on three Black women and the ocean they came from
Start with the water, because the water is where we start.
The Atlantic carried the theft. The ocean was the road the Middle Passage ran on, the route by which a people were turned into cargo and scattered across a hemisphere. But the people who did the scattering never understood water. It does not stay where you put it. It does not hold the shape of the container. The sea that was used to disperse us became the thing we are most like: connected underneath, impossible to own, a resource too vast to exhaust. They poured us out to break us. We became an ocean.
I have been thinking about that ocean because I watched three Black women perform, and I came away certain I had been looking at one of the great underclaimed art forms of our time — and watching the culture refuse, the way it always refuses, to call it art.
Here is what I think a Black woman does when she takes a stage. She authors, in public, her own relationship to the one thing the world spends her whole life trying to take from her: control. She can lose it, seize it, or surrender it — but on a stage, for the length of a song, she is the one who decides which, and she signs the decision with her body. The mastery of the performance is the signature. And the culture looks at all of it — the staging, the choreography, the voice bent past where a voice is supposed to go — and files it under entertainment. The word is the demotion. It is how you look at a Black woman who has authored every inch of a visual world and call her a diversion, as if there were no cultivated creative mind behind the spectacle. It is the same misnaming that turns the erotic into the pornographic, and that would file all three of these women, sonically, under R&B — whatever they are actually making. The frame gets denied to the people most obviously filling it.
Let me show you three women filling it. Three different waters. One ocean.
Dawn Richard is the deep current, and she is where I want to begin, because she taught me the most about what this costs.
She is from New Orleans, a city that lives below the water it is named for, and she came up inside one of the most notorious machines in modern music — Danity Kane, then Diddy’s Dirty Money — and she got out, and she became the thing that machine does not produce: a complete auteur. She builds her own worlds. Afrofuturist, experimental, hand-made. In her work the music is top-tier and so is everything bolted to it — the choreography, the costuming, the vocals, the editing, the lighting, the graphics. Every lever an artist can pull, she pulls herself.
The song I keep returning to is “only fans,” off her 2026 album Creole Culture — the title a sharp little play on the platform where strangers pay for access to a body. In the video a man finds her online and gets pulled into her digital world, where she becomes exactly the woman he came looking for, and she keeps a cool, deliberate distance the entire time. He can look. He never gets to touch. That is her whole argument folded into one conceit: the artist is endlessly watched, endlessly copied, and almost never paid — and the one power that remains is control of the gaze itself, the right to decide how close you get and on whose terms. Cameras everywhere, choreography cut tight, color that pops off the screen. She is in command of every inch of the frame.
And here is the part that undid me. She has done all of this from inside a kind of obscurity — known by a focused circle of Black millennials who know, and criminally unseen by nearly everyone else. Dawn Richard is, quite literally, who you think your contemporary favorite is. And knowing that — knowing the recognition has never once matched the size of the gift — she does not phone in a single frame. She is giving her absolute best to a room that has only ever half-clapped. A titan receiving a fraction of a titan’s due, and she answers it not with bitterness but with more craft. More discipline. More.
I watched that and thought: how dare I ever be lazy. She is Solange-league and should be said in the same breath, and she is still out here clawing up the same hill, page after page of a journey she has every right to be exhausted by. The deep current does not need you to see it to keep moving the whole ocean. That is discipline. That is control seized and kept — the refusal to let the size of the audience set the size of the work.
Tinashe is the storm surge — the wave that chooses to break.
Her song is called “Crash Out,” and she made its arrival literal: a woman in Los Angeles with a sledgehammer, taking apart a luxury car, snapping on purpose, in public. But watch what she built around the snap and you understand it is not chaos, it is composition. The video is shot with a cinematic beauty you are not supposed to be able to afford without a major label’s checkbook behind you, and she does not have one. The choreography is top of the entire industry — she brought in JaQuel Knight, the mind who built Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies” — and she did it on independent terms. She assembled major-label mastery with her own hands, which is its own quiet argument about who the gatekeeping was ever really for.
And the thing I keep returning to is the frequency. The art direction matches the beat — dark, gritty, low — the whole visual tuned to the sound the way a room shakes when someone plucks a bass string and lets it ring out. She did not decorate the song. She rendered it visible. That is a total authorship of the senses: a woman controlling not only how she sounds but the exact texture of how she is seen, and choosing, this time, to show you the surge. A wave losing its shape is not the ocean losing control. It is the ocean showing you its force.
And Rihanna is the tide you can drown in — until she isn’t.
She is from Barbados, an island held in the arms of the sea, and the song is “Rehab,” which is about love as an addiction, a person you have to detox from, a current that pulls you under. For most of the performance that is exactly what it is — surrender, the slow undertow of needing someone who is bad for you. And then, at the very end, the pyrotechnics come up, and something breaks open in her. She growls. She stops singing from the place you sing from and starts emoting from the place you survive from — a sound with no leash on it, unrestricted, free. She explodes. The song that began as drowning ends as detonation, and you realize you were never watching surrender at all. You were watching a woman go all the way down into the water on purpose, so she could come back up as the storm.
That is the deepest control of the three, because it wears the face of its opposite. Fire meeting water makes steam, makes pressure, makes the force that moves a turbine. Rihanna surrenders on the stage and owns the entire harbor the second she steps off it. Both are true. The sea is calm and the sea is a hurricane, and it was never going to ask your permission to be both.
Three waters, one sea. And what connects them was never the geography. It is what rises out of them — a diaspora of titans, Black women turning control, survival, force, and discipline into the highest form the art will hold.
I drink from that water, and little else. People find it curious that nearly everything I take in is crafted by Black women — the art, the music, the fashion, the theory, the cultural commentary, the poetry. And the reason is plain: I go to the art where I see myself, where I see where I am going, and where I recognize what I came from. Those are the waters that feed me.
I have not found my own mastery yet. I am still learning to alchemize what I was handed into something that is mine. But I know it lives in the same water that feeds them, and I know the road to it is the one they walk in plain sight — not luck, not arrival, but discipline. Mariame Kaba tells us hope is a discipline. So is this. The reaching is the practice, and the practice is the point.
So reach. Whatever your water is — wherever you see yourself, wherever you are going, whatever you came from — go to it, and give it the best of you, the way they do. Not for the clapping. Because the current does not rise unless we rise in it.
— Ebonyicons
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