The new exhibition shows not only how African and Afro-Caribbean music infused British culture over the years, but also how it reflects its society's multiculturalism today.
The V&A East is the new iteration of the world renowned Victoria & Albert Museum. It opened in the London district of Stratford (where the Olympic Park emerged in 2012), on Saturday 18 April, with a wealth of guests, journalists and curators.The inaugural exhibition, titled 'The Music is Black: A British Story', offers a survey of Black music from the UK, starting with early drumbeats brought back from Africa and going up to the latest innovations in popular music on the island.
Augustus 'Gus' Casely-Hayford is the director of V&A East. The British curator was formerly director of the Smithsonian National Museum of African Art in Washington, DC, USA. At the press viewing, he said that young people, in the boroughs of East London in particular, where the museum is set, "were absolutely critical" in choosing 'The Music Is Black' as the inaugural exhibition.
"We wanted something that would speak to their hopes and dreams," he told a busy crowd of journalists and guests. "Young people go to football matches here, spend their money on music, but would they come to an exhibition? Would they spend their money on exhibitions?" he asked.He worked to find ways to challenge that paradigm.
"Black British music is the music we fall in love to, the music that we listen to at great events," he continued. "It's also the music that tells those informal stories and reflects our political history as a nation."
The team planned to create a space that reflects the stories of the global majoriry, especially from African and Caribbean roots, "the unreflected stories", he called them, and to do so "in ways that inspire and offer hope," he concluded, acclaimed by the audience.
A long, convoluted history
Reggae, dub, ska, drum & bass, jungle, grime... all emerged in the UK as offspring of African music after it had travelled to the West Indies and the British Empire in general.
The genres presented in the exhibitions also include jazz, soul music, funk, lovers rock, two-tone, rocksteady, dub, trip hop, garage and drill.
Famous voices are featured, including Dame Shirley Bassey (and her unforgettable theme for the 'Goldfinger' James Bond film), Joan Armatrading, Sade, Seal, Tricky, Skunk Anansie’s Skin and Little Simz.
But, even before them, Black composers contributed to classical music in the UK, like Samuel Coleridge-Taylor (1875–1912), then to jazz and to British soul music, including Winifred Atwell – the first Black artist to have a number one hit in the UK singles chart.
The show displays over 200 objects, including iconic photos but also records, documents, stage costumes, instruments, films... and even art pieces from contemporary creators, including Thomas J. Price, whose paternal family hails from Jamaica, and is part of the so-called 'Windrush generation'."The first act provides the vertebrae, the spinal cord for all the acts to follow. It provides a deeper history," Springer told me.
"It tells us a long story about the way in which humans, as a species, have the need and compulsion to express themselves, also in relation to social politics, cultural ideas, emotions."
Then the show moves into what occurs on the West African coasts from the 1400s onward, when the Portuguese then British explorers first arrived on African shores, ushering in "a sense of competition continentally for the riches of the African continent," according to Springer, who is also a former music journalist, a lecturer and event curator.Act I looks at the historical exchanges between Africa and Britain from the 1400s, including a deep exploration of the role of spiritual beliefs in music and of forced conversions to Christian religions.
"We also look at how the transatlantic African enslavement was permeated and legalised in the United Kingdom," Springer said, "with documents from the British Library providing empirical evidence of that."
Multitude of genres, sounds and stories
"Act II travels from the 1900s to the 1960s, looking at music and the world wars," Springer told me. "It looks at the phenomenon that is jazz, the presence of the blues."
To her, the centrepiece of the exhibition is Atwell's piano. Born in Trinidad in 1914, the pianist and composer migrated to Britain and enjoyed great popularity from the 1950s with a series of boogie-woogie and ragtime hits, selling over 20 million records."That's the very piano that she played on," Springer is proud to say. "She would play with two pianos, a classical piano, and this kind of broken down ragtime piano, showing her versatility as a musician, but also the fact that she could play jazz as well as classical music."
Act III, which is the core of the exhibition, is the one dedicated to the British black music genres that emerged in the UK iafter World War II and the arrival of the 'Windrush generation', from the West Indies, after decades of multicultural brewing.
"The stories in Act III are what inspired the title, 'The Music is Black, a British story'. This is the British story," for Springer.
She gives an example: lovers rock.
"Lovers rock is the first reggae form of music created outside of Jamaica," she said. "It's slower, but it is as political. It can be escapist, it's romantic, but the vocal delivery of artists like Janet Kay, Louisa Marks, Carol Thompson, Jean Adamo, Adebambo offers a deployment of warmth and authority of sensuality never heard."
And that was really important at a time when the United Kingdom, in the 1970s, "was going through the political climate that it did," she adds, referring to immigration, the rise of the far right and movement against racism, then to Thatcherism.
From Pauline Black, the lead singer of the 2 Tone group The Selector, to Sade, Seal and Tricky, the exhibition also shows the creativity that came into black music beyond London, from places like Coventry and Bristol."Soundsystem culture from Jamaica and reggae was coming in again in these towns, and then that's smoothed out for trip hop. It still has the ingredients of turn-tablism, of singing like lovers rock, but there's a political undertone, but there's also an emotional interrogation," Springer insists.
Bands like The Specials, Soul II Soul, Massive Attack, a singer like Martina Topley-Bird, and the dub master Mad Professor all inherited from the innovations that gave the Bristol sound.Springer added that it also retells a complex, rich but often crual history too, linked to a brutal colonial exploitation and the legacy of the transatlantic slave trade, including racist police brutality, inequality in media treatment and episodes of uprising.
Looking back to Africa but also forward
If in the 1950s, 60s, and 70s, black British music got redefined by musicians with strong links to Jamaica and more widely the British West Indies and Guyana, during the 1980s and up to our days, African musicians have made their voices heard increasingly.
Neneh Cherry, Sade, Keziah Jones, as well as, more recently, Skepta and Stormzy, the two rappers who brought British hip-hop to a new level in the past decade, all have links to West Africa, from Sierra Leone to Nigeria.
Festivals like WOMAD also contributed to popularising African music in England from the 1980s.
"In Act IV, we're looking at imported music, this time from British born black artists, and at how it travels all the way from classical again through folk, R&B, dance, punk, electronica, rap, gospel, jazz, drill, Afrobeats, the the new incarnation incarnation inspired by Fela Kuti," the curator explained.
In more recent years, the link between black British musicians and Africa itself seems to have deepened too, with a long list of artists coming from Nigeria notably, including Wizkid, from Lagos, collaborating with other black British musicians like Arlos Parks and Greentea Peng, living and working in London."We're thus also looking at how art was reconfigured by British artists responding to imported music," Jacqueline concludes.
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