Making visual displays about music is hard. This may be why V&A East’s inaugural exhibition, ostensibly celebrating the work of black British musicians, opens with extensive notes on the transatlantic slave trade. A dozen objects and infographics, of no relevance to music, imply between staves that Africa is the origin of sound.
To the eye rolling in response, what follows looks like a jumble of archival photos, vinyl records, and audio kits, arranged to quasi-educational, quasi-entertainment ends. The show’s thesis — that there is a uniquely black British music and that it is synonymous with postcolonialism — is hard to evaluate because the display can’t figure out what blackness means in Britain that’s only “Great” enough to be named so in scare quotes.
There’d be plenty to hear here. Yet the show barely explores, for example, the source of racial tensions in Notting Hill when it takes on the Carnival in the 1960s. It treats Windrush as if it were myth, not a subject worthy of research and mindful interpretation.
The exhibition’s soundtrack is rich, at least, yet the individual headphones turn would-be rave-goers into mute, inanimate zombies. The celebrations are, therefore, mindless. A large section on contemporary black music venerates 2 Tone for “confronting Britain with its own reflection” and Trip Hop for “opening listeners’ eyes [sic] to emotion”. But there’s no mention of Drill, a uniquely black British genre, nor the incarceration of its many makers for gang crime.
The exhibition, if not the entire V&A East enterprise, presents a tired, corporatist response to questions of identity that the institutions made bank on in 2021. The project’s intellectual gentrification is as lazy as it is advanced, shedding even Blairite Millenium Dome ambitions. This may be fitting for the new Stratford desert but hits few notes beyond.
