Table of Content
Her stint as the face of the 2017 Michael Kors street-style campaign was a blend of accessibility, storybook beauty, and metropolitan sophistication. The same year’s Calvin Klein digital holiday campaign dressed the singer in denim alongside friends and musical collaborators in a barn, as a meditation on the concepts of family and Americana. Last year’s Hammer Museum performance piece “Metatronia (Metatron’s Cube)” used music, interpretive dance, and sculpture to create “charge through visual storytelling.” This month’s new visual album When I Get Home unites these interdisciplinary exercises like a lodestone. Solange is creating a beautiful Black America of the mind, imagining how far we would get in a society unencumbered by division and disorder. Two-and-a-half years after the release of A Seat At The Table, Solange shares her surprise CQ visual album When I Get Home.
Some will know these references — candy paint, the late legend DJ Screw — via the city’s mid-aughts hip-hop explosion, but through Solange’s lens, these same touchstones are elevated to high art. Presenting Home as an exclusively black planet suggests that these distinctions aren’t our fault, that popular perceptions of what is and isn’t classy are borne out of hundreds of years of sternly enforced inequality. Stereotypes about the kinds of food we eat and the style of music we enjoy are rooted in restrictions on what black shoppers and vendors were allowed to buy and sell in the Jim Crow years. When I Get Home is a Carrollian trip down a rabbit hole where none of that stuff happened. “When I first started creating “When I Get Home” I was quite literally fighting for my life…” reflected the singer-songwriter in an Instagram post commemorating the momentous occasion. Creating frenzy for a new release via an old school black-owned site imagined as a world just for black people is so Solo.
Honda Music
The album has been described as an ode to Houston's hip hop scene, and is narrated by a range of sampled African-American women from its Third Ward, where Solange grew up. In writing the album, Solange was inspired by the use of repetition in Stevie Wonder's The Secret Life of Plants as well as music by Steve Reich, Alice Coltrane, and Sun Ra. She also noted that the album was more focused on what she had to "feel", compared to A Seat at the Table's focus on what she had to "say". On February 27, 2019, Solange released a teaser video on social media, and shared the album's track listing on February 28.
In the three years since her seminal album A Seat at the Table, Solange has broadened her artistic reach, expanding her work to museum installations, unconventional live performances, and striking videos. With her fourth album, When I Get Home, the singer continues to push her vision forward with an exploration of roots and their lifelong influence. In Solange's case, that’s the culturally rich Houston of her childhood.
When I Get Home Review
Arly on Friday morning, Solange Knowles released her fourth studio album, When I Get Home. The 19-track album, which the singer and performance artist teased with a mysterious social media roll-out throughout the week, features star-studded collaborations, references to her hometown of Houston, Texas, interludes from feminist writers and production from her teenage son, Julez. Over the last three years, the Houston singer, songwriter, producer, and artist has worked quietly and intensely on a series of projects across mediums whose purpose seems to be to envision the peace and order the real world lacks. Her 2016 studio album, A Seat at the Table, and “Orion’s Rise,” a visually stimulating live production presented to select theaters the following summer, provided comfort food for the election-addled masses.
Unfazed by having to follow a landmark album that crowned the Billboard 200, went gold, and yielded a hit that took a Grammy, Solange leisurely detours with When I Get Home. Made in spots as remote as Los Angeles and Jamaica, the follow-up to A Seat at the Table was also recorded in New Orleans and Solange's native Houston. Most pertinent is the last location, referenced repeatedly in expressions of nostalgia, pride, and tranquility, as well as in titular geographic markers.
Lyrics
With the abstraction and uniqueness of this album, Solange’s musical and creative stylings may not appeal to a first-time listener. As for her loyal fans, “When I Get Home” served as another project that resulted in an increased admiration of the songstress’s unparalleled talent. The first song on the album, “Things I Imagined,” illustrates Knowles’ goal manifestation and is the initial song that Solange and her ensemble performed in the visual album. Thematically illustrating Solange’s struggle within personal politics and black identity. The album is also littered with references to her hometown, H-town, through mentions of the city’s streets by names via song titles and it’s individual yet distinctive status symbols – slabs and grills. Solange noted in a chat about the album in Houston on Sunday that she was listening to Steve Reich, Alice Coltrane, and Stevie Wonder’s Journey Through “The Secret Life of Plants” as she coached and edited the open-ended jam sessions that birthed the music for the new album.
In addition to Solange’s genres variations within this album, she includes tracks such as “Way to the Show” and “Time ” that showcased her signature R&B and soul elements. The 19-track album not only serves as a way for Knowles to speak on her life experiences, but allows her to bring her listeners along with her on a journey of reflection and tribute. With the variation of musical stylings and song interpretations, listeners will either be in the mood to dance or self-reflect. If you could get past a busy signal, you could hear snippets of the not-yet-released songs. "The album is an exploration of origin," reads a news release announcing the album.
Released after 1976’s Songs in the Key of Life to accompany a film full of time-lapse photography and suggestions that just maybe flowers have feelings, Plants is the spot in Wonder’s nearly flawless ’70s creative streak that people rarely talk about. Reviews suggested it was difficult or else half-baked, the bridge too far in a decade of innovations; Stevie reined himself in and returned a little under a year later with the crisp, funky Hotter Than July. This isn't a replica of "A Seat at the Table," with direct song titles such as "Don't Touch My Hair" and several interludes of Solange's parents and Master P discussing racism, black pride and self worth. "When I Get Home," with tracks that breeze effortlessly from one to another, has a more cosmic and dreamlike quality, while also nodding to Houston's chopped-and-screwed sound. Solange was expected to release her new album in the fall of 2018, but the year came and went. "There is a lot of jazz at the core," she told the New York Times while she was still finishing the project.
"But with electronic and hip-hop drum and bass because I want it to bang and make your trunk rattle." The Internet’s Steve Lacy also contributed production, which Solange hinted at when she previously told the Times that the two had been “jamming” together. The film was released alongside the album through Apple Music on March 1, 2019. The 41-minute director's cut of the film was released on all platforms on December 12, 2019.
Emerging stars such as H.E.R, Daniel Caesar, SZA and Jorja Smith have sounds that reach back to earlier music eras, pull elements of substance and nostalgia, and become a new thing in their art, moving the culture forward. Solange is one of the best at manifesting something completely new out of things that are familiar. She’s created her lane by not actually picking one lane, instead proclaiming that she’s bringing home with her wherever she goes, and we’re happy to follow her to the next destination. Fans spent Tuesday and Wednesday searching for old Hotmail and AOL email addresses and passwords, and looking around the site for the first time in years. The platform never shut down, and still feels very retro, as it’s in the process of being updated, but Solange’s new profile was sleek and modern — and offered a sampling of teaser photos, clips and messages, all fervently shared and reposted. The idea of going back to a safe online space was as enticing as the promise of new Solange content.
BlackPlanet was the online destination for black people before MySpace, Facebook, Twitter and Instagram existed. There were forums and groups for cities, organizations and affiliations, dating and job hunting. Pages were customizable , teaching a whole generation of black bloggers how to code on the low.
Tracks on the album such as “Stay Flo” and “Almeda” delivered the album’s hip-hop and trap elements. As we are whisked further into the record, Solange makes the listener more acquainted with her side of the world and how she feels about the people in it. The track “Dreams” gracefully follows an interlude with ethereal, nostalgic vocals “I grew up a little girl with/ Dreams, dreams, dreams, dreams, dreams…” Another standout track is the powerful “Almeda”. There is something noteworthy about a black woman’s resilience and the constant uphill battles she is made to endure; “Almeda” is an embodiment of all of this.
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