Why 2016 was a good year to be black in the entertainment industry

23 December 2016 - 02:00 By Pearl Boshomane
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A scene from Solange’s ‘Cranes in the Sky’ video.
A scene from Solange’s ‘Cranes in the Sky’ video.
Image: Supplied

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

 

The thread of blackness also ran through Freetown Sound, the magnificent and melancholic album by frequent Solange collaborator Devonté "Dev" Hynes (aka Blood Orange). The title refers to the capital of Sierra Leone, where his father was born.

The album explored religion's role in the lives of Africans, respectability politics, othering, and being black where you're not welcome ("Why the fuck do you even speak?/ It's not a choice of speech, and it sure ain't free/ Wear your braids to keep your edge/ Stay in your corner, fuck you up, we lost our chill," Hynes sings on Chance).

On the track Hands Up, Hynes compared police officers to the bogeyman, something for black people to be afraid of. He sang: "Are you sleeping with the lights on baby?/ Keep your hood off when you're walking cause they/ Trying not to be obsessed with your hatin'/ Sure enough they're gonna take your body."

Legendary rap outfit A Tribe Called Quest explored being a person of colour in Donald Trump's America on We Got It From Here ... Thank You 4 Your Service, which they said would be their final album following the death this year of member Phife Dawg. ("All you black folks, you must go/ All you Mexicans, you must go/ And all you poor folks, you must go/ Muslims and gays, boy, we hate your ways," Q-Tip sings on We the People.)

Common's Black America Again - watch the music video below - was accompanied by a short film that included references to police brutality and the Black Lives Matter movement.

The album itself was Common at his conscious rap best, ending on a hopeful, fist-in-the-air moment with the track Letter to the Free, whose lyrics include: "Institution ain't just a building/ But a method of having black and brown bodies fill them/ We ain't seen as human beings with feelings/ Will the US ever be us? Lord willing!"

LISTEN to Common's Black America Again featuring Stevie Wonder

 

But the blackness extended beyond music.

One of the biggest sources of blackness in entertainment was, surprisingly, Marvel Comics. This was the year that the film and comic book superpower gave black characters time in the spotlight. First it was with the Netflix series Luke Cage, the character whose blackness is a major part of who he is. The series showrunner, Cheo Hodari Coker, told Vanity Fair in an interview that Luke Cage didn't just happen to be a black guy: "No, he's black all day because I'm black all day. There's just no way around that."

Luke Cage was refreshing and overdue. The hero was black, the women were multidimensional (and black), the bad guy was black (and not some lame-ass stereotype ghetto Flava Flav-chain-and-durag-wearing crime boss caricature called Shawty, of the sort so often featured in major productions). The supporting cast was black (and Asian and Latino), the extras were black. There was a white supporting character but he was the sidekick to a black female detective.

Who could ignore what a massive statement it was to have a bulletproof black superhero who was wearing a hoodie at a time when black men in hoodies were being killed?

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This was also the year that the Marvel character Black Panther finally made his big screen debut, in Captain America: Civil War. This was to prep us for his upcoming solo movie, due out in 2018. The cast of the movie is black (Chadwick Boseman, Lupita Nyong'o, Angela Bassett, Michael B. Jordan) and so is its director (Ryan Coogler).

And when Marvel rebooted the Black Panther comic book this year, it was written by Ta-Nehisi Coates, the same journalist whose main beat is race and whose most famous work is The Case for Reparations, a piece he wrote for The Atlantic.

One of the breakout stars on mainstream TV was Issa Rae, the woman who enjoyed a cult following because of her fabulous web series Awkward Black Girl. Her HBO sitcom Insecure - watch the trailer below - was one of the highlights of 2016. The show followed the adventures of Rae and her bestie, Molly - and while it featured the usual growing pains of being in your late 20s/early 30s, race and racial dynamics played a big part.

Watching Rae trying to assert herself around her tone-deaf white colleagues while also trying not to be labelled as an angry or bitter black woman was something many of us understood from personal experience.

Molly, who worked in a big law firm, lived the reality that many black people in the corporate world understand - code switching, or minimising your blackness so that you can not only be accepted within white spaces but also stand the chance of progressing.

In one episode a new black girl joined the firm, and while Molly was thrilled to see another black face in a white sea of tailored suits and pencil skirts, she was horrified because the girl was loud and, well, too black.

WATCH the trailer for Insecure

Also worth a mention are Queen Sugar, the series by Selma director Ava DuVernay on Oprah's OWN network, and Donald Glover's FX series Atlanta.

Before Insecure debuted, Rae said it would explore "the complexities of 'blackness' and the reality that you can't escape being black". Thankfully she wasn't the only black creative determined to tell one of many black stories and black experiences.

They say 2016 was a terrible year, but it was a great year to be a black artist.

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