I like to think about hair a lot. As a hairstylist, this should make sense, but sometimes I think hair might be taking up too much of my brain space. Lately, I’ve been noticing a lot of it in music, so I’ve decided to analyze a few that mention or talk about hair, in a short and simplified format just to put a little rock in your shoe. So that maybe next time you turn on your favourite Spotify playlist or absentmindedly turn the radio on in your car, or while you’re walking down the aisles at Safeway and you hear a song you know arbitrarily, you’ll stop and think a little bit more about the words.
I’m writing about the song “I am not my hair” by India.Arie featuring Akon. If you’ve never heard this song, I would suggest you stop reading now, go listen to it, and then come back.
The song opens with rapper Akon taking us back to a time in his younger life, trying to get girls and trying to land a job, but having problems with both because his hair is deemed unattractive for one and inappropriate for the other. What would you do it this situation? Style your hair so you can land the girl? Cut it all off so you can nail that job interview and impress the big guys in suits? Either way you’re sort of forced to compromise what you really want right? He says so himself at the end of this verse; he didn’t see success, until after he cut it all off anyways.
Then bops in India Arie. She she gives us a timeline of hairstyles in her life from a young age up until adulthood, dealing with harmful hairstyles, harsh chemicals, and dealing with hair loss. All of these are very common scenarios for young black women with tight afro hair. And along with that comes, shame, embarrassment, sometimes bullying, all in an effort to conform to an image that other people want you to be.
Later on in the song, India asks a very important question: does the state of her hair actually matter? And that question can be extended to us, and even beyond hair. Does our appearance inherently change our value as human beings at all? I think the easy and obvious answer is no. But if we all believed that as a society, songs like this wouldn’t be written, right?
There are people who look different from us, who behave differently from us, who speak differently from us, and we judge them. I think all of us are born with prejudice towards others not like us, whether we like it or not.
The answer to this question is given in the song specifically in the chorus as India sings:
I am not my hair
I am not this skin
I am not your expectations, no
I am not my hair
I am not this skin
I am the soul that lives within
One of my favourite things about this song is that the answer is in you.
It’s 2024. We all know racism exists, that’s not a secret. If you pay attention to the news, you will know that there are still children in the U.S. that have been suspended from school because they refuse to change their hair to meet the standards of the school dress code. Standards that are inherently racist. You may know that we’ve come very far since this song has been released. There are laws that have been enacted so that people with different hair textures can’t be refused jobs based on their hair. (For more information on this, I highly recommend you Google “the Crown Act”).
This song is almost 20 years old, and its message is still incredibly accurate to today’s society. But I think this song is really trying to get across the message that it’s about self acceptance first. It’s about the soul that lives within. It’s not about placing the blame on the people that create the expectations, or even making them change their perspective. It’s about you accepting you for who you are, knowing where you’re worth comes from, and that your hair has nothing to do with that.
Chanté
💙🩵💙🩵💙🩵Happy Valentine’s Day💙🩵💙🩵💙🩵
