ill Manors by Plan B

How have representations of the music video 'ill Manors' by Plan B been constructed?

In April 2011, Plan B released the album 'ill Manors' which went alongside the film he wrote and directed that came out later on in June 2012. The big record labels for 'ill Manors' the album are 679 and Atlantic records, which help to show how much the album was a hit with the public.

The Film portrayed the lives of people who live in council estate flats in London, and was set in Forest Gate, London, where Plan B (Ben Drew) grew up himself. The film follows 8 main characters, whose lives are all linked together in some way, with their stories all being represented by another Plan B song featuring Al Shux. The studios producing the film were Film London Microwave, BBC Films, and Aimimage, and was later sold to Revolver Entertainments in April 2011. It cost around £100, 000 to produce, and made £453, 570 from box office sales alone. To raise the funds to cover post-production, Ben Drew made the decision to go on tour throughout 2010 and 2011, where he performed his previous album 'The Defamation of Strickland Banks'.

'ill Manors' is a hip hop protest song, that was written in reaction to the 2011 riots across England. The lyrics in 'ill Manors' portray a dominant ideology in terms of what people think of council estate kids. The song is about how the media and society perceives working class youth and how some people play up to that stereotype, with 'ill' meaning antisocial behaviour, and 'Manors' is street slang for the area you grew up in. They challenge society's interpretations and tell people that not all kids that live on council estates are violent criminals. By challenging these dominant opinions, it forces people to think about their own views on the matter and helps to reinforce their ideas. The lyrics "little rich boy" and "you bloody rich kids never listen" help to reinforce the idea that the upper class was disliked by the teenagers shown in the music video. The hatred they have for politicians is also shown through the lyrics "he's got a hoodie n give him a hug, on second thoughts don't you wanna get mugged" which hints at the 'hug a hoodie' campaign that David Cameron instated in 2009 in an attempt to try and tackle the problem of anti-social behaviour in cities. These lyrics portray the kid's ideas about the government and how they'll never understand the problems of living in a council estate and why these kids sometimes have to turn to violence because they have no other option, they just see the people living there as the problem with society.

Click here to view an article about the 2011 London riots.

The 2011 riots began in Tottenham, sparking riots cross the London districts of Brixton, Enfield, Islington and Wood Green and in Oxford Circus in the centre of London. They began after police shot and killed Mark Duggan, who was under suspicion of planning an attack. The riots began as a peaceful protest, of people demanding answers for Mark Duggan's death, before a full-scale riot began with teenagers looting and committing arson.  The music video was then later filmed in the estates that the riots took place in, to give a continuity between the actual riot footage used and what Plan B's crew filmed. Plan B made the song and music video as his perception of 'society's failure to nurture its disadvantaged youth'. An establishing shot is used at the beginning, showing the poverty side of London, and then after shows another shot which shows the 'poverty' side in the foreground, and the 'nice' side of London in the background, with the two separated by smoke. High angles, mid shots, and long shots are used regularly to show the riot that and violence that was going on, the use of a high angle could also represent how these kids involved in the riots are viewed by the rest of society. The jump cuts used to switch between different scenes gain speed and become faster as the song continues and the beat picks up.

Although Plan B himself is white, a large proportion of the actors in his music video for 'ill Manors' are black. Race was a key issue in the 2011 riots as many people believed institutional racism was the cause of the shooting and killing of Mark Duggan, which raised many questions about the police's decision to shoot him.