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

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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'?