SIBLING REVELRY
She’s more than just Bey’s sister, she’s a soul sister on a mission
IT was the elevator ride that went ’round the world.
On May 5, 2014, Beyoncé, sister Solange Knowles and Jay-Z were leaving a Met Gala after-party at Manhattan’s Standard hotel. On security video from inside a hotel elevator (shown by TMZ just days later), an agitated Solange appeared to attack her brother-in-law, reportedly because she was angry about his treatment of her sister.
In hindsight, it now looks like a trailer for the music that came afterward: Both Beyoncé and Jay-Z have addressed marital infidelities in their latest albums.
But Solange — who plays Friday’s Panorama festival on Randalls Island — is the one who has moved furthest beyond the elevator incident thanks to her own neo-soul masterpiece, “A Seat at the Table.” Released this past September, her third album is a rumination on what it’s like to be a black woman in the modern world. Universally praised by critics, it hit No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart.
“A Seat at the Table” has taken Solange out of her sister’s artistic shadow, establishing the 31-year-old as one of pop’s premier artists.
“Before I started working with her, I don’t think people were taking her seriously,” says Raphael Saadiq, one of Solange’s collaborators, who will be playing at next month’s Afropunk Fest in Brooklyn. “But I could hear what she was saying. It makes me smile to see her get her due.”
Solange self-funded the album, which took the better part of a decade to write and record. It’s rich with experience — not all positive, as Saadiq can testify.
“I remember walking into a praline store one night with Solange in New Orleans,” he says. “There was a lady in there that saw us, and said, ‘I don’t have any money!’ She thought I was a panhandler! I was only in town for three weeks. Solange actually lives there, so I don’t know how many experiences like that she’s had. She probably held a lot of that inside her for a while.”
Last September, Solange took to social media to share that concertgoers at a Kraftwerk show in New Orleans threw trash at and harassed her, her video-director husband, Alan Ferguson, and her son from a previous marriage, Julez.
While “A Seat at the Table” vocalized her thoughts about being made to feel like she doesn’t belong in traditionally “white spaces,” Solange has used some of her live shows to confront that state of affairs.
In May, she performed inside the Guggenheim Museum’s iconic rotunda, delivering songs to the audience at an almost one-on-one level, instead of from behind a rope or from up on a stage. It was less a performance than an occupation. “Inclusion is not enough,” she told the crowd. “Being a black woman of color, I’m not settling for just being here, but tearing the f - - king walls down.”
“Simple traditional inclusivity would have been for her to simply play downstairs,” says Nat Trotman, the museum’s curator of performance and media. “But the fact we worked together to have her in the rotunda, which is the symbolic center of this institution, to me goes beyond inclusion.”
Her set at Panorama won’t be as conceptual or intimate, but there’s no doubt that Solange is her own woman, and the seat at the table is hers for keeps.
“We beat the elevator,” says Saadiq. “People don’t talk about that anymore — they talk about Solange’s music now.”