Advocating for authentic bass culture with 20 years of Lionbeat
As Lionbeat enters its 20th year since the brand first appeared on a flyer in 2004, the organisation has evolved from promoting music to embarking on its mission to champion bass culture and provide skills-generating, training and employment routes for bass-cultured communities in the application of technology and the arts. CIC speaks with founder Jean-Claude Lionbeat to understand more about the Lionbeat mission to celebrate bass culture, and how being a charity partner working alongside CIC volunteer Jonny Armstrong has helped Lionbeat evolve along this journey.
Jean-Claude, Founder of Lionbeat
No one conveys the mission of Lionbeat more beautifully than its very own founder, Jean-Claude, who set out in 2012 to create a bass culture advocacy organisation. Its central purpose is to celebrate the cultures and communities intrinsic to bass culture, rooted in Caribbean sound system culture, incorporating music from reggae and hip-hop to dancehall and jungle genres and its fans - especially those with African, Caribbean and multiple heritage.
“OFTEN, BASS CULTURE COMMUNITIES ARE EXCLUDED FROM [CULTURAL PRODUCTION]. THERE MIGHT BE THOSE HOLDING THE MICROPHONE OR DANCING OR SINGING ON STAGE, BUT WHEN YOU GET DOWN TO THE LIGHTING OR SOUND TECH AND SO ON, THE DEMOGRAPHICS CHANGE. TYPICALLY THOSE ARRE WHITE MIDDLE CLASS PEOPLE FROM MUCH BETTER RESOURCED BACKGROUNDS THAN BLACK AND OTHER MINORITISED COMMUNITIES THAT ARE MUCH CLOSER TO THE PRODUCTION AND EMISSION OF BASS CULTURE.”
Jean-Claude came to CIC seeking out ways to elevate Lionbeat’s reach and share its mission as part of the Impact Awards scheme, where he met with CIC volunteer and communications strategist, Jonny Armstrong, to strategise its next steps.
For Jean-Claude, who passionately proclaims to have “a powerful grounding in culture and with an almost missionary zeal to his vows”, working with the “super amiable” Jonny brought more creativity and diverse thinking to the work of Lionbeat. Jonny was able to bring a unique way of thinking, or “neural diversity” to those that Jean-Claude would typically engage to do what he does day to day, while Jonny was able to listen and absorb the wealth of information from Jean-Claude’s cultural experience and put the next steps for the brand into motion.
“He was super interested in what I was doing, which is a hallmark of his skill as a listener and negotiator, no doubt,” says Jean-Claude. “He was then able to assemble my thoughts into clear pillars of relevance for the variety of stakeholders that we may now need to approach to increase the frequency of our operations or the frequency at which we're winning funding bids and so on and so forth.”
While the organisation was officially founded in 2012, the Lionbeat brand first appeared on a flyer way back in 2004, celebrating its unofficial twentieth anniversary this year. Over that time, it has undergone several transformations, transitioning from a promo company to an agency representing various artists, and later to advocacy. Notable achievements include working with renowned artists like The Mad Professor, Congo Natty, Top Cat, Tenafly, Daddy Freddy and General Levy. The organisation even managed to successfully facilitate an artist's signing to Ninja Tune and transformed their touring into a lucrative, six-figure business.
“Through doing that, we intersected with the festival environment, where I learned we've really got a special offer for these places, and that was something that Boomtown recognised in 2009,” says Jean-Claude. “By 2014, we elevated through playing there regularly to actually building out festival areas for them. I won Arts Council funding to do that in 2014, and the Tangled Roots arena for sound system culture still stands as a legacy to that.”
But after a while, Jean-Claude grew somewhat disillusioned by the festival circuit. “It was very white, European controlled and curated,” he says. “That demanded a huge amount of me particularly, but by extension, my tools, the resources that I had, the teams that I brought together; I was never able to pay people what I felt they should be paid.”
Furthermore, Jean-Claude felt the crowds they performed to weren’t the right audience for Lionbeat, full of inebriated individuals miles away from the communities that Lionbeat wanted to speak to. That said, the festival environment fed inspiration for the Bassis bikes, which involves putting high-powered sound systems and other audio visual capabilities onto E-cargo bike platforms, run by batteries that can be charged with renewable energy to reduce the environmental pollution required for sound systems.
“What we do is state of the art in the sense that the dynamics are amazing, whether they're audio or visual projections or films or whatever it is that we're doing, such as young people playing computer games in the outdoors, for example,” says Jean-Claude. “It's quite important to me that it's cutting edge, because that is the type of promotion that we do through Bassis, and that's the promotion platform that we have.”
But while Bassis is the outreach vehicle, Lionbeat itself takes on much more substantive issues when it comes to bass culture and cultural production, says its founder.
“Often, bass culture communities are excluded from [cultural production]. There might be those holding the microphone or dancing or singing on stage, but when you get down to the lighting or sound tech and so on, the demographics change,” says Jean-Claude. “Typically those are white middle class people from much better resourced backgrounds than black and other minoritised communities that are much closer to the production and emission of bass culture. Lionbeat exists fundamentally to unlock the economic potential that is bound up in black communities and their culture works.”
Lionbeat offers services in ways that help to double down on the message they convey, through decolonising spaces by entering them with minimal infrastructure that helps to decarbonise event production services.
“We're looking to our Bassis bikes to do that with a very light touch,” says Jean-Claude. “We can roll up on a street corner, onto a public plaza, into a park, and we can very, very quickly establish a culture space in those realms. I'd like to think of what we do as some sort of magical transmogrification of a given realm. Give us a British Land plaza that is typically like its denizens, or Google, Santander, Facebook and Dentsu Aegis employees who are going to their glass and steel office, but perhaps we're there on the weekend and we turn up with a bike, and we turn it into a culture space where we can have break dance and double Dutch jump rope happening.”
The CIC provided crucial support by offering resources, networking opportunities, and mentorship to help navigate the challenges and refine the Lionbeat purpose.
“I wear my heart on my sleeve a lot, and that was another point of empathy that Jonny and I managed to conjure,” says Jean-Claude. “There's a lot of warmth in our conversations. It was really encouraging, and quite emotive for me to see this profusion of thought I've assembled over six years now that I've been working on this iteration of Lionbeat, the base culture advocacy. I now feel like I'm getting really close to having a document that I can walk into any boardroom with or engage with any sort of tier one type of funder or sponsor and really cogently make my case.”
Working with Jonny helped Jean-Claude to structure an approach for Lionbeat, asking the right questions such as who the stakeholders are and how they should be regarded, what messaging Lionbeat needs to produce for them to be able to win their favour and to get the sought-after outcome.
“I'm very confident that the work we've done not only substantiates a base for us to do that, but it's a really solid one,” says Jean-Claude. “I'm very proud of the work we've done together, and I'm very thankful to Jonny and the CIC for furnishing us with that expertise.”
Jean-Claude urges anyone who might be encouraged to apply for the CIC Impact Reward to do their homework, and to think about what elements they need to succeed. Whether it’s brand photography, copywriting or a website, thinking carefully about what they need will help them get the most out of the process.
“There's this virtuous circle of referrals and thought sharing at CIC, which is really exciting,” says Jean-Claude. “It's emblematic of the approach that both of us, as organisations, want to have in our local communities. That's the beauty of this - that we can build such networks, and the more we're able to do it, the greater the outcomes will be.”
Lionbeat is a think tank & consultancy which champions bass culture - rooted in Caribbean sound system culture - for community benefit.
Instagram: @lionbeat