Music

UK hip hop (and its 130 beats per minute cousin grime) rarely gets the coverage or support it deserves. While many people know of Katy B, few know of the Brixton hip hop collective, The Illersapiens, she originally sang with.

Artists such as Ty, Jehst and Roots Manuva have been honing their craft for years with very little profile. Back in 2008 Estelle said in a Guardian interview there is "blindness to black talent" in the UK music industry. Plan B recently vented his frustration that "people are prejudiced towards hip hop".

Ry Cooder's rage against bankers and Republicans provides the impetus for his recent album, Pull Up Some Dust and Sit Down. This is the culmination of a long and rich musical career rooted in American folk and blues.

In a homemade video from 2003, on a rooftop now close to Stratford's Olympic site, 15 members of London's grime scene came together to perform for a pirate radio station. The video, often shaky and at times blurred, now has over a million views on YouTube and resembles a roll-call for grime music's hall of fame. While Tinchy Stryder and Dizzee Rascal are now global superstars, the equally talented MC Crazy Titch is now serving a life sentence for murder. In the middle of it all is Wiley - often referred to as the "Godfather of Grime".

Following on from their popular album, 11:11, Rodrigo y Gabriela's forceful fast-paced riffing style returns in what can only be described as a funk-filled full-orchestral waltz, following in the footsteps of their Latin American jazz-funk lineage. If that's too much of a mouthful to swallow, you really shouldn't attempt to recite the names of the 13 members of Havana's finest collective, known as C.U.B.A., who have helped to make this new album an aural sensation.

It has been over three years since Slime and Reason, the album that placed Rodney Smith (Roots Manuva) at the forefront of British hip hop. His new album, the imaginatively titled 4everevolution, does not disappoint. At first glance an album with 17 tracks can seem quite hard going. It is testimony to the diversity and range of his music that 17 tracks later and nearly an hour in I was still listening with bated breath.

In this song Ali relentlessly lays bare the contradictions of the American dream by turning it into a nightmare, guiding the audience through the hypocritical self-representation of the world's "imperial guard".

Ali, who will be performing in London this month, is part of a new generation of political hip hop artists. Miles away from the bling of the mainstream, he stands in the poetic tradition of Talib Kweli or Mos Def, with the hard hitting politics and personal accounts of Immortal Technique or Vinnie Paz.

Last month PJ Harvey won the Mercury Prize for her latest album, Let England Shake. She was the first woman to win the prize back in 2001, is the first artist to win it twice and has won it with an album that is determinedly anti-war.

Taking Iraq and Afghanistan as her starting point, this a departure from the deeply personal explorations of her albums to date. Harvey has said she wanted to write this album for years but has waited until she had the writing skills to do it.

The irony was probably lost in the Orwellian world inhabited by the BBC's directors. When a young rapper Mic Righteous delivered the line "I can say free Palestine" on the 1Xtra hip hop show M1X, the BBC censor proved him wrong. As if it were an expletive, "Palestine" was removed from the broadcast version and replaced with the sound of a bomb blast. The BBC has offered no credible explanation for this shameful act.

Just as the Velvet Underground stood out in 1967 like a black flower in the blooming summer of love, Radiohead's OK Computer clashed with the synthetic euphoria of New Labour and Cool Britannia in 1997. They gave us songs of alienation (and alien abduction) instead of bloated, cocaine-fuelled gibberish.

The human experience which the composers convey is not simply the product of past musical influences but is shaped by the historical context. This is borne out by the strange coincidence that Frédéric Chopin and Robert Schumann, the two greatest composers of romantic piano music, were born in the same year.