Day 248: Solange – A Seat at the Table
I was wondering what album to do today and couldn’t really think of anything in particular, so I’m grasping at straws here: in honour of it being the 12th anniversary of Solange whopping Jay Z’s ass in that elevator, let’s do her 2016 album A Seat at the Table.
Album cover courtesy of Saint Records
Solange is known for being Beyoncé’s sister and a famed elevator warrior, but she’s a very talented and accomplished singer and songwriter in her own right – if she wasn’t Beyoncé’s sister, we’d think of her so differently, but she just gets overshadowed. She got her start as a Destiny’s Child backup singer and dancer, but she was also signed to her father’s label and released her first solo album in 2003.
A Seat at the Table was her third full-length album, and it’s largely an album about being a Black woman in America, with themes of identity, empowerment and healing. It’s built on her family history, as the album contains interludes with snippets from interviews she did with her parents, and Solange also wrote the album in the town of New Iberia, Louisiana, where her maternal grandparents lived until they were driven out of town:
I wanted to reclaim that space. I wanted to be able to go back as a descendant of my grandparents and stake my claim and create work that honored them and honored their strength and their resilience and their fight — basically say, "No one's pushing me out of town. No one is going to stop me from telling my story, our story."
Despite the heaviness of some of the subject matter, there’s a lightness and a joy to it – it’s as much a celebration of Black identity as it is an exorcism of the anger and frustration she felt at the time. It’s sonically a very restrained album, with her soft and almost whisper-sounding voice paired with the pared-back sound and slower songs building a relaxed atmosphere where the power really comes from her lyrics.
It’s a beautiful, powerful album that doesn’t have a single boring second on it. It’s modern R&B that pushes boundaries and blends genres fearlessly, resulting in something that’s hard to think of contemporaries for. It’s worthy of all the praise it got at the time and it’s a shame it always gets talked about in relation to her sister, what they’re doing is so different that you really can’t even compare them. A Seat at the Table is a 9/10.