Sidney, why do you think the Black experience has been such a powerful force throughout our music?

I think it has a lot to do with the building blocks of America, which is collision, contradiction, and low-key violence.

Black people were not coming here from their own volition traditionally.

The American slave trade is a, a violent past that some people still try to deny happened.

But through that, and through that survival and resilience, there has been just this influx and over-indexing of storytelling

[Star-Spangled Banner]

Mm.

That's a good one

Yeah.

The tension between them is just so magnetic and spine-tingling and funny that that really is what keeps you engaged for a very long time.

There's points when Michaela Coel playing Sam, the designer, you think she's gonna start to forgive, and then she pulls all the way back, and it's like you're getting an eye into the really deepest wounds and the deepest parts of their fight.

Even when they're-

Oh, wow

... subverting the religious rigidity of that faith.

And so a lot of people were getting confused that it was associated with this pop group, and the pop group, they actually came out and said, "No, we're trying to work with A24 to send like, have some clarity in this," because what it's going to do is create confusion in the market of does this film have anything to do with our pop group?

Mm-hmm, mm-hmm.

You get the Jays, and you get Nigel.

You get Ken Mok.

You get the former executive from UPN who greenlit the show.

But I will say for me, it is a moving target, accountability, and from my point of view, the accountability was not really taken on the show for a few key reasons.

She talks about how originally the show was meant to be a mashup of The Real World and American Idol but set in the modeling industry.

But then she contradicts herself by comparing it to other reality shows that were big at the time.

[laughs]