Olivia Dean is in the bell hooks hive.
The 27-year-old UK pop star just swept the UK’s Music of Black Origin (MOBO) awards on Thursday, March 26, taking home three of the evening’s biggest awards, including Song of the Year, Album of the Year, and Best Female Act for her breakout hit sophomore album “The Art of Loving.” While accepting the award for Album of the Year, the “Man I Need” songstress dedicated the award to bell hooks and all of the black feminists who inspire her.
“This album was really just born out of me wanting to write something about love, and really what it means to me and us loving each other,” she began during her speech after taking to the stage in a slinky sequin black halter gown, her hair in its usual sprawling array of dark loose curls.
“And I want to just dedicate this, actually, to bell hooks and all the black feminists that inspire me to love better and love the people in my life,” she continued. “So thank you so much. I love everyone.”
Dean, as fans may recall, kicks off “The Art of Loving (Intro)” by singing “gotta throw some paint” because “that’s what bell [hooks] would say.” From the beginning of that album to the flow of several of the tracks, including “Nice to Each Other,” it’s clear just how inspired the singer was by the late writer whose well-known works include the ever-popular title “All About Love: New Visions.”
Taking the lyric from the beginning for instance, “gotta throw some paint,” encompasses the main themes from “All About Love” on how love is not a feeling but an action. At one point, hooks uses “throwing paint” as a metaphor to demonstrate that love requires action, effort, and some bravery to get started. The masterpiece can’t happen if the painter isn’t willing to throw some paint on the canvas.
Willem Ward, the Capitol A&R who had a hand in her sophomore album, testified to the ways the Grammy winner is “intentional with everything she does” while speaking to The Guardian. He confirmed that while writing the album, the singer “was reading books by [authors such as] bell hooks, which were quite informative for her.”
While speaking to Rolling Stone UK magazine for their August/September issue, the “The Art Loving” artist revealed the album was partly in conversation with hooks’ writing.
“It’s in response to bell hooks’ All About Love, which I’m a huge fan of,” she admitted to the outlet. “There’s this passage in the book about the craft of loving one’s own life, and I thought, ‘I think I’m gonna call this album The Art of Loving.’”
Originally published in 1999, “All About Love,” the first part of the “Love Song to the Nation” trilogy, delves deep into the many types of love we may seek to foster in a lifetime and the ways many of us have been led astray in how to do so. In the work, hooks largely critiques the lack of a modern definition of “love” in contemporary culture. In addition to interrogating how we’ve been socialized and conditioned around love, she offers “love ethic,” a more tender approach based on care, respect, commitment, and trust. The trilogy also includes the titles “Salvation: Black People and Love” and “Communion: The Female Search for Love.”
A highly regarded work of feminist critique to this day, “All About Love” resurfaced in pop culture through a perfect storm of hooks’ death arriving in 2021 at age 69 in the middle of the COVID-19 pandemic after a year in which there was a national reckoning around the continued disenfranchisement of Black people in this country. As many new generations flocked to her work in spades at the beginning of the 2020s, it seems as though Dean was among them.
“Love is something I have always been interested in,” Dean continued while in discussion with Rolling Stone UK. “For some reason, it’s seen as this mystical, untouchable thing that we’re all supposed to just have a go at and figure out. In ‘All About Love,’ bell hooks is like, imagine if we had a class in primary school that was, like, emotional studies? So that we could teach each other a bit of etiquette, and how to fill each other with care? I just wanted to do a deep-dive on love, to understand why I love the way that I do, and how I love other people.”
Dean hasn’t explicitly stated who else she’s been inspired by, but hooks herself was inspired by other Black feminists, including the poet Audre Lorde; the scholar Patricia Hill Collins was her contemporary; and there are others like the activist Angela Davis, as well as more contemporary writers like Roxane Gay.
