‘LADIES A YOUR TIME NOW!’Erotic politics, lovers' rock and resistance in the UK

‘Lovers’ rock' is a largely overlooked genre of ‘Black British’ reggae music that emerged in London during the 1970s through Caribbean nightclubs and ‘pirate radio’ stations. Lovers’ rock was an integral part of the reggae music scene of that period. However, lovers rock became gendered as genre that appealed particularly to the romantic aspirations of black teenaged girls growing up in ‘Thatcher's Britain’. Within the political context of the dancehall scene, both lovers rock and roots reggae are seen as binary opposites of each other – lovers being ‘soft’ feminised reggae concerned with romantic love, and roots as masculinised ‘serious’ reggae concerned with black oppositional politics. Using black feminist theories on love and the erotic, this paper challenges the gendering of lovers' rock by suggesting that the genre was part of a much broader and complex political expression of love and rebellion amongst Caribbean communities in Britain. Indeed, while the gendering process is highly problematic, this paper also argues that Caribbean communities had also used the erotic and political intersection of both genres to reconfigure racist and sexist representations of their identities. As such Caribbean males and females had created their own ethic of ‘loving blackness’ as a way of restoring and validating their experiences within Britain's often hostile urban centres.