On Thursday, Sept. 27, Solange Knowles released her third studio album “A Seat at the Table,” which is a provoking collection of song and spoken word that pervades areas of conflict regarding race, womanhood, dignity, gentrification and family. This project is a bold take on the fight for equality. It is a declaration of preserving what is rightfully yours and is an artistic rendering of black culture that reveals the richness, the regality and the strength of the oppressed race.
Solange posted a brief documentary on Oct. 6 that followed her creative process in gathering much of the album’s inspiration and generating its modern sound.
Louisiana has a palpable role in the depth and soul of the collection. Staying in a small house in New Iberia, La. in the center of a sugarcane field, Solange wrote of validation, self-care, familial honor and the beauty and burdens of being a black woman in America. Knowles chose this location because it is where her grandparents lived until they were driven out by the Ku Klux Klan. The connection with her family’s history and the hardships they traversed penetrates the music to produce an album laden with healing words and a theme of perseverance and righteousness.
The first song on the album, “Rise,” is made up of a series of commands to “fall in your ways, so you can crumble” and in the end to “walk in your ways, so you won’t crumble.” The repetitive song has heavy base and a climactic progression of synth, immediately establishing the album’s meditative tone.
The first interlude of spoken word is called “The Glory is in You,” in which rapper Master P speaks of the importance of finding peace in everything you do. He explains, “as long as you find peace in what you doin then you successful.” The notion of peace runs fluidly into the next song, “Cranes in the Sky.” A soft, somber ballad about coping with discrimination, rejection and the ignorance of many. Her drowsy harmonies drip through the lyrics with the consistency of honey.
“Mad” is a statement of defiance against the stereotype of an “angry black woman.” In the song she is repeatedly asked “why you always gotta be so mad?” Solange responds with “I got a lot to be mad about,” which seems to be her response to the media on behalf of herself and all who refuse to relent in speaking out against racial injustice.
The music video for “Cranes in the Sky,” directed by Knowles’s husband Alan Ferguson, is conceptually and visually breathtaking. The artist liberally plays with color, texture and femininity. The glossy piano and strings are illuminated by the spinning world of jewel tones and mountainous landscapes that Solange places herself into.
The video for “Don’t Touch My Hair” is another dynamic gift. The song, which discusses pride and the dismissal of European beauty ideals, creates essences of regality with the use of horns, inspired by those used in Kanye West’s “We Major.” The video is luxurious, intimate and redefining. One scene is composed of four black individuals enrobed in furs and silks and balancing containers of water on their heads. Clear statements such as these are brilliantly woven into the narrative of the video with as much prowess as the messages laced into each song of the album.
In the closing interlude, “The Chosen Ones,” Master P states that “now we come here as slaves, but we goin’ out as royalty and able to show that we truly are the chosen ones.”
During a time when movements such as Black Lives Matter are seldom able to rest, Knowles’ album is an admittance of exhaustion and a revelation of ascension. She encourages self-care and a personal understanding of when to take an intermission from the incessant horrors of police brutality and racial slurs spewing from the mouths of political figures. She stresses the importance of cultural ownership and rebellion against the barriers of personal expression.
“A Seat at the Table” is Knowles’ message to stop seeing the evolution of black pride as a party of hate but rather as people trying their best to create a world for their children that embraces black culture rather than devaluing it.
