Why Black America Floats In Beats by Dre's "You Love Me" Spot
Trey Alston / WNW Member
One of The Wire’s scenes resulted in one of the most popular GIFs on the internet. Drug dealer-turned-marketing executive Stringer Bell explains the concept of “market saturation” to two of his employees while he sits in the back of the car. After dropping off the knowledge to them, he tilts his head and looks at each man for no more than a second without them realizing it because they’re looking ahead. Seemingly in amazement at their cluelessness, he chuckles to himself and stares out of his own window afterwards, shaking his head at the situation that he’s in.
That’s what being Black in America feels like. Especially in 2020.
This scene is what kept circling through my mind while watching Beats by Dre’s new “You Love Me” advertisement that comes with beautiful narration about America’s love-hate obsession with the Black experience by Tobe Nwigwe. For full context, Beats By Dre’s past advertisements, in recent years, have focused on the resiliency of athletes to tune out noise and distractions through explicit headphone tie-ins. But in this latest Beats spot, there’s no promotion of any item—only an important message about race that the country needs to buy into.
“In this latest Beats spot, there’s no promotion of any item—only an important message about race that the country needs to buy into.”
For two minutes, Nwigwe speaks to America as an institution, asking the people that don’t look like us why they fetishize parts of us but refuse to actually love us. Rapper Lil Baby, tennis player Naomi Osaka, and others star in the ad as representatives of the black culture that America greedily drinks up like the first canteen of fresh water after three hundred years meandering through a desert. It’s meant to be unsettling. Almost all of its stars lock eyes with the camera to pass judgement with your soul and decide whether you fetishize or respect its people. Even its credits, with the cast assigned the same character name as “Black Person,” mean to show that this message is from not just the stars of the video, but from us all—bringing issues that are frequently spoken about in the black community to the forefront of entertainment at the highest level.
“You love how I sound, my voice, these beats, this flow, not me though, right?” is one of the first things that you hear after the ad’s intro. This simple, yet powerful phrase, is delivered during a scene of Lil Baby getting his hair braided. The 25-year-old rapper, (who has two platinum albums under his belt and perhaps the biggest protest song of 2020), with his braids, gold chains, and massive diamond earrings, is the prototypical image of everything that makes America’s fingers hover over the lock button when he walks past their cars. Yet his immense commercial popularity, and personal research into who champions him across Twitter and Instagram, has proven that those same people are the ones who caption their pictures with their lyrics and wear clothes that he’s popularized.
The spot continues with the quote, “you love how I look, my hair, this skin, but me? Nah.” It’s a great observation, considering how white models and influencers have recently been showered with endearing amounts of press for wearing long acrylic nails and dying their hair electric shades of blue and purple. These two styles, for decades, were considered to not only be “black” things, but also to be “ghetto” which is typically used as a negative descriptor. But, this year, black is the new white. The term “Blackfishing,” coined in part by writer Wanna Thompson, explains how these very same influencers tan and wear makeup until their skin is almost the same complexion as the people that their ancestors turned water hoses on out of sheer evil. Seeing these things is unsettling, spooky even.
Beats By Dre makes these points and then shifts to exploring this history and beauty in our brown skin. Through its brief look at the world of cowboys and the church, it reminds me of our overall history in America and how we’re programmed from birth. We don’t get to just exist, we’re forced to survive. Black Americans come out of the womb in a defensive stance, with our parents charging our batteries with messages needed to survive in a world that isn’t ready for us. We watch the world decide which aspects of our culture it loves, and simultaneously watch its institutions, charged with protecting us, instead harm and kill the innocent. It's traumatizing, and most of us don't realize it.
“We don’t get to just exist, we’re forced to survive. Black Americans come out of the womb in a defensive stance, with our parents charging our batteries with messages needed to survive in a world that isn’t ready for us.”
That is until red lights are flashing in our rear view mirror and our hearts start skipping. The officer walks to the car and shines his light in your face with his hands on his pistol. In that moment, you’re dependent on how much he loves black culture or understands it—how much he loves us.
But love us or not, we still rise. We’re a resilient people who continue to march for justice, create the culture that drives the world, and come together to create a brighter future by being the driving force that gets blatantly racist presidents out of office. At the end of the ad, Nwigwe explains this almost unbelievable quality with three words: “we defy gravity.” A black body on screen then rises into the air slowly, mystically.
It’s my favorite part of the experience, and it's indicative of how I see us through it all. I shake my head at White America for criticizing then appropriating our culture while hating us, but I clap for us coming on the other side spiritually unscathed. Trauma is in our bloodlines and has been through generations, so just like with the pandemic’s impacts of this year, we brush off the doom and keep it going.
“I clap for us coming on the other side spiritually unscathed. Trauma is in our bloodlines and has been through generations, so just like with the pandemic’s impacts of this year, we brush off the doom and keep it going.”
“You Love Me” is an impressive, important, and eye-opening look into what the black experience is like in 2020. It asks questions that could make America and its institutions look away in discomfort, but they’re necessary asks to define the climate that we currently live in—and hopefully change it for the better. At the end of the video, a black youth emerges from water into what could symbolically be a new world. It’s the aftereffect of a natural baptism, potentially symbolizing a reality where America does, in fact, love us. I smile at the thought of this new lease on Black life, but I wonder whether America will ever create that for us.
The road to that, first, begins with America revealing that it loves us.
Trey Alston is a copywriter and music journalist who writes for Complex, MTV News, BET, and more. He just discovered that he loves egg salad.