'Dear White People' S2 & soundtrack out now (ft. Tyler the Creator, Brockhampton, DeJ Loaf, more)

The second season of Netflix’s Dear White People came out today on Netflix, and its soundtrack is also out now on Spotify. The soundtrack includes music by Tyler, The Creator, Brockhampton, Jidenna, DeJ Loaf, H.E.R., The Cool Kids, Zebra Katz, BbyMutha, and many others. The awesome soundtrack is thanks in part to the show’s music supervisor, Morgan Rhodes, a former DJ at KCRW. Morgan talked to Variety after season one came out about her obsessive approach to picking songs for the show, and how she weaves them in with the individual characters’ storylines. You can read that here.

The soundtrack also includes music by the show’s composer, jazz musician/film scorer Kris Bowers, who’s played on Kanye & Jay-Z’s Watch the Throne, A Tribe Called Quest’s We Got It From Here…, and more. Kris discussed the new season’s music in a video interview at the red carpet at the show’s Special Screening at the Arclight Hollywood theater. You can watch that, and stream the whole soundtrack, below.

Ceator Justin Simien also spoke to ET about a particular Katy Perry/Migos joke from the new season…

What I do love, though, is when you bring someone into the show by name, and that’s largely through the pop culture references. My favorite by far this season is when you make the joke about Katy Perry and the song, “Oppression featuring Migos.” That was so on point.

[Laughs] It was funny, because there were a few Katy Perry fans who were up in arms [when the teaser was released] and I read some of the tweets. They were trying to say that I was calling her a white nationalist or something, which I think is a bit of a stretch. Talk about choosing to be outraged. But yeah, for me, it’s about saying that culturally, everything is always up for grabs. I don’t think that Katy Perry is a white nationalist — funny I have to keep qualifying that — but I do think that the brilliance of the white nationalist movement is that they have appropriated the language of the opposition. They now use words like oppression and marginalization and erasure. They’re using all this terminology in order to get their base excited, and that, to me, is a more systemic, dangerous, frightening version of the more lighthearted person, which is white artists adopting all kinds of aspects of the black experience in order to make pop music.

Listen, I have yet to do the episode on cultural appropriation or give my statement on it as a artist, but my feelings on it are pretty complex. I don’t think you can stop white people, and I don’t think we should try to stop white artists from appropriating black culture. What is so eye-roll-inducing about it is when people don’t know where it came from and we start celebrating Miley Cyrus as if she invented twerking when twerking as a word and as a dance and as a concept, that’s been around for so long. People were saying that Elvis was the king or the inventor of rock ‘n’ roll — that’s the part that really pisses me off about so-called cultural appropriation, is that we’re in a society where a group of us are providing so much culture but are getting so little credit for it and, in fact, our careers are being marginalized because of the success of our white counterparts. That’s the part that really pisses me off. To me, it’s just a really funny joke. [Laughs] I don’t think you can get mad about it, if you don’t get what I’m talking about.

Simien also spoke to USA Today about the new season coming out the same week as Kanye West’s alt-right-leaning rants and controversial comments on slavery: “It’s another example of some of these things we talk about in the writers’ room that we think we’re being satirical about, and there it is in the real world. Not that we have an explicit Kanye West reference in the new season, but we certainly get into how people of color end up being a spokesperson (for their race) against their best interest.”

Watch the season two trailer, along with the soundtrack stream and the video of the Kris Bowers interview, below. Watch Dear White People season two on Netflix.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=UbCQsA1g3K0