125 years of Black music-making in Britain

Spanning four continents, this is a story of excellence, struggle, resilience and joy.

Step into The Music is Black: A British Story and travel through time as over 120 tracks from every era play directly through your headset. More than an exhibition, this immersive sound experience explores the power and impact of Black British music and guides you through this labyrinth of videos, costumes, sculptures and photographs with the songs they chronicle. It traces the manifold musical cultures that came out of the violent displacement of African people by the slave trade and this synoptic history of Black music sows the seeds for many other exhibitions, from the media hysteria surrounding the birth of grime at the turn of the century to 2 Tone and the anti-racist coalitions of the late 1970s. It is the opening offering from the newest part of an institution that seems to be endlessly expanding. V&A East follows the neighbouring Storehouse and Young V&A in Bethnal Green. Farther north, there’s V&A Dundee, which opened in 2018 and had a starring role in Succession. The new addition in Stratford was designed by O’Donnell & Tuomey, which describes the £135m building as a “protective jacket”. Some cover may be necessary: it’s already been criticised by some as “ugly”, “perverse” and looking like “a reconstructed Toblerone bar”.

Perhaps this seeding of ideas is the point – because The Music is Black establishes an exhibition model well suited to the institution. A story pertinent to the V&A’s own colonial history is told through the culture that emerged from and contests it. The combination of powerful music with contextualising information produces the complexity that only comes when the senses and the intellect are forced to operate at the same time, and cannot find alignment.

The show does not attempt to square the horrors of the slave trade or the racism experienced by Black Britons with the music that emerged from those experiences. The visitor is instead asked to hold those two things in their minds and their bodies, and to reflect on the capacity of music to express suffering even as it provokes joy.