This is surreal. I’m standing in the new home of one of Britain’s most historically august cultural institutions, and it looks and feels for all the world like a silent disco.
There is a middle-aged white woman to my right, staring intently ahead, swaying gently and bobbing her head as rhythmically as the giant headphones covering her ears will allow. Behind me there is a young black woman, her hair pulled back to give the headset and whatever she is listening to untrammelled passage. She is swaying, rising a bit, then falling: in the room but in a world of her own. Behind me, I see a muscular guy of mixed heritage; his ripped torso is still, his head of braided hair is not, and his face gently creases as he smiles about what he is hearing. My feet are planted, but I’m aware that I’m giddy, as if slightly drunk. There we are, imbibing different musical clips of different things in different bits of semi-darkened galleries, and yet it is a shared endeavour.
Gallery director Gus Casely-Hayford is quite open about his driving intention to make a statement with The Music is Black, at the V&A East in east London. We have recurring arguments about the public provision of culture. Whose art is it anyway? Especially when it’s funded by the taxpayer.
Those set on ousting Misan Harriman from the Southbank Centre have many lines of attack, but one is undoubtedly the feared deprioritisation of artistic excellence as they perceive it. It is a spectre mockingly, anxiously described by one Spectator writer as “fewer orchestral concerts (boring) and many more groovy events”. That’s groovy as in lacking merit, by the way. Groovy as a cudgel.
It’s also laughably reductive. The Music is Black describes music that is not just interesting as culture on the periphery, but is central to the way large sections of British society have evolved. And it is, at the same time, formative of much of British popular mainstream culture.
The exhibition merely asserts the centrality of black music and all that goes with it in our island lives. The death this week of Kanya King, founder of the hugely popular, hugely influential Music of Black Origin awards (Mobos), makes this a good time to reassert that fact.
But that wider truth isn’t in itself why we were shuffling through the many rooms, heads bobbing, looking at the pictures, the sculptures, the clothes, watching the news clips. That was more about personal history, remembering, and a taxpayer-funded public project that said your art is also elite art, your stories have the same resonances and significance as anyone else’s.
So my journey took in the reggae: Millie Small and My Boy Lollipop from the 1960s, and the Cimarons, described as the UK’s first reggae band. I halted in front of the brightly laminated sign for the Four Aces club in Dalston. That was where post-Windrush, music-hungry West Indians in east London went for a night out. The Met police really liked it too for harassment swoops and show-of-force drug raids. My elder brother would go to the Four Aces, and my parents would barely sleep until the front door of our house clicked shut in the early hours of the morning. People took risks for the music back then. Memories, memories.
I moved on and there was the lovers rock section, the female reggae balladeering genre that made us as teenaged boys think we might get lucky with teenaged girls, who in truth were only interested in possibilities older than us and thus more glamorous. Janet Kay (now styled the Queen of Lovers Rock), Carroll Thompson (also now styled the Queen of Lovers Rock), Louisa Mark: all raised hopes hardly ever fulfilled.
I revisited 2 Tone, where British reggae and ska met rock and punk, in a recipe devised in the Midlands. The Specials, the Beat, Madness, the Selecter: my comprehensive school discos weren’t possible without them. They gave inner city teenagers – black, white, Asian, of many tastes and many origins – a place of musical intersection, a chance to dance without skill or guardrails. I listened to the clips and remembered being on the edge of a park on a summer’s afternoon with three white English schoolfriends, when a march by the National Front hoved into view. One schoolmate shot me a glance, taking fright for us both. “We’d better get out of here,” he said. Another wheeled round, looked contemptuously at the looming procession, then slowly turned again. “I’m not running coz I’ve got black mates,” he said. “Fuck ‘em!” So we stayed put and stared hard into the high street, as the toxic rabble passed by.
A head bob away at the exhibition, and there was Britfunk, the point in the 80s and 90s when black Britain knew enough about US disco and R&B to evolve its own version and sell it back to Americans. Linx, Central Line, Light of the World, Loose Ends, Junior Giscombe: we watched back then as young Britons who talked like us hit big on the Billboard charts and were celebrated on classic US shows like Soul Train. In the late 80s, Jazzie B and Soul II Soul did the same. I wanted back then to be a bit like David Grant of Linx, all impassioned vocals and gleaming perm. I achieved the perm. The vocals? Let’s move on.
I think the swaying woman I saw at the V&A was bathing in Afrobeat. I moved past her, pausing only to hear a snatch of Fela Kuti, the Nigerian hero musician who faced down his government. I stopped by the trip-hop. Massive Attack, Tricky, Morcheeba, Portishead – their genre moved the musically fashionable dial away from London towards Bristol. Another era, another mash of styles familiar to us as black and white Britons, resonant of all the fragments of our Britain, and a reassurance that they all hung together.
I ran out of time; there was too much to see and hear and think about, past and present. What to think about evolution and progress when you see the union jack stab-proof vest Stormzy wore during his triumph at Glastonbury, or Little Simz’s stage garb? Or Joan Armatrading’s first guitar, or the actual lyric sheet the legendary songwriter Rod Temperton, son of Cleethorpes, wrote when he adapted a song called Starlight and handed it back to Michael Jackson as Thriller.
Don’t get me wrong, I also like the classical manifestations of art conservatives and rightwing elitists like and vigorously promote, and I pay for that too, but routinely it offers a window into other lives, other cultures, other eras. This is mine: I claim it, and here my taxpayer dollar gave it due respect. Enjoy: I’m happy to share it.
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The future starts with us: Gordon Brown in conversation
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Hugh Muir is executive editor, Opinion
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