A graffiti-covered piano played by the captivating 1950s pianist Winifred Atwell, the first Black British artist to top the U.K. charts; Dame Shirley Bassey’s dazzling Bond-esque gown, worn for a performance of “Goldfinger” at the 2013 Academy Awards; the iconic Union Jack vest donned by boundary-breaking rapper Stormzy during his 2019 Glastonbury headline set. Weave your way through “The Music is Black,” and you’ll encounter some of the most visually striking and historically important artifacts of the modern British musical story.
The exhibition, which opened in April, is the first at the new V&A East Museum, the East London-based offshoot of the prestigious South Kensington institution (think of it as a cool younger sibling). “The Music is Black” embarks on a sweeping, 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, U.K. garage and grime. In addition to analyzing their cultural importance and the relationships among certain subcultures, the exhibition fleshes out the roots of these sounds in Jamaican sound system culture, jazz and traditional West African music.
“For Black British music makers, this is a confirmation of their value. It reiterates the importance of Black music but also just how undercelebrated Black British music has been,” says Jacqueline Springer, lead curator of the exhibition. Her background as a music reporter and academic led her to a start date of 1900, which she pinpoints as “when mass media gallops into modernity [with the creation of radio]… this provides a relatively instant way of telling you what’s happened in the world, and you can intone and further disseminate these prejudicial structures through this new media.”
“The Music is Black, A British Story“
Artists: Various
Venue: V&A East
Address: 107 Carpenters Rd., London, E20 2AR
Through: January 3, 2027
To establish the context for 20th- and 21st-century Black British musical innovation, Springer and her collaborators decided to begin the experience with a room that captures powerful moments from the first centuries of contact between Europeans and West Africa, beginning in the 1400s. On entering “The Music is Black,” visitors are handed an over-ear headset that’s programmed to play different music in different parts of the exhibition. You can remain with a particular piece of music as long as you’d like, revisit one that stuck with you, or enter a neutral zone if you require some peace and quiet; the fluid nature of the technology means “The Music is Black” is a lively and engrossing experience, but one that you are in control of throughout.
Sonically, Act One begins with a tense, ethereal landscape that engulfs you as you witness distressing, highly influential old documents, such as the legal paper signed by King Charles II in 1672 to legalize the trade in enslaved people along the West African coastline. This introductory section is kept brief and is all the more powerful for it, this history of violence and oppression lending additional weight to the narratives of resistance and innovation that follow.
“Music pushes through, and the oppressed and misrepresented always come through, and that is one of the ongoing triumphs of Black music,” says Springer, whose mission was to join the dots between hundreds of diverse, centuries-spanning stories of creativity and endurance under the ongoing influence of the British colonial project. Walking around, you’re encouraged to draw connections of your own, too: between pioneering Jamaican jazz guitarist Ernest Ranglin’s arrival in England and the creation of the 2 Tone ska movement in the late 1970s, for example, or, if you’re a grime music nerd (like me), the relationship between legendary Welsh singer Shirley Bassey and 21st-century grime producer DJ Spooky (whose brassy “Goldfinger”-sampling instrumental is a cult classic).
Building on the exhibition’s work and offering an opportunity to spotlight the plethora of creatives not featured within the V&A East’s walls, an accompanying book written by Springer and also titled “The Music is Black” has been published, and an extensive program of talks and live music events has been taking place at both the museum and the adjoining East Bank site (which hosts a four-weekend festival from June to September). On top of that, there’s a partnership with the BBC that secures greater education for British children on Black British musical history via BBC Bitesize, as well as the broadcasting of relevant documentaries on BBC iPlayer.
Few U.K. exhibitions spark the development of this kind of broader cultural world. According to the V&A East’s artistic director Gus Casely-Hayford, “The 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’s one of our major contributions to the world.” It isn’t just about evolving culture and touching people emotionally; recent research suggests that Black music accounted for 80 percent of the money generated by the U.K. industry in the last 30 years, and exhibitions like this show that, at last, that fact is gaining wider appreciation.
“It’s deeply moving that [the exhibition] has rippled out, it’s got this wavular effect. But that is Black music,” Springer adds. “It’s fitting to me that there is so much enthusiasm, and the scale of it is beyond my expectations. That’s good because it reiterates just how important this is.”
