Black History Month in school was always complicated for me. I used to argue with teachers about what it really meant, because the history I needed wasn’t on their whiteboard. We were given Tudors, trenches and tectonic plates. All fine; but none of that helped me figure out how to live as a Black girl in Britain right now.

That history was outside the classroom. It was the Bluetooth speaker blasting at lunch, TikTok dances in the corridor, my aunties’ playlists rolling on Saturday afternoons. Music mentored us. Not in the cliché “music saved my life” way, but in the everyday, practical sense: it gave us language, rhythm, rules, even maps.

For the generation just above me, grime was the foundation. But by the time I was growing up, it was Afroswing, Afrobeats and UK rap that soundtracked everything. 

Kojo Funds, Not3s, J Hus, NSG; their songs were the air we breathed. When those artists fused road rap with West African and Caribbean rhythm, it felt like someone finally built a sound for our actual lives: church one day, ends the next, mandem group chats, family motives in the summer.

J Hus sits at the centre of that memory. Not as a perfect person, but as the artist who made it normal to live in multiple cultures at once. His album Common Sense mixed patois with pidgin and road slang with sweet melodies. Critics said it blurred diaspora boundaries, but for us it was simpler than that; it sounded like home.

And then NSG turned that feeling into movement. Options, then OT Bop, weren’t just songs, they were social events. You learnt the choreography, you caught the captions, you proved you were tapped in. Youth magazines wrote about how the “OT Bop” snippet went viral before the full drop. That moment taught us something without anyone spelling it out: TikTok and Instagram were the new pirate radio.

Even the dances felt like lessons. Shaku Shaku, Kupe, Pilolo; they taught rhythm, confidence and belonging faster than any school assembly. We learnt continentalties through eight counts and Instagram skits, not textbooks. OkayAfrica covered how Afro B helped popularise Shaku Shaku on UK timelines, and how Ghanaian choreographers like Incredible Zigi created moves that ended up on NBA 2K and late night American TV. My generation learnt African pride through choreography and Chop Daily as much as through history class. I remember the “Gun Lean” moment best. Russ Millions dropped it and suddenly everyone was leaning: PE halls, youth clubs, even church car parks after service. We even had those local myths — don’t Gun Lean in this area or you’ll get pressed. No one really did, but the point was clear. Music carried territory and reputation; a dance could mark you out the same way a postcode could. That was the lesson: a dance could carry as much weight as a postcode.

Language was another classroom. For Gen Z Londoners, Multicultural London English became the default. A mix of patois, Yoruba, Twi, Arabic slang, road idioms; tightened by rap and drill, spread through TikTok until even kids in Cornwall were saying “bruv.” The Guardian tracked how words like “bait,” “peng” and “certi” travelled from verses to national speech. I remember being in Year 7, heaingteachers call it “broken English.” Then a few years later those same people were texting “lowkey” and “wasteman” unironically. That’s the thing about culture: it moves faster than policy; music was the loudspeaker.

I think a lot about representation too. ENNY gave us softness and pride with “Peng Black Girls.” But there was a foundation already there. Ms Dynamite was one of the first to make herself impossible to ignore. “Dy-Na-Mi-Tee” wasn’t just catchy, it was a declaration. A young Black woman spitting social truth, winning a Mercury Prize, and holding her own in a scene that wasn’t built for her. Then there’s Lady Leshurr. Her “Queen’s Speech” freestyles didn’t just go viral; they showed us humour could be sharp, wordplay could be feminine, and a Birmingham accent could headline grime. And Little Simz — she doesn’t just rap, she builds worlds. Albums like Sometimes I Might Be Introvert read like novels, orchestral and layered. When she won the Mercury Prize, it wasn’t just a win for her, it was proof that Black British women could redefine what the national sound looks like.

These women weren’t background figures. They were mentors in their own way, teaching us that you don’t need permission to take the mic.