from Vibe.com
CRITICAL NOIR: Up-and-Coming R&B Diva # 19
by Mark Anthony Neal
You have to feel for Solange Knowles or any up-and-coming R&B Diva. There's always gonna be somebody prettier (those doe-eyes notwithstanding), somebody grittier, somebody who dances better, somebody who plays the piano finer, somebody with more curves, somebody who is thinner, somebody who is more exotic, somebody who is Whiter and of course--in a perfect world--somebody who can sing better. And in Solange's case it doesn't help that your older sister is, arguably, the hardest working person in the industry and heir apparent to a Hip-hop Soul Queen who by all measure is not going anywhere, anytime soon.
So what's an Up-and-Coming R&B Diva to do?
A year ago, uber-critic Greg Tate elicited much chatter when he described Alicia Keys's As I Am as "very much an album in the old-fashioned sense, a complete work: one you shouldn't subject to shuffle before you've given Keys's sequencing a chance to work its magic, its rising and falling arcs, its gut-punch-and-goose-bumps denouement." A year later Keys's "Teenage Love" was as ubiquitous as summer, her love anthem "Like You'll Never See Me Again" bought a beloved black soap opera star back from the dead, and "Superwoman" has many dreaming of the first black First Lady and first baby-gurls in the White House.
Yet, I would argue that Solange Knowles's Sol-Angel and the Hadley Street Dreams realizes what Keys's As I Am only hinted at: a fully blown black pop that is in conversation with its 1960s predecessors like Dionne Warwicke, Barbara Lewis and The Shirelles. Hadley Street Dreams is more Maxine Brown and Diana Ross than Aretha Franklin and Mabel John and too many folk can't make that distinction as they conjure the Soul Goddesses from a time long-gone--but not as long as we'd like to believe it was. Truth be told, Ms. Knowles probably can't make those distinctions either, but damn if the music don't speak for her.
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