Michael Kiwanuka – Light
2020 · Directed by Jeremy Ngatho Cole
25K Likes
Best comments
1.“I'll be honest: I thought this was a 1970s, Bill Withers-ish song. I was surprised to find out this masterpiece is from 2019... it gives me hope that real music isn't dead.”
More comments
- 2.“This should have been the soundtrack for the new 007.”
- 3.“I'm 83 years old, a classical/jazz buff, and relieved to hear something genuinely new – something kind, something not canned!”
The story
Michael Kiwanuka put this out on June 19, 2020 – Juneteenth – with Black Lives Matter protests still filling streets around the world. London filmmaker Jeremy Ngatho Cole made it as an animated piece, with illustrations of the protests woven through it: Black men and women marching, and one young man holding a sign that asks whether he's next. Heavy pictures, gentle song. The contrast does the work.
Light is the closing track on KIWANUKA, the 2019 album he made with Danger Mouse and Inflo, and the video uses a trimmed edit of the nearly six-minute original. Kiwanuka said he wanted to state it plainly: he was proud to be Black, after years of watching the world shrink Black people down to labels and statistics.
Later that year the album won the 2020 Mercury Prize. NME had compared him to Bill Withers and Gil Scott-Heron. Fair company for the soundtrack to a very loud summer.
