Austin-native, singer-songwriter and producer Mobley recently released a socially charged music video for his new boundary-pushing “post-genre pop” single entitled “Tell Me.”
The video begins with a young woman twirling and shuffling throughout her house to a record.
Her dancing is soon halted when she discovers a black man standing outside her house with a bat in hand and headphones in ear.
The woman calls the police which leads to the man being tackled to the ground in front of his wife and child — who is wearing baseball clothes.
The refrain “tell me what you want me to be” echoes as the man finds himself tackled to the ground.
The video seems to beg the question: what role can black men take to shed the prejudice their skin evokes? What role can black men (and black people in general) take to appease a racist America?
I think it has been evidenced that no such role exists.
In an age flooded with images of young black men killed unjustly within a “justice” system that enforces no consequences for such actions, Mobley confronts the fear and caution that accompanies what it means to be black in America.
“Tell Me” presents a searing take on the current normalization of racial profiling. And in this way, the video acts as a reaction to the idealized gentrification Mobley has encountered in his hometown, Austin.
"In the video, our lovely starlet’s blissful domesticity is in no small part predicated on the fact that her position in the social order that enables her to displace people and things that she finds displeasurable, with little thought to the fallout for other people," Mobley told Blavity, "I wanted to first turn the camera toward that aspirational bourgeois obliviousness and then to the people who get displaced and dispossessed to maintain it, even if their only real offense is existing.
The track is one of a series that Mobley has written using love as a convention to explore his relationship with America as a black man. Mobley is on tour now and continues his New York residency next week. Check out the tour dates HERE.
You can find out more about the tour and his music on Mobley's website.
