Live Look: Solange @ Radio City
Bringing her “Orion’s Rise” performance piece to Radio City, Solange used her radiant stage presence to plant her foot in the name of solidarity.
To be granted the gift of enlightenment by Solange Piaget Knowles is a burdensome yolk so heavy it can’t be carried by one man alone. This gift, however, is accompanied by a guidebook for the modern era: A Seat At The Table, Solange’s 2016 masterpiece, feels ever more prescient in the shifting global news topography, fighting oppression with jazz, funk and heart. The shit makes you get it, truly get it. Every day I get a little dizzier, reeling from information overload. I’ve tried avoiding it, but I’m still hooked on staying connected and my phone is never too far away. When enjoying a show, I often forget the world for a night, but Solange kept the state of the world on the forefront of the minds of the audience. Together we rejoiced and weeped for the world and hoped for a better one to come. She preaches peace and understanding in her words while illustrating hurt, discord, anger and awakening. These powerful feelings filled the souls of the audience in Radio City Music Hall and at each stop she’s made before and since.
Solange sung her album through, replacing interludes with stand-outs from previous records, including “Losing You” and “Some Things Never Seem to Fucking Work” from the True EP. The effect was sweeping, like following an unfamiliar curve on a scenic drive I’d taken so many times before (the show took place nearly a year to the day of the album’s release). A white staircase flanked by two massive pyramids provided ample room for the composer and choreographer (she is a Knowles sister, after all) to make a grand, mesmerizing entrance among her full band and backup singers. The set moved like one unified piece with Solange as the body’s vibrant head. She commanded the microphone with aplomb, playing vocal acrobatics with lyrics and hollering like she was really feeling it.
Underneath her lyrics, the band replicated the album on Radio City’s grandest of grand scales while creating an experience no less intimate than listening to the record alone in Central Park’s Great Hill with your headphones in and the volume up. When the drums cascade in, signaling the arrival of stunner “Cranes in the Sky,” the audience reacted with exuberant joy but also solemnity for the gentle sound of the track. When the crunching beat in “Mad” began, the room rose to boogie and when her falsetto soared on “T.O.N.Y.,” we wept with her over miserable one night stands.
The absolutely anthemic “Don’t Touch My Hair” electrified the room predictably and Solange led complex, disjointed choreography that held the room’s attention like a cat on a laser pointer, each move segueing into the next without the need for a transition. And Solange brought along Verdine White to perform his rendition of her True track “Bad Girls.” However, the emotional highlight of the night was when the synths chimed, coaxing in “F.U.B.U.,” or “For Us By Us,” named for the brand and idea represented by so many black icons before her. The-Dream talks about helping Solange tie her thoughts and loose ends together on this track when she visited him in Atlanta, reassuring her it was “awesome as fuck” and definitely a statement. At this climactic apex in the set, the crowd was mesmerized and the synthesis of themes on A Seat At The Table fully dawned. Love for and ownership of hundreds of years of black culture resonated and reverberated as loud as a siren as Solange luxuriated in the message Master P shares on the preceding interlude: “If you don’t understand my record, you don’t understand me, so this is not for you.” This was such a masterful moment by Solange, who wrote the track as an unabashed black empowerment anthem, previously titled “Be Very Afraid” with the hook, “Be very afraid of the color.”
Solange and the two women singing and dancing beside her, behind her and around her moved in either unison or succession, neatly and uniformly, through much of the set. Solange, though, often took the opportunity to break from the choreography routine to let loose and vibe with the possessive reverence of Florence Welch. Her movement was striking and thematically on-point, getting lost in the expression of her female form and her African American and Creole heritage. Four years prior to the release of A Seat At The Table, Solange moved to New Iberia, Louisiana, to begin writing the foundations of the record and simultaneously understanding the foundations of her family. Her father’s family was run out of New Iberia and settled toward Galveston, Texas, and a restless spirit of movement runs like an invisible seam, stitched through the whole record. She was a vessel on stage, her movement leading the crowd along through her record, her own guidebook to living more responsibly and respectfully. And when she twerks, she has full command, a confident black woman taking up her seat at the table with pride.
The most gifted of musicians can not only stir emotion but also a call to action. Solange embraces her role as spirit leader and encourager for the champion-less and defeated. Her show was proud, anthemic and crystal-clear; it was up-front, in-the-moment and well rehearsed with such an air still of improvisation, of fun. It was real and it deserves to be seen, to be heard. It was a masterclass in professionalism, love and music — in her own words now, “Where do we go from here?” Solange, show us, please.
