Excuse me for a moment while I use the Platform blog as a mouthpiece for my infatuation but I am IN LOVE with Solange: her music, her face, the way saying her name makes me curl my tonuge.
For those of you who wake-up each day feeling like something is missing in your life, Solange is a 22-year-old singer from Texas who has so much talent that Amanda Holden is ACTUALLY BANNED from being in the same room as her in case she cries out her vital organs.
Solange’s debut release Sol-angel and the Hadley St. Dreams featured in the upper realms of both the Pitchfork and Popjustice albums of the year and featured contributions from Mark Ronson, Boards of Canada, Gnarls Barkley singer Ce-Lo Green, Q-Tip and Supremes’ producer Larmont Dozier.
And yeah, she’s Solange Knowles, Beyonce’s little sister.
But Solange is nothing like Beyonce. She had a baby when she was 17, covers Devin the Dude’s Doobie Ashtray at her live shows and writes lyrics like “I’m just saying to the industry, this is fuck you signed sincerely”.
Beyonce makes power ballads that were put together by a team of writers. Solange writes songs bursting with soul and groove that burn a beaming grin on to your rubbish little face.
Her first show was on Friday night at Heaven. I went on my own. It was a mixed crowd:
About 50% girls who looked like this:
20% guys who looked like this:
10% gays who looked like this:
And the rest were geeks who looked like this:
As I wondered around the venue I bumped into a guy called Richard who works for super-trendy indie label XL Records. Last time I saw him at a gig we were watching underground no-fi band A Grave With No Name. “I was on holiday this week,” he tells me, “but I cut it a day short so I could see Solange. This is the fourth time I’ve seen her but the first time I’ve seen her with friends.”
OH MY GOD MATE, YOU’RE LONELY TOO. DO YOU WANT TO COME ROUND TO MY HOUSE AND LISTEN TO SOLANGE AND TALK ABOUT WHY WE LOVE HER AND THEN WE CAN BE BLOOD BROTHERS AND FALL ASLEEP UNDER THE STARS.
Ahem, I mean, yeah she’s good ain’t she. Blud.
Seeing Solange in the flesh was incredible. I can’t put my very real and physical love for Solange into prose, safe to say that she is really, really, hot. During the show she throws between motown homages and deep electronica. She does a gospel cover of Bjork’s It’s Oh So Quiet and chucks about twenty snippets of other songs, none of which I can remember because I was too excited.
I saw her again on Monday night. Beyonce introduced her (that girl is getting to know her place). Raekwon from Wu-Tang Clan made a guest appearance. Solange killed it. If you want to watch the whole thing in really bad quality on Youtube, you can.
Total swear count from both nights:
Muthafuckers: 2
Regular “fuck”s or “fucking’: 6
Shit: 3
References to drug taking: Loads
This has been less a blog post, more torrential fandom. I will finish the nonsense by making this, slightly lame, point:
The more you listen to music, the less you appreciate it. The sheen is taken off. Popstars are as exposed as tools, music is exposed as vacuous and the feeling you get when you hear a song you love is dampened by the understanding of how that song was made. That’s why at gigs you see kids down the front getting sweaty and grown-ups at the back looking grumpy. It’s a vertical graph of cynicism.
This weekend Solange broke through all of that, just by being incredible. By the end of both gigs, there were guys clapping and hollering like kids at a school disco. Even Jools Holland agrees with me and he invented music.
Ok that’s enough bigging-up now. I’m going chemist, I have the most inexplicable urge for a lozenge.
WORDS: SAM WOLFSON
