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Music

Helado Negro's “It's My Brown Skin” Is Already Changing Lives

The Brooklyn-based artist premieres a cut from his upcoming record 'Private Energy.'

​Helado Negro caused a bit of a stir last year with the release of the single, "Young, Latin and Proud." It was a refreshing departure for Roberto Carlos Lange's elliptical electronic pop project in that it made a direct statement about Roberto Carlos Lange's own identity as the American child of Equadorian immigrants. Through total coincidence, it dropped around the same time that Donald Trump said some spectacularly messed up things about Mexican immigrants.

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Since then, Lange has released a couple of other singles from his forthcoming album Private Energy,  which he has been performing on tour. Now, he's returned to "Young, Latin and Proud" territory with "It's My Brown Skin," premiering today on Noisey. The track nods at both dub and 70s Latin soul and the message of pride is pretty clear when Lange sings "My brown is the shade that's just for me/I'm never missing anything but me."

The songwriter and producer says that he never intended to make "politically relevant" statement. "I wrote it to myself when I was younger as like some kind of outer space message that would hopefully go back in time and hit me," he told Noisey. That transmission, at least, has gotten through to kids hearing it today. Lange says fans have been coming up to him after shows to talk to him about it: "They would say something like 'I grew up Mexican-American or from somewhere else in Latin America and you know I never really thought about this and I'm so happy you wrote this song.' I never expected anything like that. I realized how much more this meant than just my personal experience of being brown," he says.

Private Energy is out October 7.