When I was thirteen, Jamal Edwards WAS YouTube. Having launched SBTV in 2006, not even a full year after the platform itself was born, my early online experience was tied tightly to the exploration of his videos, capturing a true sense of the music that was igniting mine and my friends’ Mp3 players at the time. Fun and fresh but always taking its subject matter seriously, SBTV set a benchmark for new music coverage that many since have tried to imitate, rarely coming close. Last week, Jamal Edwards MBE, MBA, PHD passed away. He was 31.
Born in Luton (not far from me) before his family moved to London, Jamal’s business was the definition of a bedroom start-up. Given a video camera for Christmas at 15, he began filming friends’ raps and uploading them to YouTube, morphing into ‘SBTV’ as he added his own raps under the name SmokeyBarz. As the channel grew and grew, so did he; leaving school and working for Topman until a time when SBTV was able to support him as a full-time music career.
Born out of sheer love for the genre, SBTV absolutely emanated positivity. While the police were busying themselves issuing the deeply controversial ‘risk-assessment form 696’ to get grime gigs shut down, SBTV was defiantly proving that it was a genre worth listening to, floating over the noise by getting on with what it did best. Over the years, it helped to break the careers of a great many artists including Dave, Stormzy, Jessie J, Rita Ora and Lady Leshurr, always rooted closely to the UK.
When a new and nervous Ed Sheeran appeared in 2011 to deliver a performance of ‘You Need Me, I Don’t Need You’ for the acoustic version of SBTV’s legendary 64-bar series, it was a sign of just how many bridges had been built between rap and the mainstream. While the platform had hosted many slow-burn viral moments, it felt like a real watershed moment, a recognition that SBTV was not only showcasing new artists but actively breaking them, solidified as a vital form of new media. When the platform’s now-legendary Google advert launched in 2011, I watched it with my parents during the ad break of X Factor, smugly using it as a significant leverage for the music journalism degree I was about to start a few weeks later. For a working-class teenager about to make tentative steps into their own career, he made it feel like it wasn’t a foolish dream to chase.
SBTV was special because it truly was built by fans. Not a shrewd elder businessman in a stuffy office puzzling over what new lucrative thing the kids were into, but a proper community of hip-hop, dance and rap fans who were on the ground and following their noses. It’s the way that great music businesses should be — taking support and opportunities from larger organisations where necessary for growth, but always staying true to its initial ethos. By 2016, SBTV had teamed up with the press association to cover a wider remit of Hip-Hop culture, taking on the first online UK interviews with the likes of Drake, Nicki Minaj and Wiz Khalifa. Far from starstruck, Edwards gave everybody the same grace, but it was clear that his heart lay with the emergence of new talent, premiering new artists right up until the present day.
His pioneering spirit didn’t stop with SBTV either. A recent project, 8BARS, is a mobile app designed to democratise the process of rap clashes, allowing MCs to take on head-to-heads in an online space. Edwards had also been working with the Princes Trust and Response organisations to destigmatise mental illness and provide support to carers in the music industry, and had published a book in 2013 — Self Belief: The Vision: How to Be a Success on Your Own Terms.
Without Edwards, it is deeply unlikely that British rap would be what it is today. We might now take Dave’s epic performance from this month’s Brit awards as standard, but it is directly because of the groundwork that folk like Edwards laid in the late 00’s that black-British culture is getting its flowers in these huge spaces, shaping the charts and filling venues once thought to be solely the domain of rock stars of US rap behemoths. For many people of my generation and beyond, getting on SBTV or working with SBTV was a benchmark of true success, of being recognised by your peers. You can see its DNA in all manner of YouTube series that have followed in its wake; Tiny Desk, Colors, even Chicken Shop Date, all striving to add that little bit more recognition to the value of rap culture. I have been heartwarmed to realise through the last week’s testimonies how many incredible talents got their start by working with him, how many people he seemed to help through nothing more than his own kindness and desire to see the scene win. The sheer abundance of people who have shared personal anecdotes in his passing demonstrates not only how relentlessly giving he was, but how hard he lived, packing a truly astonishing amount into his short life.
If his awful, untimely passing can teach us anything, it’s that desire to get back to the roots of why so many of us do this. Clickbait pressure and difficult choices about what will ‘do the numbers’ aren’t going away anytime soon, but they’re not the reason any of us started this. We got here because we cared, because we knew a sick new artist that we just needed to shout about, or because there was a burning question we really wanted to ask of a beloved star. We were all once that kid in a bedroom, with a new Christmas toy and the passion to do something cool with it. There won’t be another Jamal Edwards, but maybe we could all aspire to be a little more like him; sharing and building a true musical empire, but always doing it out of love.
