The Music is Black

The Music is Black: A British Story, the inaugural exhibition at the new V&A East Museum in Stratford, is a bold and timely statement about the Black cultural presence in Blighty. This exciting exposition opened up last month and will end in January 2027.

I grew up in Barbados and Nigeria in the 1970s and 1980s listening and shimmying to Hot Chocolate, Beggar and Co, The Real Thing, Imagination, and Central Line, among others, not realising until many years later that these were in fact among the finest music acts to emerge from Albion.

So for me, seeing some of these artists celebrated in the exhibition was special and nostalgic.

Curated by Jacqueline Springer, The Music is Black: A British Story brings together some 200 objects spanning over a century of musical history. Springer’s vision is expansive, tracing an arc ranging from precolonial African sound traditions to the contemporary genres dominating today’s charts.

Visitors begin their journey in an immersive sound tunnel featuring over a hundred tracks – a sensory overture so to speak – setting the tone for the exhibition’s four thematic acts. From there, the show moves through histories of migration, resistance, innovation, and reinvention. The V&A has also produced a companion playlist, available at:

https://www.vam.ac.uk/articles/the-music-is-black-playlist

Chelone Wolf, ‘Fabio and Grooverider’ © Chelone Wolf.

Grime: A Homegrown East London Story

One of the exhibition’s most resonant sections focuses on grime, the genre born just down the road in Bow. Emerging in the early 2000s from pirate radio stations, youth clubs, and tower block bedrooms, grime fused garage, jungle, dancehall, and hiphop into a sound that was unmistakably local. Artists such as Wiley, Dizzee Rascal, Tinchy Stryder, and later Skepta and JME, transformed East London into a creative engine whose influence spread across the UK and beyond.

The exhibition acknowledges grime as a pivotal chapter in the story of Black British music. Photographs, performance footage, and objects associated with the scene highlight its do-it-yourself ethos and its role in giving voice to young people navigating austerity, inequality, and rapid urban change. The inclusion of grime reinforces the exhibition’s grounding in place, so to speak, reminding visitors that the museum stands in the very landscape that shaped one of Britain’s most significant musical movements.

You could say, too, that the Music is Black exhibition sits within a wider context of curatorial recognition.

The British Library’s Beyond the Bassline, the Barbican’s explorations of Black London’s music scenes, Sonia Boyce’s Golden Lion-winning Feeling Her Way, Dennis Morris’ excellent Music + Life showcase, and the Tate Modern’s landmark Soul of a Nation, have all contributed to a growing recognition of Black cultural impact.

The show’s objects are displayed with the care one associates with the V&A’s major blockbusters. Highlights include the yeoman contribution made by Trip Hop artists out of Bristol, Pauline Black’s 2 Tone outfit, Stormzy’s Union Jack stab vest, Liverpool’s The Real Thing, Joan Armatrading’s acoustic guitar, stagewear from DJ Paulette, and imagery of So Solid Crew and Skepta.

Stormzy’s Union Jack Stab Vest

Winifred Atwells other upright piano.

Winifred Atwell’s ‘other’ upright piano is also on splendid display. We get a glimpse, through Dennis Morris’s gifted photographic eye of the Aces Club’s Sound System in the early 1970s, and, courtesy Adrian Boot, Linton Kwesi Johnson and Darcus Howe at the Race Today office in Brixton in 1979.

Adrian Boot, ‘Linton Kwesi Johnson and Darkus Howe at the Race Today office on Railton Road Brixton’, 1979 © Adrian Boot.

Political and racial realities

Several of the most striking elements in The Music is Black: A British Story are those that confront the racial histories underpinning Black British culture. One of the most powerful is the inclusion of King Charles II’s 1663 Royal Charter for the Royal African Company, a document that formalised Britain’s role in the transatlantic slave trade.

Its presence grounds the exhibition in the brutal economic and colonial systems that shaped the African diaspora, and, by extension, the cultural forms that later emerged in Britain. Alongside it, Haitian bank stamps associated with Vodou resistance movements highlight global networks of Black defiance, linking Caribbean spiritual and political traditions directly to the identities carried into Britain by later generations. The exhibition also uses art and contemporary culture to explore political expression.

Ben Enwonwu’s The Drummer foregrounds the primacy of rhythm in all African-descended communities including those scattered throughout the Caribbean. It should be remembered that beyond its function as foundational to African rhythm, the drum was so feared by slave owners during the Trans Atlantic slave trade because of its power of communication – that it was banned and suppressed by the plantocracy.

Dennis Morris, Aces Club, Count Shelly Sound System, Hackney’, 1974 (photographed), 2010 (printed) © Dennis Morris, Courtesy Victoria Albert Museum.

Other genres are framed through their political contexts. Lovers Rock is presented not just as a romantic reggae style but as a form of Black British feminist expression emerging during a period marked by the SUS laws and the rise of the National Front. Jungle, garage, and drill are shown in relation to the criminalisation of Black nightlife, referencing controversies such as Form 696 and the wider moral panics that have shaped public perceptions of Black music. Archival footage of protests, carnivals, and community organising – including references to the Mangrove Nine and the Black People’s Day of Action (following the horrific January 1981 New Cross Fire killing 13 young Black people and severely injuring 50 more during a birthday party) reinforces the exhibition’s central argument: Black British music has always been inseparable from the everyday struggle for human dignity, community resilience, and cultural recognition.

Sepia Butterfly, London, 1993 © Jennie Baptiste.

The £20 Question

The exhibition’s standard entry fee is £20 (weekday prices rise to £22.50 and weekends to £24.50, with concessions available). Whether this is justified will divide opinion. On one hand, the scale, research depth, and immersive design clearly reflect significant investment. On the other, the museum’s stated commitment to accessibility – particularly for local communities facing economic pressures – makes the pricing a point of tension. Concession tickets help, but the question remains whether a landmark exhibition celebrating Black British culture should be more financially accessible to the communities whose histories it honours.

A Landmark for East London and a reminder of the evolving dialogue

Ultimately, The Music is Black: A British Story is a confident and necessary exhibition. It celebrates the artists, communities, and movements that have shaped Britain’s soundscape, while acknowledging the histories that made that creativity possible. Springer’s curatorial voice is authoritative while Casely-Hayford’s leadership gives the project a sense of purpose rooted in place.

Needless to say, for well over a century, Black British expressive cultures have operated as counter-hegemonic practices that articulate, contest, and reconfigure the racialised conditions of British life.

From the 1950s onward, expressions of our unique creativity such as sound system culture, visual movements like the BLK Art Group, literary interventions by writers including Sam Selvon, CLR James and Bernardine Evaristo, and fashion subcultures emerging from the Caribbean and African diasporic communities have collectively produced a canon of resistance.

These forms have responded to structural racism, aggressive and institutionalised racial policing, housing discrimination, and cultural marginalisation not only by documenting lived experience but by generating alternative epistemologies and aesthetic strategies.

In the contemporary moment – marked by the rise of far right movements across Europe – Black British creativity continues to function as a critical site of political expression, and diasporic memory.

Taken together, these practices, so excellently documented and showcased in the V&A East’s exhibition, The Music is Black: A British Story, reveal a sustained, evolving dialogue between oppression and imagination.