"There's a couple lines in our script/I think we should edit": Autofiction and the moment of "consciousness" in black-British conscious rap

奥马尔·沙希德将“有意识的”说唱定义为“新一代的本土艺术家，他们不怕处理明显的政治问题”。在充满政治色彩的专辑中，英国黑人说唱歌手开始了更长的叙事项目，他们跨越了“意识”和表演之间的界限，花时间发挥资本主义对名人和财富的掠夺的形象，同时也开辟了反省的空间。这些作品不仅被主流观众所接受，与英国黑人说唱和地下车库集体中的grimein相去甚远，而且也构成了真正的政治抗议，音乐领导了“对黑人文化认为是敌对政府的反叛”。小迈克尔·奥沃（Stormzy），例如，手势完成他的自我发展后，达到他的第三张专辑，“这不是同一个人谁说他的头很重”3。然而，在之前的一张专辑中，他仍然在“商业化”和“有意识”之间感到不安：“他们说我是年轻黑人青年的声音/然后我说“是的，酷”，然后我把我的祖特“4。这意味着一个过渡的过程，贯穿他的唱片，在他的第三部作品的地点有一个明确的结束，但围绕着起源点。为了更好地理解作品本身，以及这种有意识的说唱如何有助于和偏离现有的黑人-英国说唱流派，关键是要问和回答：说唱何时变得“有意识”？

Omar Shahid defines 'conscious' rap as "a new generation of homegrown artists who aren'tscared to deal in the explicitly political"1. Within politically charged albums, black-Britishrappers embark on longer narrative projects in which they straddle the boundary between the'conscious' and the performative, taking time to play with imagery of the capitalist spoils ofcelebrity and wealth, whilst also carving out spaces for introspection. These works are not onlybeing accepted by mainstream audiences, a far cry from the roots of black-British rap and grimein underground garage collectives, but are also constituting genuine political protest, with themusic leading the "rebellion against what black culture considers to be a hostile government"2.However, it remains unclear as to when the materialistic, single-producing black-British rapperexchanges boastfulness for didacticism. Michael Owuo Jr. (Stormzy), for example, gestures to thecompletion of his self-development upon reaching his third album, "This ain't the same man whosaid his head was heavy"3. And yet, one album prior, he remained uncomfortably between the"commercialized" and the "conscious": "They sayin' I'm the voice of the young black youth/Andthen I say "Yeah, cool" and then I bun my zoot"4. This gestures to a process of transitiontraversing his discography, with a definitive end in the site of his third work, but ambiguitysurrounding the point of origin. In order to understand the work itself better, as well as how thisevolution of conscious rap contributes to and diverges from the existing genre of black-Britishrap, it is critical to ask and answer: when does rap become 'conscious'?