A guide to Blackout Week

Welcome to Mixmag Blackout.

On Monday October 19 we began a week of editorial dedicated to Black dance music history, artists, issues and stories guest edited by Kwame Safo, aka Funk Butcher, and guest designed by Naomi Ray.

All of the features from Blackout Week are listed below, in order of publish date, along with a list of the journalists who wrote them. You can also find the features in the Blackout section of Mixmag.net.

Mixmag owes its existence to Black music culture and following on from Blackout Week we will increase the support and attention we give to Black history, artists, communities, voices and writers (you can read our full statement from the beginning of Blackout Week here).

Dance music is Black music.

Guest Editor:

Kwame Safo is a DJ, broadcaster, label head, producer and music consultant. He is the Editor of Mixmag's Blackout Week and you can follow him on Twitter here

Guest Designer:

Naomi Ray is an art director and senior creative. She created the Blackout Week logo and visual identity. Check out her website here

Journalists (A-Z):

Ash Lauryn is a DJ and journalist. Follow her on Twitter here

DeForrest Brown, Jr. is a New York-based theorist, journalist, and curator. He produces digital audio and extended media as Speaker Music and is a representative of the Make Techno Black Again campaign. His work explores the links between Black experience in industrialized labor systems and Black innovation in electronic music. On Juneteenth of 2020, he released the album Black Nationalist Sonic Weaponry on Planet Mu, and Primary Information will publish his first book Assembling a Black Counter Culture in 2021

Chanté Joseph is a freelance writer, social creative and host of Channel 4's How Not to be Racist, follow her on Twitter

Welcome to Blackout week
A note from Guest Editor Kwame Safo, Guest Designer Naomi Ray
Read the feature

Inside Trax Records: Why Chicago's house originators are fighting for reparations
Decades on from changing the world, Chicago's pioneers are still pursuing payment and the rights to the music they created. Marcus K. Dowling investigates
Read the feature

Mysteries of the deep: How Drexciya reimagined slavery to create an afrofuturist utopia
Marcus Barnes presents the history of Drexciya, the mysterious Detroit duo who built their own vast underwater afrofuturist utopia
Read the feature

The unsung Black women pioneers of house music
Jaguar talks to the Black women who laid the foundations for the house music scene as we know it today
Read the feature

Honey Dijon: "Dance music has been colonised"
Honey Dijon talks to Ash Lauryn about the impact that the Black Lives Matter movement has had on dance music
Read the feature

Sting gave your favourite grime MCs their big break – so why haven't you heard of him?
Kwame Safo presents the history of Sting, the London entrepreneur behind the legendary Deja Vu radio station and the seminal early 90s Telepathy parties that helped to birth jungle
Read the feature

The Beneficiaries: "We are resistance artists, techno is resistance music"
Marcus Barnes meets Jeff Mills, Eddie Fowlkes and Jessica Care Moore who have united to become Detroit supergroup The Beneficiaries
Read the feature

Annie Mac: "There's not enough Black people in every level of the industry"
Annie Mac and Natalie Maddix of House Gospel Choir talk race, power and business in the music industry with Jasmine Kent-Smith
Read the feature

The Lazarusman: "Not being racist isn't enough, you need to be anti-racist"
The South African spoken word poet, vocalist, DJ and producer talks anti-racism, post-apartheid South Africa, and more
Read the feature

How the Dance Music Industry failed Black artists
DeForrest Brown, Jr. surveys the last three decades of the dance music industry to figure out what went wrong for Black artists
Read the feature

Simon Dunmore: "I've had to re-educate myself"
Kwame Safo talks to Simon Dunmore about his responsibility as a record label boss in the age of Black Lives Matter
Read the feature

The exploitation of Black women vocalists in house music
Chanté Joseph talks in depth to five artists about their experiences of racism and misogyny in the music industry
Read the feature

Kevin Saunderson: "Black people don't even know that techno came from Black artists"
Jaguar talks to Kevin Saunderson and Idris Elba about their Inner City collaboration, the roots of techno and the future of dance music
Read the feature

The roadmap to change
Kwame Safo sets out a plan for real change in the music industry
Read the feature

Nightclubs aren't utopia for every Black raver
Joseph 'JP' Patterson details the discrimination that runs throughout clubland
Read the feature

The gentrification of jungle
Kwame Safo talks to Marc Mac, Bryan Gee, DJ Flight and Junior Tomlin about the futuristic Black art form and why its Black roots should never be forgotten
Read the feature

20 Black UK house acts you should know about
Kwame Safo picks 20 Black UK house acts who are pushing things forward
Read the feature

Why didn't UK funky break the mainstream?
Kwame Safo talks to some prominent figures of UK funky about why the sound didn't crack the mainstream market
Read the feature

Ty and the history of UK rap
A brief history of UK hip hop, rap and MC culture told by a linchpin of the scene, Shortee Blitz
Read the feature