Solange, Smokey & Obama

from Piecing It Together

Solange, Smokey and Obama
by Tokumbo Bodunde

One of my favorite songs of 2008 was "I've Decided" by Solange (the much underappreciated younger sister of Beyonce) Knowles.

Weeks ago, while driving around in freezing Chicago, my sisters and I had the song on repeat, LOUD. It took me a minute to figure out why I liked the song so much. The Neptunes-produced single takes the most delicious, feet stomping part of The Supremes' "Baby Love" and loops it throughout.

Solange's song--as is evidenced by the video-- is very much of this moment, my generation (not sure what we're being called these days), searching for some kind of identity. Colorful and pastichey, the piece pays homage to all that is in this generation's cultural image-ination about the political culture of the Motown & beyond era. Quick flashes of raised-fisted Olympians from '68, Malcolm X, people being water-hosed, Rubik's cubes spinning, and the Berlin Wall falling appear amid Solange crooning and the stomping beat. To make meaning of the video is work, a student of mine complained.

There's a clear difference between the display of events being shown in the video for the Smokey Robinson & The Miracles' "Tears from a Clown."

Its three sequences reveal a clear narrative of the cultural turmoil and grief experienced by the moments/movements surrounding the JFK and MLK assasinations and the Vietnam War. "Smiling for the public eye," sings Smokey. "Don't let my glad expression give you the wrong impression." Very much a statement of the times--smiling outside but dying inside.

I was born in 1979, a decade plus after those assassinations and a few years post-Vietnam. Smack dab in the birth of hip-hop and advent of an extreme right-wing, fiercely developing global capitalist world (not unrelated phenomena in the least). The stylistic elements of Solange's song and video are telling, in that they represent how I and most of us under 30 understand the events of Smokey's song. The song's pulsating claps and the video's refusal to distinguish between cultural-poltical turmoil and social fads mute any sadness we might have even had.

It's all about that beat. Or not. At least, it shouldn't be. Not in this moment, the simultaneous 50th anniversary of Motown Records and the election of America's first black president. The final minute of Solange's video stands in abrupt contrast to the frenetic collage of iconic images of the past 40 years. Slower, more comtemplative and futuristic, its shades of blue-grays lets her imagine (at least in her love life), some other-world type sh*t. What will we do with the equally compelling and troubling elements of the world that we (and Obama) are inheriting?

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Tokumbo Bodunde is a Professor of Communication and Women's Studies at Manhattan College and William Paterson University. She also works for the non-profit filmmaking organization, Chica Luna Productions. Her documentary, "Black Girls Face: R. Kelly" was featured in the Reel Sisters of the Diaspora Film Festival.She will be presenting at the Women, Action & Media Conference near Boston next month.

A Right on Hadley Street: Solange Knowles

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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