Music
Stratford is a gateway. One of London’s biggest transport interchanges, it’s part of many people’s daily commute. It’s an entrance and exit, a point of transition; it’s a space to pass through, and spot many people call home. Last year, V&A East laid down roots in Stratford – a stunning cultural coup for the area, it’s latest exhibition may rank as one of the most important to open in London for some time.
The Music Is Black: A British Story isn’t a retrospective, it’s an exploration of Black excellence, a platform for struggle, resilience, and joy. Curator Jacqueline Springer worked with her team for years to bring it all together – from ground-breaking classical composers to grime innovators, from folk guitarists and steel pan drum bands through to chart-crushing pop divas and crucial Lover’s Rock innovators. It’s all here – a bustling, exhaustive, inspiration waltz through 125 years of Black British music.
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“We start in 1900,” she tells CLASH over Zoom. “And that’s fortuitous, because it brings with it the explosion of mass media, mass communication, through cinema, radio, and television. From a curatorial perspective, that brings an accelerated way of dissecting and understanding who you are, but it’s all based off established ways in which global societies are viewed.”
Very much a project that has seeped into the fabric of her being, Jacqueline has worked tremendously hard on every single detail within The Music Is Black: A British Story. It’s a love letter to all kinds of phenomenal musicians, but it’s also the story in which multiple threads of the Black diaspora came to know and express themselves.
“For more than three centuries – a very long, long time – the practice of competing for territory, and for trading and trafficking African men, women, and children was legal practise. And what that does to the cultures of those who were dispersed, who became acculturated to wherever they were taken. Brazil. The Caribbean. America.”
“What were are having people think about,” she explains, “is how the long past has an impact on the modern day.”
Although the exhibition is vast, certain facets recur. Take the necessity of Black innovation, often utilisation broken or thrown away technology in a different way. The steel pan drum, for example, is simply an empty oil drum, beaten into shape by Caribbean communities. Elsewhere in the exhibition, you see Jme’s SNES, which he used to create sound effects for his early grime productions. It’s people separated by almost 100 years, displaying the same instinct and aptitude for innovation.
“When I spoke to artists,” Jacqueline continues, “I asked them to consider what object you feel best demonstrates how you create music. What was interesting, and tells us something about the power of media, is that several artists immediately knee-jerk said: I’ve got some gold discs! But that just demonstrates the commercial calculation of your art.”
“It doesn’t explain how art is made,” she insists. “Art is made under the cloud of the politics of the day, under the influence of your cultural, gendered, sexual, political identities”.
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Often, it’s the most humble details that prove to be the most profound. A Guy Called Gerald’s Roland for example, or the adjustments to Joan Armatrading’s guitar “because her little hand had to stretch further than it actually needed to”.
Refusing to restrict itself to genres more commonly recognised as Black, the exhibition moves from the baton utilised by Victoria composer and conductor Samuel Coleridge Taylor past the guitar loaned by the widow of mercurial guitarist Davy Graham, the mixed-heritage musician who almost single-handedly crafted the British folk guitar tradition.
“It’s so easy for things to be classified as underground,” Jacqueline notes during one point of our conversation, “but the underground only exists due to marginalisation. We are all controlled by stratas and hierarchies, and yet music just gnaws through all that. It’s the determination of musically talented people to just tell us: no, listen to this!”
Running until January 2027, The Music Is Black is one of the year’s must-see exhibitions. On one level, it brings into one place the full spectrum of Black British music excellence – stage costumes worn by Little Simz, for example, or the door sign for Hoxton’s fabled Blue Note club, where Norman Jay hosted a residency, and Metalheadz helped brew up drum ‘n’ bass. But on another, it’s a beautifully moving, frequently challenging discourse on the nature of this country.
“The way in which we dissect and stratify hierarchies, and create hierarchies, has an impact on how we see people. And the breadth of this exhibition – I hope – provides enough space in order for us to consider how we are all complicit in upholding this… but isn’t it fantastic how art can challenge this?”
“You should walk out of her knowing more about yourself,” she notes. “I would really hope that people have a greater sense of awe about Black music makers, about what they travel through. These artists walk among us – how lucky we are on this damp island to have generated all these mushrooms of activity.”
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The Music Is Black: A British Story runs at V&A East, London until January 3rd, 2027. Tickets are available to purchase here.
Words: Robin Murray
Photography: David Parry
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