Like Lockdown Never Happened Music and Culture During Covid

Analyses how Black music and culture framed how we passed the time in the first 18 months of the pandemic.

During the COVID-19 pandemic, music listening increased as people used it to help to counter the psychological fallout of lockdown and reduce its effects of isolation, restriction and boredom. At the same time, concerts and other musical events moved online, and even when lockdown eased, social distancing meant that group musical and cultural events took on a different format.

With a focus on contemporary Black music, this book takes a deep dive into a few of the various forms that popular culture took over this period, including Kano's Newham Talks series; Steve McQueen's BBC anthology Small Axe; the Verzuz DJ Battle series; TikTok's Don't Rush Challenge; radio station theresnosignal; and many more.

An attempt to make sense of chronological and kairotic time in the early era of the pandemic, this book explores the way that Black joy and sonic Black geographies were key to the culture of this period, and how Black music and Black creative expression soundtracked and sustained us during the pandemic.

Joy White is Lecturer in Applied Social Studies at the University of Bedfordshire and the author of Urban Music and Entrepreneurship: Beats, Rhymes and Young People’s Enterprise and Terraformed: Young Black Lives in the Inner-City. She has also written for The Quietus, The Conversation, Prospect, Red Pepper and Google Arts & Culture.