Hip hop is currently the most popular genre of music in the world, but it has always been at its best when it gives a voice to the marginalised. In Tones: A Hip Hop Opera, rap is appropriately and powerfully used to tell one person’s story of the struggle to navigate the structures of race and class identity.
The piece tells the story of Jerome, aka The Professor, a Black British man currently working in a hardware store. He tells us about growing up as the son of Caribbean immigrants, his struggles with anti-Black racism, and making friends with Henry, a white boy much more affluent than him.
Jerome’s admiration of his friend and his love of words cause him to develop a sophisticated way of speaking, but this isolates him yet again, this time from his Black peers in high school. After growing up too Black as a child, now he’s too white to fit in. Jerome tries to navigate the worlds of love, university, and underground hip-hop, while struggling with reconciling the prejudices caused by the tone of his voice and the tone of his skin with his authentic self.
Tones: A Hip Hop Opera is a sung-through, or rather rapped-through, play, and Jerome, through the medium of rap, tells us his story without hardly stopping for a breath. The lyrical dexterity on display is breathtaking.
The writer and performer Gerel Falconer uses wordplay, metaphors, and humour in a verbal fireworks display to tell the story. There’s a lot of exposition and description of what’s going on in the different scenarios, but the strength of the writing holds the audience’s interest. The language is clear and straightforward when it needs to be, but when Jerome really needs to grandstand, such as during the very exciting rap battles, the extravagance of the language is turned up easily.
Witty, intelligent, and cleverly staged, Tones: A Hip Hop Opera is a really impressive piece of work that will not only cause you to reflect on the Black British experience but also on the importance and power of hip hop as an artistic medium.
