93. Solange - A Seat At The Table (Saint, Columbia, 2016)

On paper, Solange has been handed every opportunity there is to be a great musical artist. However, as all critics and listeners know, that's not enough for success, or even good music, even if you're talented. There has to be a spark somewhere and there has to be a reckoning with what has come before you.

Aged fourteen, Solange Knowles, a back-up dancer and understudy for her sister's band Destiny's Child is thrust into the recording industry for an elaborate debut album with features from B2K, Lil Romeo, Beyoncé, Timbaland and Rockwilder. Between sessions, she bags a few TV theme, voice acting and soundtrack song jobs (Solange is I think the only musical artist attached to both Mike Myers' Goldmember and Dana Carvey's The Master of Disguise, what an honour!). One such song, “Thinkin' About You”, a cover of the theme to Scooby Doo, possibly once destined for the James Gunn-penned film, rivals “Addams Family (Whoomp!)” and “Grinch (2000)” as one of the worst songs ever recorded for a soundtrack. The album, 2002's Solo Star, is marred by the inclusion of this unleashed monster, but it's an otherwise pretty sparkly showcase, particularly when Solange gets to do what she wants. At this time, she's obviously animated by neo-soul and she's good at it too, especially on “This Could Be Love” and “So Be It”.

Solange takes a longer run-up for her “sophomore album” (I despise this term so much), all the while acting for a living, travelling extensively and becoming a mother. The result is 2008's absolutely fascinating Sol-Angel and the Hadley St. Dreams. This album is overblown in ways only lots of money and/or expensive drugs (likely just money in Solange's case, she promises on track 1 that she's not high) can get you. Think Fleetwood Mac's Tusk or Outkast's Speakerboxx/The Love Below for the level of ambition we're talking. The weird thing about listening to early Solange is that every time you think you hear the influence of a legendary producer it is them, like Mark Ronson, The Neptunes, Boards of Canada. Boards of Canada? That's like getting... I was gonna write a joke here, like that's like getting Pope Ratzinger or the Dalai Lama, but honestly, those are easier gets! Making music like this is like downloading the cracked version of “all living people”!

The album that I think Hadley St. Dreams ends up most resembling is Donna Summer's I Remember Yesterday. Here Donna Summer tried to record songs for different periods of dance history so that the listener would travel from past to future, culminating in the futuristic “I Feel Love”, but the project was released before its goal was achieved clearly, leaving scraps of distinct time periods everywhere, but no narrative and a mostly 70s sound. There are a few Motowny tracks on Hadley St. Dreams, but Solange is a non-aughts (95-05s) kid and the non-aughts end up all over this, giving you moments of 90s lounge-craze, psy-trance, IDM and big beat, all of which sound mistakenly dated in 2008. Trouble with working with legends is, they are already legends. The ideal goal when seeking musical perfection is you and/or your producer doing work to establish yourselves as legends of the present day. Donna Summer was fortunate enough to have some luck in writing the future of music at the time of making her record (“I Feel Love” still sounds like it's out next year), but Solange has no such luck here.

Follow-up EP True (2012) is a record that completely gets this. It also succeeds at finally restaging Solange at the fore while consigning non-concurrent influences to the background. It gives and gives on repeat listens, particularly every time “Lovers In The Parking Lot” rolls around. The indie press finally have a record that they don't want to pick apart. They praise Solange for her brevity, humility, quietness, naïveté and for being a good muse to her producer Dev Hynes. A solid 7.8. Praise is a horrific thing sometimes.

It's worth mentioning at this point that Solange has not had a hit record yet, including True.

“On paper, Solange has been handed every opportunity there is to be a great musical artist. However, as all critics and listeners know, that's not enough for success, or even good music, even if you're talented. There has to be a spark somewhere and there has to be a reckoning with what has come before you.”

Let's go “off paper” for a moment. You're fourteen and hit the studio. Jermaine Dupri is there, to try to coax a pop hit out of you. You have Inside Edition later that day.

You're twenty, in the 2000s, the hardest decade for making a musical statement since the dawn of the LP, amid a landscape of mostly wrong-headed retro and future ideas, trying to turn thousands of your Soulseek downloads into a gold nugget of your own while looking after a three-year-old. Your sister is now the biggest pop star on Earth. You are now in charge of the collaborations in your work and it is your job to hob-nob with producers at the Grammys, send them your demos and assure them that they will get paid. Lamont Dozier, at that time the greatest living songwriter for Motown, old Motown, is trying to coax a pop hit out of you, but really you're trying to make your own music, because you're now expected to be self-defined. The label has you go on TRL, where a straight white man expresses love for your dress. “Looks fantastic, guys” he says, to forced hoots from the audience.

You're twenty-four. Your sister is still the biggest pop star on Earth. You've learned to synchronise your breathing with the present. You've not worked with Pharrell Williams this time. You have made a “modest” record and white critics praise the modesty more than they praise you. At this point, you have full on music dysmorphia disorder and it comes with physical pain and exhaustion. Fashion Week in Milan beckons. TSA pat down your afro. When you get back home, a white security guard fails to let you into your own gated community.

You're twenty-eight, now well-acquainted with panic attacks and the perks and pitfalls of having infinite access to the wellness industry. Fox News has just run a story with the headline “Should Beyonce (sic) ditch Solange?” as a video circulates of you seeming to assault your billionaire brother-in-law in an elevator. It's 2016, the West's most profoundly understood year of cultural tragedy and death since WW2 ended. BLM, Tumblr, 4chan, Proud Boys, soon to be Trump and Brexit. Half the planet, yourself included, has now seen videos of black Americans being executed by white Americans with unstoppable unions and the backing of the courts. You are searching for peace and light and air. You return to the comfort zone of neo-soul, your original musical love, while trying to synchronise your breathing with the present, with history, with Velvet Rope Janet Jackson and Baduizm Erykah Badu.

For 2016's A Seat At The Table, Solange has interviewed folks for interstitial tracks. They are older than her. Two are her parents, then there's Master P and Daymond John (founder of FUBU). These people are black, and highly successful. Lil Wayne also features, examining his suicide attempt. Millionaires all, speaking of injustices and hardships they've faced as black creatives, each sounding scarred and frail in the moment. They have come from the dregs, reached the ceilings and tested the nature of those ceilings and the give of those ceilings. It genuinely must be hard to be a black millionaire. Money doesn't buy happiness, it doesn't buy acceptance in the pop sphere or racial acceptance in the United States. It buys a lot of things that could fuck you up for life too.

I'm thinking of another black success story, the billionaire Tyler Perry. His character Madea got him to where he is. I think of the white critics' responses to those plays and those twenty-odd movies, not getting it, not a bit. By movie five, they'd probably stopped trying to get it at all. It's just one of those things that repels white people, right? Black women, especially older ones, would rush to those movies. They got to see a man doing a pretty good impression of his momma, and some moral plays to stir discussion. Simple pleasures, but lo and behold, the same physical space normally reserved for white Ain't It Cool nerds is all of a sudden an exciting and vivacious hub of discourse for black women. I'm immune to the charms of those films as a European white guy, but stick on a British comedy where Peter Kay's doing an impression of his mam and I see it, the microgags, vocabulary and vocal stims within the impression, the context of dilapidation, seediness and grimness. It's all there in a different parochial vernacular.

A Seat At The Table has the same racial exclusivity to it, to the extent that many white critics are unable to access it. It examines the black ceiling of America, the desire to escape black trauma and the tools that make such escape possible. It uses Solange's feather touch voice alongside powerful soul arrangements with bumping bass to extend Solange's own comfort zone, her sanctuary, into the life of the listener. It is vague at times in its delivery, but this is by design. It's unhurried and leaves space for comprehension and dialogue.

What Kind Of Splash Did It Make?

A Seat At The Table was both a big hit and a sleeper hit. It has touched a lot of hearts in ways that albums tend not to get to any more, because it was so embraced and replayed.

It is difficult to establish the extent of one albums influence on R'n'B generally, but three years on from its release, there is a definite sense of its sound being championed and celebrated musically and its message being championed and celebrated in the context of civil rights and self-care.

I don't profess certainty of direct influence on any of these albums, the greater context of increased civil rights prominence and the generalised shift of R'n'B to the peripheries of pop in 2019 makes this quite difficult, but if you listen to them there is a definite sense of a shift of direction happening towards Solange's well-read soul with a message:

Mahalia - Love and Compromise (Asylum)

Dawn Richard - New Breed (Merge)

Ari Lennox - Shea Butter Baby (Dreamville)

Brittany Howard - Jaime (ATO)

Sudan Archives - Athena (Stones Throw)

Jamila Woods - LEGACY! LEGACY! (Jagjaguwar)

Ezra Collective - You Can't Steal My Joy (Enter The Jungle)

Shafiq Husayn - The Loop (Eglo)

Where To Go From Here?

There is some interesting writing from the artist about the greater context of this record, originally uploaded to a now-defunct website. In 2024 it's in danger of becoming lost media, and that is a shame, because as this lengthier review attests, context is key. You can still read it by looking at the lyric site Genius. Talking of lost media, Bandcamp in the Pandemic had some exceptional curation of R'n'B releases. The site was eviscerated in a double corporate takeover, but the write-ups are still online for now.

This album has one follow-up at the time of writing, 2019's When I Get Home, an exploration of Solange's home city Houston. I slightly prefer it to a Seat at the Table, primarily because it is loaded with exciting Houston rhythms, setting it apart from the field at the time.