[Twosugars]

Liked Celeste, Eilish, Stormzy and Dave

Guardian on Dave

Playing piano against blocks of black is a performance of Black, Dave’s ode to needing to work twice as hard, as a black person, to get half as far in life. If Harry Styles had two pianos, Dave one-ups him with a single piano with two keyboards. He plays it himself in the opening half of the endlessly unspooling freestyle, but is joined by a second pianist to allow him to focus on the mic ratchet up the vocal intensity; pain and speed gradually reaching a climax of sheer anger at institutional and historic racism.

And what a climax. Dave gets off his piano stool to deliver a newly written final freestyle verse that ranks alongside – no, outpaces – the similarly electric and political statement from Stormzy when he shouted “where’s the money for Grenfell?” in 2018. “The truth is our prime minister is a real racist” gets aired in the opening lines. He pays tribute to Jack Merritt, a victim of the London Bridge terror attack, but argues “tougher sentences: that’s just papering cracks”; spits fire about the treatment of Meghan Markle, calls out the government regarding Grenfell; and calls for “reparations for the time our people spent on plantations”. This is what the Brits stage is made for: forthright political statements that can hopefully move the dial in millions of living rooms nationwide.

Must have made any racists watching a bit uncomfortable