On “Mad,” she affirms her own and others’ right to “be mad, be mad, be mad” with a lilting pop finesse worthy of the Supremes, while also singing sorrowful lines with heartbreaking beauty: “Where’d your love go?” she inquires, repeating the question over a simple arpeggio as if retracing her steps. There is often a tension between what she sings and how she sings it. The song is simultaneously a celebration, a lament, and a critique-an admixture that is also expressed in the way Solange sings. Offering more questions than answers, more questing than closure, she might “provoke” healing, as she put it, but she does not provide it. And her refusal to make one clear statement, far from compromising the force of her album, is actually the source of its power: By insisting on doubleness and ambivalence, she makes space for the complex interiority that black women are often denied, and refuses the role of racial healer they are often expected to play. By crafting an aesthetic of ebb and flow, push and pull, Solange insists on being angry (“I’ve got a lot to be mad about,” as she puts it on “Mad”), melancholic, and empowered. The album’s layered voices and dense, intricate harmonies, its deliberate aesthetic of indirection, and its poetic double meanings all amount to a refusal to simplify this moment. She herself tweeted that the album is meant to “provoke healing & journey of self-empowerment.”īut at the same time, to focus on the album’s “message” or its “statement” is to miss the fact that both the album and the issues she’s addressing are so much messier than that.
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Certainly, song titles like “Don’t Touch My Hair” are about as clear as it gets, and Solange’s featured speakers, from her mother and father to Master P, address race in America with fierce eloquence.
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In the days since its release, critics have praised A Seat at the Table for delivering messages of racial empowerment perfectly pitched to the #BlackLivesMatter moment.