Love Inside Babylon - The Cultural Politics of Lovers Rock Reggae Music in Britain

My research critically examines lovers rock, the distinctly Black British Caribbean genre of romantic reggae that emerged in London’s mid-1970s sound system and pirate radio scene. I argue that this music—often dismissed as a sentimental, apolitical counterpoint to the overt protests of roots reggae—was in fact a vital site where the cultural politics of Rastafari, love-politics, blackness, gender, sexuality, and the erotic converged. Against a backdrop of economic decline, far-right ascendency, and urban uprisings from St Pauls to Brixton, lovers rock articulated a politics of Black diasporic revolution dreaming, permitted erotic intimacies and an anti-colonial collective consciousness that demands scholarly attention.