“The song is about self love, thinking about my own brown skin. It’s a song I thought of as a children’s song and also something romantic. It’s about the resilience of our skin, how it can stretch, grow, heal and scar. Maybe the most obvious of analogies being the healing and scaring but it’s this one thing we have and we can’t change. It feels good to be brown and I want all the other people who live in the United States who might be fear that their brown skin brings them trouble to use this as a meditation or a mantra.”
Helado Negro, Vibe
South Florida-born Ecuadorian-American singer-songwriter and producer Roberto Carlos Lange (a.k.a. Helado Negro - Spanish for 'black ice cream') claims to have not intended to be 'politically relevant' to the present, but it's difficult to see how his musical output could not be influenced by the issues of the moment. The music video for "It's My Brown Skin" may have only just been released, but the song was written back in 2014, when the Black Lives Matter demonstrations were taking place near his Brooklyn residence as a response to the death of Michael Brown.
Like Solange's A Seat at the Table(2016), "It's My Brown Skin" delivers a powerful message of empowerment to a generally under-privileged ethnic minority in America, "a broad stroke of overlapping thoughts on people of color and a continual love for all shades of brown" (Helado Negro, FADER). In a time filled with pervasive fear, blatant racism and an anxious resurgence of white supremacy, Lange's soothing, velvety voice reassures his listeners with its promise of profound inner confidence and ample compassion:
'My skin glows in the dark shines in the light its the color that holds me tight My brown me is the shade thats just for me I’m never not missing anything but me. Cuz I love you and I can’t miss anything but you your stuck on me and all this time I’m inside you Our time together we grow we stretch and show its tough as it goes and it won’t rub off of you There’s friends of similar shades of different ways who feel the same way don’t ever forget them its your brown skin it will keep you safe it will keep you safe it will keep you safe it will keep you safe it will keep you safe it will keep you safe it will keep you safe'
Lyrics: Musixmatch
The final refrain certainly works as a mantra, gaining efficacy via Lange's effective juxtaposition of powerful existential lyricism with electronic riffs, a pounding bass, and an arresting blend of the Latin American sounds (which he grew up with) and influences from funk, soul and R&B. Lange noted that he wrote the song "as like some kind of outer space message that would hopefully go back in time and hit me" (Noisey), and its completely unsurprising that young Latin-Americans are finding themselves moved by his message (especially when they are barraged with a host of negative racial stereotypes in the media):
"They would say something like 'I grew up Mexican-American or from somewhere else in Latin America and you know I never really thought about this and I'm so happy you wrote this song.' I never expected anything like that. I realized how much more this meant than just my personal experience of being brown".
Helado Negro, Noisey
