title or sub-title picked out in a brighter shade is insufficient evidence to suggest a monochromatic conspiracy.

Emma Warren’s Make Some Space is a self-published insider’s study of the contribution made by the Total Refreshment Centre in Dalston to the emergence of a new London jazz scene. It fearlessly foregrounds the factors contributing to the availability of a suitable location in which such a musical community could form. Thus Cleveland Watkiss and Orphy Robinson—elder statesman of an earlier UK jazz upsurge—are given room to reminisce about the Clapton rehearsal studio in which Britfunk band Savanna once jammed with a prototype Iron Maiden. And although Warren’s is, ultimately, an optimistic book, the neighbour’s noise complaint that thwarts the venue’s last night brings it to a rather ominous conclusion, as the author reflects on the ‘broader problem of people moving into the city expect[ing] a suburban right to silence on a Saturday night, while also possessing the suburban confidence to work the system in order to get what they want.’

For those who feel the word ‘suburban’ is doing some very heavy lifting in that sentence (almost as heavy as the word ‘urban’ used to have to do for the British music industry), Terraformed, Joy White’s ‘insider ethnography’ of the London Borough of Newham, brings the racial fault-lines underpinning gentrification’s artfully maintained artisanal façade still more starkly to the fore. As the climax of a long-term municipal campaign aimed at ‘keeping young black people out of public space’, White cites the 76 Newham-filmed grime videos which were taken down off YouTube at the police’s insistence in the course of the Olympic summer of 2012. Looming large among the grounds cited for this draconian censorship were the participants ‘mentioning a different postcode [and] being in a group of three or more wearing clothes of the same colour’. It is instructive to wonder how far The Beatles would have got operating under that kind of regimen.

If such arbitrary-seeming restrictions recall some of the more absurd recent antics of regional police-forces—beat-bobby fantasies of omnipotence stimulated by government rhetoric to the point of polluting beauty spot tarns with protective ink—the echo is probably instructive. One unlooked-for consequence of the Covid-19 lockdown has been to introduce British musicians of all ethnicities to the level of authoritarian control to which previously only black performers were subject.

Malcolm James’ theoretical (but of immense practical value) inquiry into Sonic Intimacy adumbrates the ratcheting-up of law enforcement’s interventions in black British music-making. These escalations stretch from routine but sporadic police harassment of reggae sound systems in the seventies and eighties, to the DTI’s increasingly scorched-earth assault on jungle pirate radio in the nineties, to the notorious risk assessment form 696 which essentially (in East London at least – Glastonbury would be another matter) closed down grime as a live performance medium over the course of the next decade.

In that context, James’ book makes several references to Franco Rossi’s once undervalued but now ever more canonical 1981 sound system drama, Babylon. It’s a scene in this film – an angry confrontation between a racist white woman and the character Beefy (played by Trevor Laird), which supplies (via the theme-tune for Beefy which Dennis Bovell and Matumbi contribute to the justly celebrated soundtrack) the title for the most seemingly arcane and high concept of this quartet of ground-breaking musical inquiries.

Dhanveer Singh Brar’s Beefy’s Tune (Dean Blunt Edit) takes Beefy’s refusal to give ground as the starting point for a meditation on the provocative art of Hackney’s Dean Blunt. Blunt’s landmark 2016 album “BBF” Hosted by DJ Escrow begins with a four-minute loop of Craig David proclaiming ‘This makes me proud to be British’ at the 2000 MOBO awards – time enough for the listener to reflect on David’s very different experience at the BRIT awards a few months later, where he turned up wearing a union jack jumper having been nominated for the sack of awards his commercial pre-eminence in that year would usually have guaranteed, only to walk away with nothing, a snub which prefigured his subsequent humiliation via the blackface pillorying of TV comedian Leigh Francis. The latter would ultimately issue a tearful Instagram apology video for his ‘racism’ in 2020, after being publicly shamed by talk-show host (and erstwhile butt of his jokes) Trisha for his hypocrisy in evincing sympathy with the Black Lives Matter movement.

‘I’m not British at all,’ Brar quotes the plain-speaking Blunt as noting in an interview. ‘The British told me that.’ And in the author’s own formulation, ‘What ‘BBF’ does is collapse the racial border between the avant-garde and black social music, not by sitting in the ambivalence of the between, but by stealthily ignoring it altogether.’ While not every reader will join Brar in instantly connecting the ‘internalised policing of black music as necessarily anti avant-gardist’ with some tense late-eighties and early-nineties critical exchanges about New Black Cinema between Kobena Mercer and Paul Gilroy, this baton is, in fact, well worth running with – not least for the light this seemingly esoteric exchange sheds on one communal musical celebration that did go ahead in 2020.

The wave of euphoria (especially from white people on Twitter, although if you looked carefully on Facebook it was possible to find sound-system veterans outraged by the wrongness of the spindle the DJs were using) which greeted the BBC screening of Lovers Rock, the second instalment of Steve McQueen’s five-part Small Axe series, was almost an event in itself. And if it was possible to discern some of the roots of that sense of communion in the deferred social gratification of endlessly extending lockdowns, that didn’t make McQueen’s achievement in creating that shared moment any less significant.

Even while showcasing the total lack of interest in plausible narrative of which he is not the first artist-turned-filmmaker to be justifiably accused (one day a thesis will presumably be written on the justification for that tacked-on rape storyline, but if it’d had any more holes in it, it would have been a string vest), McQueen somehow (more or less) united a mass prime-time TV audience in the ecstasy of a Janet Kay tone-poem. If that’s not collapsing the racial border between the avant-garde and black social music, I don’t know what is.

Elsewhere in the series, more conventionally realised storylines of self-empowerment and community outreach against the odds were occasionally interspersed with sparsely beautiful monochrome montage interludes, depicting the construction of the Westway in the opening episode, and the campaign for justice for victims of the New Cross Fire in the fourth. The latter in particular—cut to Linton Kwesi Johnson’s famous poem ‘New Crass Massakah’ with the brio of a dub-loving Eisenstein—is as powerful a sequence of historical images as I can ever remember seeing on British TV.

Like his one-time producer Dennis Bovell (whose acting cameo in Lovers Rock suggests he made the right career choice by going into music), 2020 PEN Pinter prize-winner Johnson is long overdue his moment in the spotlight. He duly crops up in both Brar’s book (performing the immortal and never more pertinent ‘Inglan is a Bitch’ on the Old Grey Whistle Test) and Malcolm James’, where his assertion that ‘bass history is a moving and a hurting black story’ establishes him as a Dunn & Co stingy brim trilby-hatted dramaturge. Small Axe’s memorial to an Afro-Caribbean-dominated ideal of black British culture is, if not explicitly nostalgic, at the very least chronologically specific; but these four volumes, which might function as a supplementary reading list to the series, look to the future, not to the past.

Individually and collectively they mark a historic break with two fading orthodoxies; on the one hand, the East London-based intellectual virus of ‘psychogeography‘ (Hackney is its Wuhan), with its blokeish praxis of middle-class men going for walks (local history as art-statement); on the other, the critical consensus surrounding ‘the hardcore continuum‘. Rooted in the capacious and in many other ways instructive oeuvres of Simon Reynolds, Mark Fisher and Kodwo Eshun, this latter traced a musical lineage from rave to jungle to grime to dubstep wherein value sometimes seemed to be connoted not so much by beats or melody as by suitability for recontextualisation within frameworks established by Deleuze and Guattari.

These new texts mark the final shift from that polemical fetishisation of the posthuman to a warmer embrace of the cultural inheritance whereby a DJ uncle passes down the funk 45s that become the next generation’s drum and bass breakbeats. ‘If Kool didn’t switch on it was like a relative had died,’ remember Dugs and Woods of their favourite pirate station in Malcolm James’ book, and it would be hard to come up with a clearer statement of the meaning of ‘sonic intimacy’.