Last Sunday, Snapchat users seeking the latest updates from Jeremy Corbyn were greeted with something unexpected. “It’s JME on Jeremy’s Snapchat and I’m here right now to tell you to register to vote!” grinned the Tottenham-based grime MC, while the words “Jeremy Corbyn” hovered in the background.

To grime fans, this was not an unexpected development. The first public declaration of admiration for Corbyn by a grime artist happened in April 2016, when Novelist – a (then) 19-year-old MC from south London – tweeted a screengrab of a text message confirming his membership of the Labour party. At the time, Corbyn was under pressure to resign over his performance during the Brexit campaign, but Novelist’s support was unequivocal: “Do not resign,” he tweeted. “The mandem need you.”

The politically active Novelist was once a deputy young mayor for Lewisham. He has tracks such as Tax the MPs, which layers someone screaming “Liar, liar, pants on fire!” over a sample of a David Cameron speech. He also spent an entire year beginning every gig leading a chant of the phrase: “Fuck David Cameron!”

How do you register to vote? You must be registered to have a vote in the election.

You can register at gov.uk/register-to-vote, which requires you to answer 11 questions including name, address, national insurance number and whether you want a postal vote. The deadline is midnight on 22 May. To ​qualify ​register you must be a British, Irish or ​ citizen, a ​qualifying Commonwealth citizen resident in the UK, ​or a n EU UK citizen resident in the UK EU . ​or a UK citizen living abroad who has been registered to vote in the UK in the last 15 years. If you are a student you may be able to register to vote at both your home and term-time addresses, but remember that it is illegal to vote more than once.

A month later, Stormzy did an interview with the Guardian in which he declared the leader of the opposition to be: “My man, Jeremy!”. His support, he claimed, was due to admiration of Corbyn’s campaigning history (“I saw some sick picture of him from back in the day when he was campaigning about anti-apartheid and I thought: ‘Yeah, I like your energy’”) as well as the fact that he seemed to express concern for segments of society that other parties don’t (“I feel like he gets what the ethnic minorities are going through and the homeless and the working class”). For Stormzy, Corbyn came across as a decent man who wasn’t there purely for the fun of braying and jeering across the dispatch box – unlike others (“Have you seen that footage of House of Commons? The way they all laugh and cheer. Is this fucking Game of Thrones? You lot have got real issues to talk about and deal with”).

When Theresa May called a snap election, the support intensified. Corbyn was championed by tweets from west London star AJ Tracey as well as JME – the latter of which the MP retweeted, eventually leading to the Snapchat collaboration. The hip-hop artist Akala also wrote a Facebook post explaining that, for the first time in his life, he would be voting – and that it would be for Corbyn – which went viral and was published in the Guardian. Grime-based pro-Corbyn posters also started appearing around south London.

Then a campaign group created a pro-voting registration website called Grime 4 Corbyn – featuring the track Corbyn Riddim, which sets one of his speeches to a bombastic instrumental. At one point more people were tweeting the hashtag #grime4corbyn than #LabourManifesto.

No one expects young creatives to flock to the Tories – but why all this grime support for Labour?

Novelist. Photograph: Suki Dhanda/The Observer

“I know people will be like: ‘What’s going on behind the scenes with all these MCs supporting Corbyn?’” laughs Akala. “But no one has reached out to me. I’ve never even met the man; I’ve just studied his politics. He isn’t all glitz and glamour – he’s willing to be different and we like that about him. So what if he goes to his allotment and doesn’t dress like the other politicians? We want someone who doesn’t pursue the traditional route!”

In the 2015 general election, turnout among black and minority ethnic (BME) voters was 56%. According to groups such as Operation Blackvote – who attempt to engage BME communities with the political process – this isn’t apathy, but a silent protest against a system that “they they think either ignores them or works against them”.

But when it comes to Corbyn, something is changing, according to grime MCs. “There are people on the street talking about him constantly – people I’ve never known to be interested in politics before,” offers Lewisham artist P Money, who has worked with the likes of Ed Sheeran and whose album, Live and Direct, recently made the iTunes chart’s top 20. “Last week, every day I was getting Whatsapp messages from people going: ‘Vote Corbyn! Vote Corbyn!’ I’ve never known anything like it before.”

Even the already political Akala initially found himself less of a convert to Corbyn’s cause than the people around him. “My core audience has been pushing me to support the guy for ages, to be honest with you. Same thing with a lot of the activist groups in the community. They’ve been going: ‘Bruv, you’ve got to get behind Corbyn!’” So, it’s partly artists representing what their followers are telling them? “Yeah, I’ve actually been under pressure to come out in his favour – although I did wait to speak out until I felt convinced that it was something I wanted to do.”

Corbyn’s stance on the NHS seems to have played well in grime circles (“Listening to him talk about the NHS, it’s like: ‘Wow, I didn’t realise it was this bad. I’m listening now!’” explains P Money). Corbyn’s lack of deference to Britain’s imperial past helps, too. “I’ve never seen that before: someone who approaches politics without the assumption that Britain has inherent moral superiority over the rest of the world,” says Akala. And his being portrayed as a man of principle rather than a power-hungry politico has also helped. “He has been on the backbench not seeking power for 30 years: for him standing up for what’s right is more important than promotion,” ran one of Novelist’s messages of support.

But can #grime4corbyn help Corbyn in that way that Jay Z and Diddy’s support helped Barack Obama in 2008?

“I’d argue that our support of Corbyn is a more astute political analysis than hip-hop’s support of Obama,” says Akala. “I get what the idea of a black president meant to a people who’d been excluded from the electoral process for so long, but our support is based on policies, humanity and voting record. I wouldn’t support a politician just because they were black – I’d never support someone like David Lammy, for instance. But it does have that similarity of popular culture being used to motivate voters – and this is the first time that we have British MCs who are popular to the same level as the big American artists.”

Akala: ‘My core audience has been pushing me to support the guy for ages.’ Photograph: Chantelle Nash

It is notable how much more proactive Corbyn has been in chasing up the support of grime MCs since the election was called. It might have started as a group of artists spontaneously declaring their support for him – to no reaction from the Labour leader. But the i-D website is currently trailing footage from the JME/Corbyn meeting as: “Coming soon. When JME met Jeremy Corbyn”. This suggests that Labour’s campaign is embracing the potential of this support, not to mention the reflective cool.

“The data doesn’t lie, Corbyn needs the black vote to save his skin. In 31 out of the top 50 marginal seats in the country, the number of black voters there absolutely dwarfs the majority that the MP holds,” explains Simon Woolley, the director of Operation Black Vote. “A lot of people might have written him off, but if he can get underground and mop up hundreds and thousands of those young votes, who knows what might happen? Even Theresa May knows those votes matter: why else do you think she’s started promising to lower the pay gap between young people and the rest of society?”

So, will grime MCs get young people to the ballot box? Their message may penetrate more than the mainstream media. “Doing music, we’re involved with the streets – they need to talk to us,” claims P Money. And there’s reason to suggest that frustration over Brexit has helped hammer home the benefit of voting. “It’s definitely made people go: ‘Woah! Look what happens when we don’t do anything!’,” suggests Woolley. But even among grime figureheads there’s still a sense of political disenfranchisement that Corbyn’s rhetoric hasn’t been able to breach.

“I’m not going to be voting. I feel like we don’t just need to change the leader, we need to change the whole system,” says the DJ Grandmixxer. “The other day Jeremy Corbyn was saying: ‘I’m not a pacifist.’ Why’s he saying that? I want my leader to be a pacifist! Why do we live in a world where a leader has to announce that he’s not a pacifist to be taken seriously? For me, that tells you everything that’s wrong with the system.”

Spotted on a phone box in Brockley by @whirringcat - grime for Corbyn pic.twitter.com/j4ei9oLS6t — dan hancox (@danhancox) May 4, 2017

Some MCs are worried that backing Corbyn takes grime across a line that should not be crossed. “To be honest with you, I’m not a fan of any politician – I don’t trust any of them,” offers Big Narstie, one of grime’s founding fathers, who recently had a top 20 hit with Craig David. “If the grime scene makes them vote for Corbyn and the country ends up in the shitter, then we’ve lost the power that we had – we’ve lost the confidence in the strength of our word. I wish the MCs who’ve supported him all the best, but it’s a big risk to take.”

In three weeks’ time we’ll find out whether grime’s support of Corbyn is a game-changing shift or just an interesting pop cultural moment. Some people obviously already think it’s pretty entertaining, given the ropey prank phone call Corbyn received from a comedian pretending to be Stormzy last week, and the fact that the Wikipedia page for the Boy Better Know collective briefly included Corbyn alongside members Skepta and JME. But for the MCs who are involved in trying to motivate people to vote Corbyn, this is no joke.

“In the way that Ukip mobilised a group of people who pulled the Tory party to the right, hopefully people like myself, JME and Novelist will show that our demographic can be mobilised,” says Akala. “Hopefully, we’ll show that we need to start being factored in in a way that we haven’t been for a very long time.”