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Belgium, Blackness and BLM: Lous And The Yakuza Is Talking About All The Things They Wish She Wouldn't

We meet in the heyday of spring. Much like everything else in 2020, the Lous and the Yakuza 2020 tour via London has been postponed. A week later, Lous is raising her fist in the manner of her signature y-shaped symbol – a signifier of acceptance – and her voice as a leader of the 10,000-strong Black Lives Matter demonstration in Brussels.

Lous and The Yakuza just might be the best thing to have happened to Belgium. The Brussels-based, Congolese-Rwandan singer-songwriter Marie-Pierra Kakoma, known as Lous, radiates hope, passion and honesty. The new face of fashion brand Chloé, she is as versatile in style as she is musically. Lous’ signature hairdo is a pixie bob, in which she bears airs of Bodyguard-era Whitney, and, with its orange fluorescent futurism, hints of The Fifth Element’s Leeloo. Her hue is best described by a word so cliché she reclaims it loudly: “My skin is not black, it is ebony colour”, she raps in French on ‘Dilemme’, the opening track of her perfectly symmetrical 10-track album, Gore.