312. Solange, "A Seat at the Table"

 

There are not many people who could stand to be, you know. Beyonce's little sister, but this album is so beautifully crafted and exquisite that Solange went one better and made an album as good as or better than any of her sister's.  It stands fully on its own, a beautifully realized statement about what it means to be a Black woman in America today.  It doesn't hurt that Solange started writing songs as a teenager, was in Destiny's Child, and released her first album at 16 years old.  

The first song I heard off of this album when it first came out, "Cranes in the Sky," is a good synecdoche of the album, with its sparse but intentional production and perfectly restrained instrumentation and, above all, Solange's gorgeous voice floating over the whole thing.  A song about trying to bury your emotions in drinking or partying or whatever, I always pictured cranes - the bird - flying through the sky as a metaphor for unrealized feelings, but I recently learned it's about actual construction cranes in the sky over Miami, where she was living at the time.  "I remember thinking of it as an analogy for my transition—this idea of building up, up, up that was going on in our country at the time, all of this excessive building, and not really dealing with what was in front of us. And we all know how that ended. That crashed and burned. It was a catastrophe. And that line came to me because it felt so indicative of what was going on in my life as well," she said.  In a way, it's just as beautiful as the image I had.

"Mad" has Lil Wayne guesting and somehow she keeps the irrepressible Weezy in check; his rap sounds literally phoned in, like he's calling her and offering his own story of anger, in comparison and contrast to her own.  I kept coming back to "Junie," clearly indebted to 70's soul and funk, with Andre 3000 on the chorus.  But there's not a real skipper anywhere on the album; it's all great.

There are also a number of spoken word interludes by Master P, tracing his own struggles and the incredible way he overcame them.  They're fascinating in and of themselves.

 Does this album deserve to be in the Top 500? Absolutely.