The changing landscape of urban music, which has moved from the fringes into the mainstream, gives Tottenham contemporary relevance.
But we also now have a role at the front edge of the mainstream: giving the whole nation new ways of seeing the world.
The wide-eyed ingénue disentangles herself from the mainstream, giving a barnstorming turn as the damaged, wired and entirely inappropriate Kym in Jonathan Demme's low-budget and partly improvised melodrama.
"The minute we started questioning it, the first question was, 'Well, when are you going to stop separating yourself out and mainstream?' " "Give us another 4,000 years," she said, "and we'll talk about mainstreaming".
The challenge for distributor Sony is that Love & Mercy doesn't quite qualify as properly mainstream, given a cast led by John Cusack, Paul Dano, Elizabeth Banks and Paul Giamatti, but the conversation in the specialised market is currently dominated by Amy.
In the 60s and 70s, Hollywood had helped shift country music (often condescended to as redneck blues) into the cultural mainstream, giving it an ambivalent political resonance in pictures such as Bonnie and Clyde and Five Easy Pieces.
She put immense, melodic pop songs over those sounds and the combination was the record that finally saw underground dance breaking the mainstream, giving its stars – Magnetic Man, Zinc and Geeneus – far wider-reaching success than they'd been used to.
Seeking to portray the Democrats as way left of the mainstream, given their acceptance of the invitation, the Republican National Committee gleefully celebrated their arrival by releasing a videotape that linked them to some of the more controversial utterances of the Daily Kos blog's founder, Markos Moulitsas.
But Prelude aims to take the idea mainstream, giving it scale and Silicon Valley pizzazz.
