Last Month, Beyonce dropped the 86 minutes long ”black is king” on Disney +
After the highly anticipated ”black is king”, the visuals for the Lion King: The Gift album, ”brown skin girl” is the fourth video Beyoncé is releasing.
Brown skin girl which features on of Nigerian’s biggest artiste, Wizkid Ayo Balogun. ”Brown skin girl” will never be a complete track, without the voice of Wizkid, he was all the beauty the song needed. In addition, he sat down putting on green with different brown girls of different shades while he sang his verse in the song.
Also, Beyonce features the English model; Naomi Campbell who shows her beautiful skin in the video. Naomi Campbell is of Afro-Jamaican descent, she has never met her father. Asides from the fact that she’s beautiful, it makes perfect sense for her to be in the video, as Beyonce preaches ”finding one’s way back” in The gift, the album. When the lines, ”Pose like a trophy when they Naomi walking/ she needs an Oscar for that pretty dark skin” Naomi’s pretty face was shown in the video.
The video also features the Kenyan actress and author; Lupita Nyog’o, to show that there is indeed beauty in every skin shade. Lupita’s black popping melanin skin was also shown when the lines, ‘Pretty like Lupita when the cameras close in”
And when they mimed the lines, ”broke the levy when my Kelly’s Rowland” they showed Beyonce’s long time friend and sister in the singing group; destiny child.
Talking about the video, In a statement to Good Morning America, Beyonce said, ”It was so important to me in ‘Brown skin girl’ that we represented all different shades of brown. We wanted every character to be shot in a regal light…Jenn Nkiru came up with the black debutantes. It was important that we are all in this together and we are all celebrating each other”
”Black is king” is a reminder that the true essence of Blacks is not in its slavery, and though we have subconsciously believed that black lives begin in chains, but that is not the case. The album testifies that the black race is rich.
The ”brown skin girl” video is directed by Jenn Nkiru, a British Nigerian artist and director. She said in her statement to GMA that, ”my greatest inspiration comes from black people, specifically black women”