Mr Bizzle goes to Wetherby

The sun shines through the window of the office of the planners of Leeds festival.

"Gotta say guys, really looking forward to Bloc Party. I'm pretty confident that their set this year is gonna be totally seminal."

"But we need a hip-hop artist."

"Do we really?"

"I said 'need', not 'want'. Gallagher, praise be with him, really fucked us over with that Glastonbury Jay-Z stuff."

"He's right. Despite releasing that really great album 15 years ago, he really made the media acknowledge that mainstream rock festivals don't exhibit black culture with the same zeal with which we approach the rakes."

"Hey guys, wasn't the blur reunion great?"

"Look, let's just focus on this for a while."

"We can't have another guardian feature piece on how indie festivals are racist. It really messes up our image. I don't even know how they can call us racist. I mean, black people are great dancers. And I love that noisettes song."

"Ok, let's get lethal bizzle on again."

"But we've already got Reggie Love compering. That isn't enough?"

"But lethal bizzle hasn't released a new album this year, his set would be identical to last year's. And the year before that."

"I'm sick of your maverick insistence on novelty. Look down the bill, nearly all the main acts haven't released anything new for years. And if they did, it'd be similar to their first albums anyway."

"So we're agreed, lethal bizzle again. He's sort of rave-y, i think, at least in that he wears sunglasses onstage. The kids like it. It's not pure black stuff."

"The smart-price Kanye."

"Having bizzle on is our get out of the independent editorials free card. We'll put him fairly high up on-but not at the top of-the dance tent bill, so he's given prominence which his recent releases don't merit, and he'll be a good warm-up for royskopp or whoever's headlining the dance tent this year."

"Royskopp's set is gonna be mental, man."

"But, here's the thing. We're trying to appear not racist, right, and that's great. I'm fully for that. But, by having lethal bizzle on, a rapper who hasn't released an album for two years or a good album for four, aren't we basically admitting to only having a superficial grasp of black culture and music? Aren't we basically saying that the UK hip-hop scene is irrelevant to us, and that whatever happens within it, we're always just gonna select the same solitary rapper for our main stages, regardless of anything else, year after year? It's tokenism of the worst form-we're patronising our audience, and choosing a shit token at that. We're completely ignorant of rap music other than jay-z since last summer and dizzee's calvin harris song, and we're openly stating that in our choice of Lethal Bizzle. If we wanna not be racist-again, fully for that-shouldn't we see what's new and big in the rap scene and get a handful of them slots throughout the weekend?"

"...we could get Tinchy Stryder as well?"