Aluna: “It’s crazy how segregated dance music is when it was created to be unifying”

Aluna guested on Zane Lowe’s Apple Music show to talk about her new song ‘Envious’ and more.

During the discussion, she spoke about her experience as a Black women in dance music and how the values supposedly underpinning the scene are no longer as strong as they once were.

Aluna said: “I had been ready to just try my hardest with me, my team, to be the exception to the rule. To break those boundaries and be a Black woman in dance electronic. And then, after George Floyd, I was like, "Let me take a step back and put this into context. What is the challenge here? Why am I facing the challenge?" And then I started to look deeper into the structure of our music industry at the moment and how it pertains to its history and how there's lots of history that I didn't know about that is truly inspiring and beautiful and magical when you find it. And why leave that buried? I felt like it's buried treasure, because there's so much richness that you can find in the untold history, especially the Black untold history of all the different musical genres, but especially dance."

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Aluna also said: “It is crazy to me how segregated dance music is when it was created to be a form of unifying and community. So I'm like, okay, we need to like... There's something wrong with this picture here. It's like, neither side wants to just be... No one wants segregation anymore. It's very old fashioned. We need to move into the future. I do feel like on the one hand, I'm really saying things that are alarming. We'd have to restructure things. I'm like, but it's also really, really obvious. So you're saying you want to keep it segregated? No, you don’t.”

On her new album ‘Renaissance’, she said: “It is really about who inspired me. I wasn't the first. I followed. I watched people breaking boundaries. I really felt like there was a Black renaissance going on, especially in film and at that kind of grassroots level where the writing all the way to the directing was being done by Black women. Then I was seeing Black cosplayers, Black girl ravers. And I was just like, "Oh my God, all this is happening." And it was always the first time, I'd be like, "I've never seen this before and I never even thought I would see this." Why? I don't know, because that's the world that we live in. And I was just like, what does it take to go so against expectations and against the grain. I'm truly enthralled by that and I was like, that's what I have to do again.”

Listen to the full interview here.

‘Renaissance’ is out on August 28. Listen to 'Envious' below.

Patrick Hinton is Mixmag's Digital Features Editor, follow him on Twitter

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