Despite racial conflict in many forms and places, on the creative front the colour black shone brighter this year than ever before, writes Pearl Boshomane
In the mid-1990s, it was almost impossible to encounter a (usually male) lover of hip-hop who wasn't walking around in something designed by FUBU. The clothing company For Us, By Us was pretty clear about its aim and who its target market was.
But as hip-hop moved on to the noughties and to 'Lil Wayne, and his label Young Money's chart-friendly, hedonistic brand of rap music, FUBU faded into the background - a distant memory alongside Boyz N the Hood, Kangol hats and Erykah Badu's headwrap game.
In 2016, the name FUBU made something of a comeback - as the title of a song by Solange. The woman who was known to un-hip mainstream media as Beyoncé's little sister had long been something of a hipster demigod to cool black girls all over the world, but 2016 was the year she truly came into her own with the incredible and incredibly black album A Seat at the Table.
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One of the songs that stood out was F.U.B.U., with lyrics like: "When you driving in your tinted car/ And you're criminal, just who you are .../ When it's going on a thousand years/ And you pulling up to your crib/ And they ask you where you live again."
Throughout the track she repeats the line: "This shit is for us," harking back to before the days of FUBU the brand, invoking the spirits of Nina Simone, James Brown, Billie Holiday, Sam Cooke, Marvin Gaye and every black artist before her who sang about black experiences.
Despite Solange's A Seat at the Table being about black life in the US, the album provides plenty of relatable moments for black people everywhere. A lot of us know what it's like to drive around the suburbs and be looked at strangely, or to be the "suspicious BM" beloved by neighbourhood watch WhatsApp groups (because a black man walking around in an 80% black country is so unusual), what it's like for our hair to be treated like something in an art exhibition ("Don't touch my hair, when it's the feelings that I wear," she sings), what it's like to be told to "get over" race and that "not everything is about race" ("You got the right to be mad/ But when you carry it alone you find it only getting in the way/ They say you gotta let it go").
Both Solange's parents made contributions to her album: her mother Tina Knowles, in the interlude Tina Taught Me, declared that there is "so much beauty in being black ... I've always been proud to be black", while her father shared his experience of racism and segregation in the 1960s US in the lyrics of Dad Was Mad.
That's something else that transcends oceans: a lot us have heard first-hand accounts about the brutality and dehumanisation of apartheid from our parents, aunts, uncles and grandparents.
But Solo (as Solange is lovingly called by her fans) wasn't the only black artist making music about being black in 2016.
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Beyoncé released Lemonade , an album about dealing with infidelity and all the demons that come with it. What's so black about being cheated on, you ask? Well, nothing. What made Lemonade such a beautifully black experience was the hour-long film that accompanied it - the imagery and poetry drew inspiration from Southern black life, Creole culture and black spirituality, even referencing the Igbo Landing (the story of captured Nigerians who, rather than become slaves, committed suicide by walking into the sea).
Her Formation video - watch it below - tackled police brutality and embraced stereotypically black physical traits (wide noses and nappy hair). In her Super Bowl performance her dancers formed an X (as in Malcolm X) during one of the routines, while they were all dressed like Black Panthers.
The reaction to Beyoncé's "newfound" blackness was so intense that Saturday Night Live made a skit in which all the white people in the US realised - to their horror - that the woman who gave them Single Ladies was actually black.
Making music about being black paid off for both sisters - Solange and Beyoncé became the first sisters in history to have Billboard No1 albums in the same year.
WATCH the music video for Beyoncé's song Formation