Jeff Ihaza

Jeff Ihaza is Senior Editor at iconic American music magazine Rolling Stone, covering music and culture. Here, he contemplates one of the big winners of the 2021 D&AD Awards, You Love Me for Beats by Dr. Dre. The film picked up a mighty eight Pencils, and boasts an impressive list of credits, including Emmy award-winning writer Lena Waithe, film and music video director heavyweight Melina Matsoukas, Grammy Award-winning musician Solange Knowles, and cinematographer Malik Hassan Sayeed, amongst many other talents.

For the 2021 D&AD Annual, Ihaza reflects on the significance of the film in the context of not only 2020’s social unrest, but decades of cultural production of the Black diaspora.

But the moment didn’t end with public demonstrations. The transformation was happening within the souls of individuals, who for the first time found themselves confronting the realities of privilege and cultural pillaging. The distractions of everyday life were on pause thanks to the invisible virus towering over even the most mundane activities. The asymmetries of Western culture – the stark divides between haves and have-nots – were made even starker in the pandemic, and also more unavoidable. Essential workers, the ones who put their lives on the line to deliver food, groceries, and the mild comforts of life, could no longer be ignored. Nor could the people who made life bearable in the midst of profound collective trauma. The musicians, the actors, the comedians, artists, and dancers, all of whom made hope seem possible.

That so many of those faces are Black, and that so much of the culture we’ve relied on in the past year comes from Black people, is exemplified in the stunning short film You Love Me, produced by the New York agency Translation for the audio equipment brand Beats by Dr. Dre. The film beautifully unfurls the ways in which the world has long been enamoured with the cultural production of the Black diaspora. It’s gentle in its messaging, which requires little explanation. There is a divide between the love of Black culture that exists in the mainstream and the treatment of Black people by the mainstream. But the film doesn’t need to tell you that, instead it shows.

The cinematic style in particular manages to reconfigure the perspective on Blackness to engender a sense of romance and tragedy all at once. These images, bountiful in colour and texture, luxuriate in the richness of Blackness, so much so that you simply can’t look away. The lighting constructs an ombre that gives life to the fact that to be Black is to be dynamic, changing, and evolving. Black and white footage of a gospel choir invokes the tragic and the joyful – Black people are all too familiar with mournful remembrances, but the camera doesn’t linger with despair, instead roving frenetically with the energy of the children doing flips in the park just moments earlier in the clip. There’s plenty of sorrow in the Black experience but You Love Me isn’t interested in retreading old narratives. The nuance here, the reason for the film’s title, is the ways in which Blackness is irreducible to the political circumstances which have, for generations, sought to tear it down. It overcomes, not by force, but by nature.

The pandemic and the uprising of last summer, in particular, put an onus on multinational corporations hoping to remain connected to people who had just spent a year inside their homes reflecting on the myriad injustices in the world. This campaign straddles a delicate line between reverence and somberness and manages to inspire political thought without being heavy-handed. It isn’t the faux-political ramblings we’ve grown accustomed to on social media, but something with a significant degree of depth, especially as this is a campaign for Beats. In the film, we see the rapper Lil Baby, and the singer Alicia Keys, among other icons of Black music, and we’re confronted with the ways that Black music has come to define all music. Without having to say it, You Love Me serves to inspire viewers not only to understand why they love Black culture but to think about what the political implications of that love might be.