While people took to communities across D.C. for parades and cookouts, music lovers gathered at Lincoln Theatre for a special Juneteenth performance by Tank and the Bangas, featuring a diverse lineup that showcases how artistry can celebrate Black liberation.
“I think we get very caught up in everything that’s wrong,” said fellow performer Cecily Alexa. “It’s very important to pay attention to the injustices of the world, respond to them, and do the things that we can in all the ways that we can to make the world that we envision it [to] be.”
The evening performance was part of Tank and the Bangas’ 2026 Last Balloon tour, which brought audiences to Northwest, D.C., to experience five opening acts by artists like Ariel J, Akinola Pedro, Cecily Alexa, and creatives Pi-Anir the Poet and Amuche the Poet.
Each performance captured a soulful, poetic and vulnerable message on what it means to have Black artistry reflect the times.
“Sometimes we’re not granted the opportunity or even access to the people that look like us, talk like us, or say the things that we want to say, but have difficulty saying,” said audience member Raqi Gamble. “We need that representation to further understand how to communicate as artists ourselves.”
Defining the Black Experience as Children of Immigrants
The opening act of the night was D.C. native Pedro, who began his performance wishing the roaring audience a happy Juneteenth. He performed songs like “audemars piguet ‘19” and “new edition {saint}” off his 2025 sophomore album, “POMEGRANATE?”
When Pedro spoke with The Informer last year, in honor of the album’s February release, he reflected on a vision to value and understand the influence of women. This time around, the performer is honoring his identity and political expression by revisiting an older piece of work.
“I wanted to get the message across about immigration, about xenophobia, about Blackness, about universal Blackness,” said Pedro, of his 2021 album, “Children of Immigrants!” “I don’t see different cultures. I think we all experience the same kind of culture.”
Pedro began to produce the album in response to the Black Lives Matter protests that rose in the wake of the 2020 murder of George Floyd. In a heightened political climate for the country, he calls out President Donald Trump and the usage of ICE.
“People come to me every single time about how that specific album touches on certain topics. They claim it’s ahead. I don’t even think it [is],” Pedro said. “It’s always going to be a recurring thing.”
The album further explores Pedro’s past struggle to fit in as a Nigerian-American amongst other Black peers, losing his accent and developing self-hatred as a result. For song tracks like “Prince,” he touches on the story of a child immigrant’s life being taken away due to gun violence in the D.C. area.
“The production being go-go driven, the story being about my experiences and Prince’s experience in D.C., but also the idea of the struggle that we deal with of what Blackness is,” Pedro told The Informer, “we tend to write people off. Whether they’re from a foreign country or whether they’re mixed race.”
He says the album helped him better understand the ongoing plight of Black people in America by remembering his origin of having ancestors who were once enslaved.
His sound throughout the album and other projects he’s created since then incorporates Afro-beats, jazz, hip-hop, and go-go, which he credits to exposure to his parents’ Afro-Brazilian and Nigerian roots.
“If you think about it, when you talk about hip-hop, when you talk about soul, blues, punk, it comes from just the liberation of one fighting the power, but also being able to express yourself,” Pedro said.
Celebrating Roots
Among other performers emphasizing the lived realities of immigration, and particularly Black communities, Amuche the Poet penned a poem that tackles the complexities of a mother-daughter relationship.
(Tatiana Allen/The Washington Informer)
The poet first discusses how her mother moved from Grenada to New York City as a teenager, had her first child at 17, and moved to D.C. with her children after a divorce. From there, vulnerability takes the form of a young girl who grows up to only know her mother’s life through phone calls she made to other family members.
“I can never comment on the stories of conversations I overheard,” Amuche said. “By the time I was 15, the running timeline of my mother’s life had been etched into the right side of my brain through eavesdropping.”
As a first-generation American, the local educator recalls memorable moments of traveling to Western Union, packing barrels of food, and sending money back home. Now that she is older, Amuche is faced with the responsibility of taking care of a terminally ill parent who will eventually leave her in what she calls the “rat race.”
“My mother is slowly becoming intangible on this continent. Her retirement is looming, and in one year, she will leave me here alone in Babylon,” Amuche said. “Although I am tempted to leave with her to escape the rat race and the First World false hopes of community and the American dream, I welcome this new season of our relationship.”
While Pedro and Amuche used their platforms to voice the struggles of first-generation Black Americans, fellow Washingtonian vocalist Cecily reminds the audience to have joy during these times of strife.
An R&B singer and songwriter, Cecily describes the love and support she feels when returning to her hometown, especially during this time of African American Music Appreciation Month (commonly referred to as Black Music Month).
“I was just talking to my grandfather, who’s 102, and I told him I was performing at the Lincoln Theater, and he was like, ‘I used to go to dances when it was the Lincoln Colonnade. We used to see Duke Ellington,” Cecily told The Informer. “D.C. has a really rich musical history. And so I feel really honored to be a part of that.”
Freedom and Liberation Music
Cecily’s music takes on the jazz and poetic influences of artists like Minnie Ripperton, Gil Scott-Heron, and Stevie Wonder. As she approaches her new project and transitions into a season of motherhood, she feels called to be even more intentional and aware of what she writes.
“I want to write music that reminds people of our freedom, of our liberation,” Cecily said, “and that true freedom and true liberation come from really just being present in our body [and]…in our life.”
The sentiment of being present and finding joy in the midst of hardship was shared with attendee Brittany Mona, who traveled from Prince George’s County, Maryland, to the Lincoln for the first time to see Tank and the Bangas.
Mona recalls musicians like Nina Simone, who rose to the occasion to reflect the times with her 1965 rendition of Billie Holiday’s “Strange Fruit.” However, the attendee emphasized the importance of remembering how Black music expresses joy and hardship when it matters the most.
“I think Black music is very important because we not only make room for joy,” Mona told The Informer, “but we also use that platform to talk about issues that we have [and bring] it to the forefront.”
