Solange – A Seat at the Table (2016)

An album like Solange’s A Seat at the Table comes around every generation, when a powerful voice checks in on the incremental progress America’s made on the security of Black safety and the eradication of systemic racism. Similar in nature to records like Marvin Gaye’s What Goin’ On, Prince’s Sign O’ The Times, Public Enemy’s Fear of a Black Planet, Pos Def’s Black on Both Sides and Erykah Badu’s New Amerykah Part One (4th World War), Solange’s third record incisively expounds on the social, economic and political injustices Black people face daily, specifically in the moment of its creation. The music may be timeless, but substantively these records are time capsules that share one dispiritingly intrinsic element that gets stronger with each canonization: the sense that things haven’t changed enough. Their mere existences are proof positive.

America’s history of repeatedly failing Black people found a new chapter in 2013, when the protests at Ferguson and the emergence of the Black Lives Matter forced the public at large to reckon, once again, with institutionalized racism and, once again, responded with willful ignorance and resistance. Though A Seat at the Table was recorded well before the horrifyingly vitriolic climate of the 2016 elections, its release matched the spirit of the moment: a man running (and succeeding) on a platform of explicit racism, at that point in history, said everything that needed to be said about the level of progress we had achieved as a country. As so it was as if Solange was responding in kind with an album laser-focused on a remarkable record of graceful, gentle R&B that soothes like fresh aloe vera on a glistening burn.

Solange Knowles’s gear-shift from left-field R&B champion to one of the genre’s most powerful figures started here, in A Seat at the Table’s healing waters. Before it, her independent work – even up to 2008’s forward-looking, underrated Sol-Angel and the Hadley St. Dreams 2012’s excellent collaboration with Dev Hynes, True – fell under the shadow of her sister’s comparative earth-shattering career. Solange may have signed up for the same rigorous training and expectations under her family’s tutelage, but her goals differed from Beyoncé’s: instead of cultural domination, she valued domination over herself, and the clarity of a honest voice. Her bit roles in Destiny’s Child and her humble pop career (with one mildly-received solo record released at fourteen years old) were not indications of a lack of talent, but the products of a resistant, disagreeing voice. Even at a young age Solange wanted little to do with an industry that she knew would compartmentalize her perspective.

A Seat at the Table is that perspective magnified to an intense degree. Under the guiding presence of multi-instrumentalist Raphael Saadiq (among several other talents both burgeoning and entrenched), Solange lays bare the old scars, newly ripped open in the wake of recent outrage, and then aims to provides the salve. Hers is not a voice of hollow placation, but of solemn anger tinged with empathy – for her people, and for how they’ve been forced to mute themselves for the sake of “assimilation.” The opening stanza sets the stage:

Fall in your ways, so you can crumble
Fall in your ways, so you can sleep at night
Fall in your ways, so you can wake up and rise

Everything afterward is a panacea, a bold call for unfiltered expressiveness and lucid truths. Poetry, verse, raps, and the voices of industry and parental figures glide over the ears, less collage-like and more like a mosaic, every individual piece forming one whole picture. Solange might be the lead writer and voice, but A Seat at the Table’s strength is in numbers: Lil Wayne provides his best feature in years on the bitter, simmering “Mad”; up-and-coming Chicago artist Sampha lends his tender voice to the indignant question on “Don’t Touch My Hair”; Tina and Matthew Knowles claim their own interludes to speak on their histories with systemic racism.

Solange fills every possible crevice with resonant Black voices, the goal being less additive to than independent from the omnipresent dominance of white culture. Nowhere is this theme more apparent than record’s centerpiece, the steady anthem of “F.U.B.U.”. In its slow groove and consciously-guarded lyrics, she knowingly designs a space for Black pride with surefire protection against being coopted by anybody else. Elsewhere, specificities and unmistakable images make up her most effective tools. Parallel to Solange’s defiant gaze in her natural beauty on the cover art, “Don’t Touch My Hair,” condemns the sense of “otherness” and “fascination” that non-Black people associate with Black hair. “Junie” integrates Andre 3000’s funky vocal hook into an ode to Walter “Junie” Morrison, member of the Ohio Players and Parliament-Funkadelic. Her second verse couplet on “Don’t You Wait,” meanwhile, is an succinct summary of the relationship between her unapologetically Black art and the misaligned perspective of white, privileged critics.

In A Seat at the Table, Solange makes a safe space for Black identity, but it also makes the argument that such a safe space is necessary in a country that unerringly suppresses that voice. By 2016, America had made some solid steps in integrating Black culture with a respect to its uniqueness, but the fervor behind the Black Lives Matter movement had disconcertingly diminished, in its place cynical accusations of a performative “wokeness” among non-Black people who cared more for their reputations than actual change. Legislation pertaining to Black rights, if there was any, had slowed to a crawl thanks to pushback from House Republicans, and the upcoming election threatened to eradicate even those feeble marks of progress. The increasing influence of conservative media also helped tipped the country further rightward. In this climate, a slogan like “All Lives Matter” would make complete sense to a part of the population that values self-aggrandizing moral authority over the lives of a historically disenfranchised people.

Such a statement is a slap in the face to the countless people who have fought against systemic American racism, because it fails to address that there’s a problem in the first place. The dominant tone is one of empty placation, with a cruel, implicit focus on the peace of the non-Black majority who, without coincidence, have yet to experience a lifetime’s worth of their passive antagonism. It’s a political tactic; placation causes complacency, which is the enemy of change. So when Solange claims she’s not allowed to be “Mad,” her words ring not just true but bitterly so. And when that anger surfaces, it stops the show completely: “Don’t You Wait,” a towering highlight, pairs palm-muted guitar and an elliptical drum pad pattern with the ghostly voices of the past. Against that burbling backdrop, Solange lambasts the parts of her audience that desire placative messaging instead of overtly conscious music, simultaneously forging one of R&B’s greatest songs.

That fact – the resistance initially met against the Black Lives Matter movement for the purposes of easing confrontation – is as indicative as anything of the sense of generational exhaustion that courses through A Seat at the Table. In the soft drums and spaciousness of “Weary” lies the spiritual burnout of a woman brought to the edge; “Scales” embodies that weariness in its most cerebral song by slowing the record down almost to a dirge, as Solange illuminates how young Black people are destined, based on how American society operates, to be judged negatively by factors other than their humanity. Her words reach inward, and then outward, to the members of the Black community that live in that exhaustion. And therein lies the goal: the sharp, painful acknowledgment of deeply-rooted oppression and the ability to assuage that pain with communal joy without compromising the power of that acknowledgment. It runs palpably through “F.U.B.U’s” ebullient bump, in “Borderline (An Ode to Self Care)’s” urge to take moments of self-healing against this constant battle, and in “Junie’s” tautological testament to the power of music itself and its ability, historically to provide both clarity and sanctuary against the enervating power of American racism.

Like the realigning of broken bones or the sting of alcohol on a cut, A Seat at the Table keeps the eternal struggle of living Black in America front-and-center, and then allows her music to assist the process of healing and growing stronger. That’s the space where the album’s most enduring moment, “Cranes in the Sky,” rests. Written years before A Seat at the Table’s recording sessions, the track sees Solange employ Raphael Saadiq’s gentle string legatos, along with a powerful, ponderous bass line and a cyclic rim-kick pattern, to gaze inward at the cloud of depression killing her soul slowly and the futile steps she takes to try and quell it. Every line provides a solution, but those weighty strings carry on unresolved, undeterred. If the common root of depression is the sense that one is trapped in circumstances without change, then this track devastatingly illustrates the default state of many Black people everywhere, consequently explaining why this kind of music is needed. Yet as part of a collection intended solely for the Black community, “Cranes in the Sky” has the unintended effect of allowing any listener suffering from depression to empathize, and then momentarily understand. For one single moment, Solange’s experience – the frustrating, exhausting experience of living Black in America – is anybody’s experience. Then it disperses, and those of us who are privileged have the option to leave, and those who aren’t have no choice but to stay, tired eyes still wide open.