At V&A East's The Music is Black, headphones that change with where you stand turn a shared exhibition into a room full of people listening alone.
At the entrance, a steward hands me a pair of headphones. The others are charging on a black trolley, a two-way radio propped among the cables. He lifts a set from its slot and passes it over. A few steps into the exhibition, the music starts. Further on, it changes without my touching anything.
The headphones respond to where you stand. At first I notice the changes; after a while, I stop thinking about them.
On the Sunday afternoon I visit, perhaps thirty or forty people are moving through the galleries. Almost nobody speaks. A shoulder drops in front of a case of hymn books. Someone keeps time beside a wall of contact sheets. A woman stays in one of the genre bays, no longer looking at the label.
I cannot tell what she is hearing.
The walls are almost black. Gold lettering runs across them in narrow vertical strokes. There is enough light to pick out a face, a sleeve, the lettering on a machine. Further into the exhibition, the bays turn purple, mustard and rose. People drift apart to look at different things, each taking the music with them.
The Music is Black covers 125 years of Black music-making in Britain, though its opening rooms reach much further back. Before the records and the stage clothes come the documents: the trade in enslaved people, the institutions that authorised it, the religious arguments used to sustain it.
A charter bearing Charles II's signature sits within this history. Nearby are a Jamaican fifty-dollar note honouring Sam Sharpe, who led the Baptist rebellion, and Haitian stamps commemorating the Bois Caïman ceremony and the Battle of Crête-à-Pierrot. The paperwork moves between the exercise of power and the later remembrance of those who fought it.
The section on religion is where the method shows. Its wall text sets out how British and European empires used faith to hold their colonies, sending missionaries and producing publications intended to make slavery appear normal. The cases below it hold scripture and hymnals. Most of the violence in this room is on paper, and much of it is editorial.
Later, recording enters the story. A gramophone with a brass horn, Columbia discs, a phonographic message sent to Queen Victoria by Emperor Menelik II. Sheet music for Star Dust and a poster for Blackbirds of 1928. You move from these to an Amiga, a Technics deck in a battered flight case and the Oberheim DMX used by Trevor Horn on Buffalo Gals.
The machines invite a different sort of attention from the documents. I find myself looking at the controls, trying to imagine hands working them. With the headphones on, it is easy to pass from an object to the sound associated with it without noticing how much the exhibition has arranged that encounter.
The history keeps interrupting the pleasure. A poster for Barrie Keeffe's SUS catches a policeman and a young Black man mid-grab, in acid green and red. There is a section on stop and search, Stella Dadzie's Motherland, Fowokan George Kelly's bronze head with locs, lit orange inside its case. These are part of the route through the music, not a separate account to consult afterwards.
I spend longer with the clothes than with the paintings.
Janet Kay's black dress is strikingly plain beside the sound of Silly Games. Pauline Black's tailored suit, checked Fred Perry shirt and pork pie hat have a precision that survives the stillness of the mannequin. Further on are a gold gown worn by Shirley Bassey and a Comme des Garçons ensemble worn by Little Simz.
Then there is Skin's lime suit, worn at Glastonbury in 2022, with Clit Rock across the back and a spiked latex headpiece above it. The label traces the phrase to an insult used by the music press. On the suit, it has become something she chose to wear in front of a crowd.
People stop to photograph it.
A costume carries the scale of a person into a museum. You can imagine the shoulders inside it, the heat, the movement it once had. The case holds it still long enough for the seams and lettering to become legible. It also gives that particular performance a place in the historical record. Other nights, other clothes, will survive only in photographs or in someone's memory.
Near the end, a statement on a purple wall argues that commercial success need not mean selling out. A short walk beyond it, the exhibition book is stacked on a table in the shop, marked at a special price. The music has been recorded, packaged, sold and collected throughout the galleries. At the exit, visitors can take another version of the story home.
But before the shop, there is a bench.
Six or seven people sit in a dark room facing a wall-sized projection of faces. Their headphones are still on. After the colours and objects, the room feels spare. Nobody says anything.
Much of the music in this exhibition grew through people gathering: in churches and front rooms, at blues dances, around sound systems, in clubs. Here, the gathering takes another form. We share the space and see one another respond, but the sound reaches each of us separately.
I have noticed people all afternoon without exchanging a word with them. The shoulder by the hymn books. The head keeping time. The woman who stayed in the bay.
I could see that she was listening. I never knew whether we were hearing the same song.
Visited 20 September 2026.
Disclosure: ELIN paid for admission.
A note on two names: the attributions of Janet Kay's dress and Pauline Black's suit draw on media coverage of the exhibition rather than object labels recorded on site.