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Hold Tight: Black Masculinity, Millennials and the Meaning of Grime [New Edition]
Hold Tight is the book that kick started the 'Grime Library'. Bursting into bookshops in July 2017 to rave reviews and a sold out event at Rough Trade East, Hold Tight paved the way for Grime-related books such as Wiley's Eskiboy , Dan Hancox's Inner City Pressure and DJ Target’s Grime Kids .This new edition of Hold Tight features new chapters, a brand new introduction from Boakye and a brand new cover. Celebrating over sixty key songs that make up Grime’s DNA, Jeffrey Boakye explores the meaning of the music and why it has such resonance in the UK. Boakye also examines the representation of masculinity in the music and the media that covers it. Both a love letter to Grime and an investigation into life as a black man in Britain today, Hold Tight is insightful, very funny and stacked with sentences you’ll want to pull up and read again and again.
400 pages, Paperback
First published July 6, 2017
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Displaying 1 - 15 of 15 reviews
May 15, 2018
Boakye takes you on a journey of how Grime was conceived and how it has evolved over the years through a track list of 66 key songs.
I played every track whilst I read through the chapters, until I reached Functions on the Low. I had this track on repeat, right through to the acknowledgements!
Boakye approach is witty and insightful, I have a new found appreciation for some of the tracks.
I played every track whilst I read through the chapters, until I reached Functions on the Low. I had this track on repeat, right through to the acknowledgements!
Boakye approach is witty and insightful, I have a new found appreciation for some of the tracks.
September 29, 2017
This book is not what I expected. A mixtape in literary form, it lists 50 of the most important tracks in the history of Grime. Other than a few short essays at the end, that's it: Jeffrey Boakye just describes and discusses these 50 songs. And he does it in a way that is jammed full of music journalist clichés, of jokey footnotes, and of awkward monologues to the reader (you know that thing where it's, like, he's talking to you, yeah? He's pretending to have a conversation, yeah? Being chatty, yeah? You do, you know exactly what I mean — after all, I mean, I'm doing it now. It's kinda annoying, don't you think? Mastubatory, self-congraulatory, various other kinds of —tory, yeah?)
But despite that — sometimes because of it — I ended up loving this book. *Loving* it. Of course, I read with the book in one hand, my phone in the other, so I could bring up each of the 50 tracks on YouTube and listen along, and that in itself taught me loads.
"Black Masculinity, Millennials"? There was less of that than I'd hoped (and most of it in the appendix), but some understanding of what it is to be young, poor, male and black in the early 21st century did seep out of the writing on the 50 tracks. Boakye doesn't shy away from the violence and misogyny that is a common to many grime tracks, and by the end I felt that I understood much better why these elements are there, though I didn't feel any more comfortable with them.
One of the few tracks by a female artist included in the book (Queen's Speech 4 by Lady Leshurr) is one of the few that my teenage daughter was aware of, and when Boakye says (of the 11 to 13-year-old girls in his English class) that "In Lady L, they found license to be extrovert and confident in a strictly female context", I scribbled in the margin "Fucking YES Jeffrey! It seems like you almost get it". But that was only after, two pages earlier, he'd written this about the same track:
"'Queen's Speech 4' won't win any awards for being profound. The first bar sets the tone and says it all, stapling a simile about contemporary temporary social media to an ironically simple simile about going over your head the same way a snapback does. This is the realm in which Leshurr seems to live today; unapologetic pop-culture references for the youth of today, sprinkled with playground bravado. Thing is, it's all rather quite addictive, and actually quite effective. It's impossible not to smile when you catch the puns in her hashtag flow, even when (especially when?) they are inane."
You know what you just did there, Jeffrey? You just described your own book, far better than I could ever have done. It's not profound. It's unapolagetically pop-culture. And, to my surprise, it's all rather addictive; effective, even!
But despite that — sometimes because of it — I ended up loving this book. *Loving* it. Of course, I read with the book in one hand, my phone in the other, so I could bring up each of the 50 tracks on YouTube and listen along, and that in itself taught me loads.
"Black Masculinity, Millennials"? There was less of that than I'd hoped (and most of it in the appendix), but some understanding of what it is to be young, poor, male and black in the early 21st century did seep out of the writing on the 50 tracks. Boakye doesn't shy away from the violence and misogyny that is a common to many grime tracks, and by the end I felt that I understood much better why these elements are there, though I didn't feel any more comfortable with them.
One of the few tracks by a female artist included in the book (Queen's Speech 4 by Lady Leshurr) is one of the few that my teenage daughter was aware of, and when Boakye says (of the 11 to 13-year-old girls in his English class) that "In Lady L, they found license to be extrovert and confident in a strictly female context", I scribbled in the margin "Fucking YES Jeffrey! It seems like you almost get it". But that was only after, two pages earlier, he'd written this about the same track:
"'Queen's Speech 4' won't win any awards for being profound. The first bar sets the tone and says it all, stapling a simile about contemporary temporary social media to an ironically simple simile about going over your head the same way a snapback does. This is the realm in which Leshurr seems to live today; unapologetic pop-culture references for the youth of today, sprinkled with playground bravado. Thing is, it's all rather quite addictive, and actually quite effective. It's impossible not to smile when you catch the puns in her hashtag flow, even when (especially when?) they are inane."
You know what you just did there, Jeffrey? You just described your own book, far better than I could ever have done. It's not profound. It's unapolagetically pop-culture. And, to my surprise, it's all rather addictive; effective, even!
June 2, 2021
Really good - Boakye’s love of the music, and of writing itself, shines through in these short essays on individual songs, paired with longer essays about the scene in general, black masculinity and the challenges of a DIY scene being co-opted.
Being a white guy in his 30s with barely any understanding of the scene, this served as a great pointer for some crucial albums I’d otherwise miss, such as mysterious, masked CASISDEAD (sort of the scene’s Dr Octagon), the bluntly eloquent vegan Jme, or the never-got-round-to-him Giggs (whose album is worth a mention purely for Aystar spitting bars in broad Scouse).
It being a book about a contemporary scene, some later developments have superseded the stories told: Dave’s ‘Psychodrama’ adds a vulnerability to the genre that didn’t seem possible as recently as 2016, while Wiley’s anti-Semitic tweets complicate his legacy (he features on a lot of these songs in some way). But it’s a book written on an ongoing journey, and as a dispatch, it’s recommended.
Being a white guy in his 30s with barely any understanding of the scene, this served as a great pointer for some crucial albums I’d otherwise miss, such as mysterious, masked CASISDEAD (sort of the scene’s Dr Octagon), the bluntly eloquent vegan Jme, or the never-got-round-to-him Giggs (whose album is worth a mention purely for Aystar spitting bars in broad Scouse).
It being a book about a contemporary scene, some later developments have superseded the stories told: Dave’s ‘Psychodrama’ adds a vulnerability to the genre that didn’t seem possible as recently as 2016, while Wiley’s anti-Semitic tweets complicate his legacy (he features on a lot of these songs in some way). But it’s a book written on an ongoing journey, and as a dispatch, it’s recommended.
March 8, 2026
Enigmatic writer, really beautiful, and the book gives so much to (re)think about. For me, not enough criticism given to how otherness is dealt with in gender and sexuality. It’s touched upon but then doesn’t go anywhere. I also find it hard to empathise with the ‘poor men’ and ‘masculinity is hard’ discourse. I get it, but, gender conforming men benefit from the masculine dividends of the hegemony, which, being gender-conforming men, they also have the power to change.
October 27, 2017
I expected a lot from a book whose subtitle is: black masculinity, millennials and the meaning of grime. I'm pleased to say this book more than delivered on all fronts. It's a work of art that charts the rise and fall and rise again of grime in a very fresh and authentic way. I think it helps that Boakye is an English teacher (so am I), he very obviously teaches sentence construction for a living and it makes this book an absolute pleasure to read. Packed with history, informed opinion, facts, humour, anecdotes and a sensitive deconstruction of grime, music and where it sits in multi-culturalism this book is a must read for anyone who has any interest in youth growing up in an urban context; a love of grime or both!
January 31, 2018
"Grime, like any significant cultural movement, deserves thoughtful examination and critique ... Hold Tight: Black Masculinity, Millennials & the Meaning of Grime is a remarkable book that marries research and rigour with the uncomplicated enthusiasm of a fan. It isn’t – and doesn’t claim to be – the final word on Grime (how could it be?) But Hold Tight is a superlative example of just how essential this kind of non-fiction can be to understanding and appreciating popular culture."
Full review can be found at https://pagetrackshot.wordpress.com/2...
Full review can be found at https://pagetrackshot.wordpress.com/2...
November 4, 2018
Just excellent. Boakye, first of all, is an engaging, funny and erudite writer who can weave a narrative together that pulls you through with pace and a rapacious, disarming wit. It’s the most authentically London voice I’ve ever seen committed to prose, encapsulating the freneticism, intellectual dexterity and intertextual power native to the city. It should be taken as a clarion call to academia about how useful it is to engage with concepts from their own territory, rather than trying to club everything over the head and drag it back to the ivory tower.
It’s formally fascinating for one. The opening pages are rhymes that demand to be heard out loud. He plays with lists, inversions, false starts and loopy meanders around the theme. And when necessary he serves it straight up and cold. Boakye is experimenting throughout, and he is apparently a natural writer of great skill.
It has Pratchett-esque use of footnotes. Like every time you see one it’s a joy because you know what you find there will be informative (but slightly off topic) or hilariously inane. Often both together. Honestly, I was giggling on the 38 with this book repeatedly.
Most importantly, though, is Boakye’s thesis. In essence it is a celebration of the counter-cultural movement turned mainstream phenomena that empowered his identities as a youth, and now an adult. To be young, black and lower class in London means countless things, things I’m not properly able to comment on. Boakye is, and he lays out how and why Grime represents a new cultural idiom for people who never had one.
And he criticises it, heavily. That’s in the critical sense of the word, not the pejorative. Boakye unflinchingly dissects the thing he loves most of his culture, and exposes its power and strength but also it’s failures and weaknesses. On the one hand, this book invites you to embrace Grime with the same passion he does - and his infectious and sophisticated love for it is amply demonstrated here - whilst on the other he calls for it to be better. He calls for a reformation of black masculinity, both from within and outside the black community.
It’s about art. And culture. And language and identity. And sick beats and MCs with bare skills. It’s about disenfranchisement and carving your own space and what happens when the people who didn’t know what to do with you before now recognise the thing you’ve made and want to share in it, or take it and make it something they can more easily understand because that’s all they can do. It’s about dualities instead of mono-polar reductions. It’s about how children become men in urban centres, why a generation learned the things they did, and demanding that we, all of us together, not just within Grime, allow that community to hold on to their voice and identity whilst evolving past the issues they have. Because, really, those issues manifest across the whole UK, across subcultures of every class and we should all be trying to move past them together.
Read it, get invested. Wherever you’re from, accept the invitation to love and challenge simultaneously, to look outwards and take responsibility for the world we are creating.
Hold tight, Jeffrey Boakye.
It’s formally fascinating for one. The opening pages are rhymes that demand to be heard out loud. He plays with lists, inversions, false starts and loopy meanders around the theme. And when necessary he serves it straight up and cold. Boakye is experimenting throughout, and he is apparently a natural writer of great skill.
It has Pratchett-esque use of footnotes. Like every time you see one it’s a joy because you know what you find there will be informative (but slightly off topic) or hilariously inane. Often both together. Honestly, I was giggling on the 38 with this book repeatedly.
Most importantly, though, is Boakye’s thesis. In essence it is a celebration of the counter-cultural movement turned mainstream phenomena that empowered his identities as a youth, and now an adult. To be young, black and lower class in London means countless things, things I’m not properly able to comment on. Boakye is, and he lays out how and why Grime represents a new cultural idiom for people who never had one.
And he criticises it, heavily. That’s in the critical sense of the word, not the pejorative. Boakye unflinchingly dissects the thing he loves most of his culture, and exposes its power and strength but also it’s failures and weaknesses. On the one hand, this book invites you to embrace Grime with the same passion he does - and his infectious and sophisticated love for it is amply demonstrated here - whilst on the other he calls for it to be better. He calls for a reformation of black masculinity, both from within and outside the black community.
It’s about art. And culture. And language and identity. And sick beats and MCs with bare skills. It’s about disenfranchisement and carving your own space and what happens when the people who didn’t know what to do with you before now recognise the thing you’ve made and want to share in it, or take it and make it something they can more easily understand because that’s all they can do. It’s about dualities instead of mono-polar reductions. It’s about how children become men in urban centres, why a generation learned the things they did, and demanding that we, all of us together, not just within Grime, allow that community to hold on to their voice and identity whilst evolving past the issues they have. Because, really, those issues manifest across the whole UK, across subcultures of every class and we should all be trying to move past them together.
Read it, get invested. Wherever you’re from, accept the invitation to love and challenge simultaneously, to look outwards and take responsibility for the world we are creating.
Hold tight, Jeffrey Boakye.
October 9, 2018
Hold Tight is underserved by its subtitle, which makes the book seem like a piece of academia. I don't think I would have read it unless I'd already read and enjoyed an extract in Noisey.
In reality, the book is mainly a personal journey through grime, via standout tunes from the last 20 (and then some) years. It's often hilarious. I laughed out loud at least four times. And Jeffrey Boakye is an engaging narrator. By the end I just wanted to go round his house and listen to him play records while he told me about them. It's definitely worth keeping a playlist on hand as you read.
I would never claim to be an expert on grime, and the book doesn't claim to be a comprehensive history, but the story as told is accurate to the way I remember things. 2-step turned into grime, which turned into pop, which came finally back to grime. It's somewhat odd that dubstep is only mentioned a couple of times in passing, when I remember dubstep, grime, sublow, and 8 bar all being intertwined in the early days. For example, in 2004 Rephlex (of all labels) released a compilation called Grime that didn't have a single MC on it!
The appendices of essays at the end seem really unnecessary, as if part of a different book. I think the goal is to try and compare this personal story of one man's journey with a wider sociocultural view. But the essays weren't deep enough to do this.
I can imagine a book where the very real issues of race, society and culture in the essays are interweaved more subtly and effectively into stories which highlight them. Just as one example, it's a shame that Boakye only superficially talks about being a schoolteacher of grime fans who happens to also be a grime fan himself. If this experience teaching has given him a realer and richer view than just "grime nerd" then that sadly doesn't come across.
Overall, Hold Tight is an engaging read, a good grime primer, and a nang playlist. But it could have been much more.
In reality, the book is mainly a personal journey through grime, via standout tunes from the last 20 (and then some) years. It's often hilarious. I laughed out loud at least four times. And Jeffrey Boakye is an engaging narrator. By the end I just wanted to go round his house and listen to him play records while he told me about them. It's definitely worth keeping a playlist on hand as you read.
I would never claim to be an expert on grime, and the book doesn't claim to be a comprehensive history, but the story as told is accurate to the way I remember things. 2-step turned into grime, which turned into pop, which came finally back to grime. It's somewhat odd that dubstep is only mentioned a couple of times in passing, when I remember dubstep, grime, sublow, and 8 bar all being intertwined in the early days. For example, in 2004 Rephlex (of all labels) released a compilation called Grime that didn't have a single MC on it!
The appendices of essays at the end seem really unnecessary, as if part of a different book. I think the goal is to try and compare this personal story of one man's journey with a wider sociocultural view. But the essays weren't deep enough to do this.
I can imagine a book where the very real issues of race, society and culture in the essays are interweaved more subtly and effectively into stories which highlight them. Just as one example, it's a shame that Boakye only superficially talks about being a schoolteacher of grime fans who happens to also be a grime fan himself. If this experience teaching has given him a realer and richer view than just "grime nerd" then that sadly doesn't come across.
Overall, Hold Tight is an engaging read, a good grime primer, and a nang playlist. But it could have been much more.
November 19, 2022
Hold Tight by Jeffrey Boakye is a love letter to Grime. This book is both knowledge driven and passion driven. Boakye is a connoisseur of music and more specifically grime. In this book he tells us of the history of grime, how it came to be, how it has evolved, how it has impacted London, Britain and the world. He tells this to us through a range of Grime artists and 66 of their songs. Reading this book has allowed me to expand more Grime repoitore from Stormzy, Kano and Skepta to include a far greater range of old artists, newer artists and women artists. I appreciate this book for opening up my eyes to the culture that has take the world by storm, Grime.
Jeffrey Boakye is a very gifted writer and this comes in throughout the book. He is a secondary English teacher and this is obvious but he cares about grime, race, education and popular culture in much the same way. I listened to his book ecause I wanted to hear the passion and I did, I was entranced by it and memerised. As an outsider to this world I have always found it intriguing so much of it reminds me of home and our way of life and then so much of it does not, so much of it is a uniquely Black British experience or East London experience and yet Grime gives every lone an opportunity to peak through the open window and to observe this world.
I highly recommend this book for Grime lovers or for those that just want to know a little bit more about Grime!
Jeffrey Boakye is a very gifted writer and this comes in throughout the book. He is a secondary English teacher and this is obvious but he cares about grime, race, education and popular culture in much the same way. I listened to his book ecause I wanted to hear the passion and I did, I was entranced by it and memerised. As an outsider to this world I have always found it intriguing so much of it reminds me of home and our way of life and then so much of it does not, so much of it is a uniquely Black British experience or East London experience and yet Grime gives every lone an opportunity to peak through the open window and to observe this world.
I highly recommend this book for Grime lovers or for those that just want to know a little bit more about Grime!
November 29, 2021
Loved it! I listened to the audio version so massive shout out to the narrator who added another dimension to the telling of these stories. Rich with detail, smart, insightful analysis and pure joy and adoration in the descriptions, this book tells the grime story in such an enthralling way, you just can’t help but love the genre by the end. Even the tracks I’d never thought much of, after listening to Jeffrey explain them, I hear them differently now. Also his examination and insights into black culture and street culture through the 80s and 90s really resonated. Things he mentions that aren’t really ever talked about but are soooo true! Highly recommend having YouTube to hand whilst you’re reading this book so you can listen to every track as they’re mentioned. Fun and enlightening I defy any grime sceptics to feel the same way after reading this book. This is how music, history, everything should be taught in schools. Brilliant.
August 4, 2017
Sensational book.
Jeffrey's passion for and dedication to Grime music is fantastically apparent throughout the humour and slight references, of which I must have missed numerous.
What is most amazing is that each chapter, could easily have been written by different people. Although the structure of the book (detailing grime through individual songs) could lead towards a stale reading experience. Jeffrey's writing style and passion keeps every page fresh and intriguing.
A great read for Grime fans.
Jeffrey's passion for and dedication to Grime music is fantastically apparent throughout the humour and slight references, of which I must have missed numerous.
What is most amazing is that each chapter, could easily have been written by different people. Although the structure of the book (detailing grime through individual songs) could lead towards a stale reading experience. Jeffrey's writing style and passion keeps every page fresh and intriguing.
A great read for Grime fans.
December 28, 2023
I loved Blacklisted and this didn’t disappoint. Unpicking standout tracks from 2nd wave of grime movement and sees the trajectory of the likes of Wiley and Dizzee Rascal. Very witty and dry, very insightful.
August 4, 2021
I learnt a lot about Grime. I don’t even like much grime. But I enjoyed this book!
February 29, 2024
I’ve neglected reading for a long time as I thought it wasn’t for me but it turned out I just hadn’t found the right book. This book has ignited a love for reading and for that reason I have to give it 5 stars
February 20, 2019
Brilliant idea for a book. Loved it and found v interesting even though I knew nothing about grime.
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