"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“新一代本土艺人，他们不怕处理明显带有政治色彩的东西”1。在充满政治色彩的专辑中，英国黑人说唱歌手开始进行更长的叙事项目，他们跨越了“有意识”和表演性之间的界限，花时间玩弄着资本主义战利品名人和财富的形象，同时也开辟出反思的空间。这些作品不仅被主流观众接受，与地下车库集体中黑人英国说唱和肮脏的根源相去甚远，而且也构成了真正的政治抗议，音乐领导了一场“反对黑人文化视为敌对政府的叛乱”。2.然而，目前尚不清楚这位物质至上、单身的英国黑人说唱歌手何时会从吹嘘变成说教。小迈克尔·欧沃例如，《暴风》(Stormzy)在他的第三张专辑《这不是那个脑袋很重的人》3中提到了他的自我发展的完成3。然而，在之前的一张专辑中，他仍然不安地在“商业化的”和“有意识的”之间徘徊：“他们说‘我是年轻黑人青年的声音/然后我说’是的，酷‘然后我就变成了我的宠物’4。这是一个穿越他的盘状图的过渡过程，明确的结局是在他的第三张作品的地点，但关于起源点的模糊。为了更好地理解作品本身，以及这种有意识说唱的演变如何促进和背离现有的黑人英国说唱流派，关键是要问和回答：说唱是什么时候变得有意识的？

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'?