Review: “The Music is Black, A British Story” at V&A East

A graffiti-covered piano played by the captivating 1950s pianist Winifred Atwell, the first black British artist to top the UK charts; Dame Shirley Bassey’s dazzling Bond-style dress, which she wore to perform “Goldfinger” at the 2013 Academy Awards; The iconic Union Jack jacket worn by boundary-breaking rapper Stormzy during his 2019 Glastonbury headline show. Make your way through ‘Music is Black’ and you’ll encounter some of the most striking and historically significant artefacts of the modern British music story.

The exhibition, which opened in April, is the first at the new V&A East museum, a branch of the prestigious South Kensington institution based in east London (think of it as a younger sibling). The Music is Black embarks on a comprehensive and ambitious tour through the history of black British music, tracing the emergence of eight unique genres created and developed in Britain: Lovers Rock, Brit funk, 2 Tone, trip-hop, jungle, drum and bass, UK garage and grime. In addition to analyzing their cultural significance and the relationships between certain subcultures, the exhibition highlights the roots of these sounds in Jamaican sound system culture, jazz and traditional music in West Africa.

“For black British music makers, this is an affirmation of their worth,” says Jacqueline Springer, the exhibition’s lead curator. “It emphasizes once again the importance of black music but also how under-celebrated black British music is.” Her background as a music reporter and academic led her to a start date of 1900, which she defined as “when the media was going modern.” [with the creation of radio]…This provides a relatively immediate way to tell you what has happened in the world, and you can echo and propagate these harmful constructs through these new media.

To contextualize black British musical innovation in the twentieth and twenty-first centuries, Springer and her collaborators decided to begin the experiment with a room that captures powerful moments from the first centuries of contact between Europeans and West Africa, beginning in the fifteenth century. Upon entering “Black Music,” visitors are handed a headset programmed to play different music in different parts of the exhibition. You can stay with a particular piece of music for as long as you want, revisit a piece of music that’s stuck in your mind, or enter a neutral zone if you need some peace and quiet; The flexible nature of technology means that ‘Black Music’ is a lively and interesting experience, but one that you can control all the time.

Sonically, the first act begins with tense, ethereal landscapes that wash over you as you witness ancient, haunting and deeply moving documents, such as the legal paper signed by King Charles II in 1672 to legalize the slave trade along the coast of West Africa. This introductory section is brief, and more powerful than ever, as this history of violence and oppression lends additional weight to the narratives of resistance and innovation that follow it.

“Music is moving forward, and the downtrodden and the downtrodden are always coming, and this is one of the enduring triumphs of black music,” says Springer, whose mission has been to connect the dots between hundreds of diverse stories spanning centuries of creativity and endurance under the continuing influence of the British colonial project. While touring, you’re encouraged to draw your own connections, too: between the arrival of pioneering Jamaican guitarist Ernest Ranglin in England and the creation of the 2 Tone ska movement in the late 1970s, for example, or, if you’re a grime fan (like me), the connection between legendary Welsh singer Shirley Bassey and 21st-century grime producer DJ Spooky (whose brass-tinged “Goldfinger” sampler is a cult classic).

Building on the exhibition’s work and providing the opportunity to highlight a large number of creatives not present within the walls of the V&A East, a companion book by Springer entitled Music is Black was published, and an extensive program of talks and live music events was organized at both the museum and the adjacent East Bank site (which hosts Four weekend festival from June to September). Furthermore, a partnership with the BBC ensures greater education for British children about the history of black British music via BBC Bitesize, as well as streaming of related documentaries on BBC iPlayer.

Few exhibitions in the UK ignite the development of this genre from the wider cultural world. According to the Victoria and Albert Museum’s artistic director Jos Casely-Hayford, Music is Black aims to reshape the perception of British music both on these shores and abroad, exemplifying how “this is our story, and it is one of our major contributions to the world.” It’s not just about evolving culture and touching people emotionally; Recent research suggests that black music has accounted for 80% of the money the industry has made in the UK in the last 30 years, and exhibitions like this show that this fact is finally gaining wider recognition.

“It’s deeply moving [the exhibition] And it’s stretched out, it’s got this wavy effect. “But this is black music,” Springer adds. “It’s appropriate for me that there’s so much enthusiasm, and the magnitude of it is beyond my expectations. That’s good because it reiterates how important this is.”

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