DJ Lindsey’s mix show Black Is Black celebrates music across the Black diaspora

DJ Lindsey. // Photo via Zoom

At the beginning of February, the second season of Black Is Black premiered on Sonos’ Sound System platform. The show is hosted by DJ Lindsey, also known as Lindsey Caldwell. The DJ and curator’s weekly show “delves into the Black musical diaspora, exploring influences, its global impact and how Black artists have consistently changed culture through music.”

Each episode of Black Is Black is a fantastic collection of music along a theme, such as “Van Hell-Sang,” which saw Tipley explore her love of horror films alongside “how Black artists have a tricky yet unique relationship with scary themes in their music,” or the recent “The Art of Begging,” tracing the history of R&B from classic crooners to rather more explicit modern songmakers.

Earlier this month, we hopped on Zoom with Caldwell to discuss Black Is Black—how the show came to be and how each episode is put together.

Black Is Black show. // Courtesy of DJ Lindsey

The Pitch: Most DJs have areas of expertise and preference, but Black Is Black covers so many genres. It’s safe to assume that a lot of what allows you to do that are the people featured in each episode?

Lindsey Caldwell: Some of it has to do with that. Personally, a lot of it has to do with just spending a lot of time with my grandparents in that era when everyone didn’t have their own individual device to decide exactly what you want to listen to.

My parents didn’t play that game in the car either. They were like, “We’re going to get this Luther Vandross. You’re going to get this Anita Baker and say nothing.” My dad and mom were into a wide variety of music—from singer-songwriters to, like, Luther and the traditional R&B singers.

My dad was really into reggae music and rock and roll. There were some standouts. Stevie Wonder was a staple in the house. Luther was a staple in the house—and just urban radio. I grew up in Missouri, and all urban radio was pretty regional, so the DJs really had more control. And you could tell.

When they were asking for people to call in and respond to certain things, they would play “Telephone Call” by Kraftwerk as they engaged with people on the phone. And Hall & Oates. A lot of the blue-eyed soul was played a lot in Missouri. I think a lot of my knowledge has to do with that.

My grandfather was huge into bebop. My nickname was Shoobee. There are all these layers of a foundation that was built for me before I ever even had my own taste in music.

Once I was in college and starting to figure everything out—I was a dancer, so I had all this exposure to classical music, and weird adult contemporary jazz was big in my ballet company. I started to listen to my own stuff, but then we were living in Arizona, so there was cumbia on the radio, along with Selena and this very top-level pop. Mariah was running the radio when I was growing up in Arizona. Janet, George, Michael—that kind of stuff.

When I moved to Georgia—we moved around a lot [laughs]—so, when I moved to Georgia, I met these kids that were all going to raves. I got into jungle, drum and bass, and breaks and just some odd, odd things. I got into acid jazz. Throughout the years, I was always open, and that came from that foundation of where you have to be a listener and find what you enjoy with what you are hearing right now.

The biggest blind spot for me, doing Black Is Black, is Africa and Black people outside of the west. That’s still a challenge. Race is also made up. Using that as a parameter for determining what artists we feature on the show can get dicey when you’re looking at Latin America, where we have Dominicans saying, “I no Black, papi.”

They’re not claiming Blackness. They’re saying their nationality is what they want to claim rather than Black versus white. I don’t blame people for wanting to side with whiteness, because it’s uncomfortable sometimes to live as a Black person in certain places. I think those are my two biggest blind spots, and that’s when I rely heavily on my DJ community.

I have an associate producer who lives in the UK, but she’s from Ghana, so a lot of times we’re tapping into a network of her family in Africa and then just looking at like, “What are they doing in Germany? What are they doing in Portugal?” We really want to include and celebrate Black people all across the diaspora, and that’s been the biggest challenge.

My perspective as a host is, “Hey, I got this very American public school education here, so I know a lot about America. I know a lot about the white history and a little bit about Europe, but I don’t know anything about Africa.” So, to answer your question after going on a very long tangent, it’s a lot of research and relying really heavily on DJs that specifically focus on certain regions or genres that are African.

There’s so much access to music now that was once hidden from the United States. Record labels like Now Again are digging deep and finding Zamrock bands nobody knew about outside of England in the early ’70s. You can enter “north African blues” into Pandora and end up with an educational playlist including Tinariwen and Mdou Moctar, among others. How do you narrow it down for an hour-long show? 

Yeah. I really think of it from the perspective of a DJ. There may be amazing songs I really want to include that make sense for the topic, but there’s also this jam, and I want to play that. The DJ in me is always going to pick the song that fits well into the storytelling of the mix, ’cause I like to start at a certain point and build up to something else.

That’s why sometimes you’ll see a gap in between. There’s no way of cohesively saying this and saying that in the same 50-minute mix. I always pick the jam first, even if the way it makes sense can be loose. The music is the focus, and it always has to be something I stand by.

What was the genesis of the show and how did it come about?

Saidah Blount is a person who books the people to do the shows, and she let me know they were interested in receiving pitches. I was like, “Oh my God, what can it be?” I have this mortal fear of public failure, so my thinking was, “How can I do this in a really honest way about what my limitations are?”

I’m not going to come to the table and be like, “I know everything about Black music,” because I don’t. So, that was the starting point—“How do I do this and show what I do know whilst being very honest about what I don’t?”

I thought of taking this more passive host position where we were learning alongside each other and applying personal memories. That’s where I feel the most comfortable. I decided to take a really personal approach and hope those things resonate or that they have interesting reference points, and we’re all digging through to figure out while tracing back through the history.

That’s really how it started. When it was decided we needed to include the whole diaspora, I was like, “Oh my God, I don’t know.” That’s when we said, “Let’s talk to the experts. Each episode, we’ll validate our points and reaffirm things by talking to them.”

Black Is Black has an appealing episode on horror movies for anyone who is inclined to be like, “Ooh, horror movies!” But the Black experience and horror is something that’s only now getting a lot of critical appraisal outside of academia, as it seems.

I think that episode draws a lot of threads together that I love—where it’s horror films and hip hop. I don’t think a lot of people think of the intersection of hip hop and horror until they start to find it. You find one thing, and it’s like this thread that you just follow. So many fun places. For me, that episode was the most fun after the Jamaica episode we worked on, because I just nerded out. I listen to a lot of horror movie podcasts.

I mean, I really am a nerd. I really went extra H.A.M. researching the historical beginnings of horror movie tropes and how a lot of times it’s based in racism. Obviously, you’ve heard of the Horror Noire documentary. They run it down. I listened to some of Tanarive Due’s lectures. I spent way too much time, just ’cause personally, it was really interesting. It’s crazy how much of our culture is embedded in racism.

You say go off on tangents, but we get to appreciate that while the show explores it in full by going down rabbit holes of the saxophone or the art of begging. Everything starts with a simple idea and follows it to its natural conclusion. What are some of the seeds that led to “The Art of Begging?” It appears it came from a very specific place.

I do Twitch. That one and the saxophone bit both came from doing Twitch streams. I feel like I was just in the mood to play. I play whatever I want into it and hope everybody kind of kicks it. I was playing a bunch of ’80s and ’90s R&B, and I was just listening. It’s funny, ’cause depending on who’s in the chat, they’ll point out like, “Dirty Mack Anthem,” or, “Oh, he’s begging,” or whatever. People will point out the what’s-happening in the lyrics of the song, and sometimes, it’ll strike me like, “Oh my God. He just said–whatever.”

A lot of times those ideas will be like, “What happened?” I remember commenting in the same stream where I thought, “Okay, let me cut out of this saxophone solo before everybody dips out of my channel,” and then I thought, “Well, what happened to these instrumental parts?” You get a bridge or a breakdown, then there’s always an instrumental solo at a certain point in R&B and pop music—then the saxophone just really went away.

I know it got driven into the ground, then it became a signifier for cheesiness. So, what else? I felt like R&B definitely kind of changed as well. We explore all these different worlds, looking around every corner to figure out what happened. So it always comes from just listening and playing music, then something will strike me that I’ve maybe thought about before that.

I remember living in Flatbush and walking past these posters. A lot of times it would be a party where it’s your usual dance hall or lover’s rock style artists and DJs. Every once in awhile, I would see a poster and would think, “What in the hell is this? Why is Michael Bolton on this flyer? This doesn’t compute.” So, I asked a friend at the time who’s from from the Bahamas. She said, “I don’t know. We just do. We really do just love Air Supply, Kenny Rogers, Dolly Parton. We love sappy syrupy.”

I thought, “Let me dig through and figure out the cultural difference here between Jamaica and what I understand in America.” I talked to a friend about the episode, and she was like, “Yo, if you’re in Jamaica at the gas station and you hear Celine Dion, you’re in a bad neighborhood.”

You think you would hear Pop Smoke or some drill, and then you would think, “Oh my God, this is scary.” It always starts with something that I kind of understand about Black culture, but I don’t know why it is the way it is. All these stories are insane, and it’s frustrating. Every time I think, “How did I not already know this?”

There are about a thousand books about the Beatles, and I just don’t know anything about the history of a lot of Black American culture that really influences everything else. So many things come from Black music, so is it frustrating, but it’s fun to be able to do this and get paid well.

Black Is Black airs the first Thursday of every month on Sonos’ Sound System. More information about Sonos Radio can be found here. DJ Lindsey can be found online here.

An earlier version of this story inaccurately stated DJ Lindsey’s name as Lindsey Tipley, instead of Lindsey Caldwell.