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Last Updated: Oct 29th, 2008 - 11:47:10 |
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 Warwick, 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.
Ms. Knowles remains earnest throughout--you can almost hear the ghost of young George Kerr or Jerry Wexler imploring her: "sing Black gal, sing!"--as on the Neptunes produced (surprise, surprise) lead single "I Decided". The day-glow-time-portal video for "I Decided", should give enough folk reason to pause and they won't be disappointed. Jack Splash of "Teen Age Love" fame provides the blueprint for three tracks, of which "T.O.N.Y." is the most notable.
As always on these period pieces, Marvin Gaye continues to be evoked though most have yet to find the right pitch beyond the poles of social justice and gratuitous sex that marked his most popular music. Splash and Knowles mine the former and it is as expected, forgettable.
Hadley Street Dreams is much more assured when the theme is less ambitious--like the Holland-Dozier-Holland knock-off "Would've Been the One" and the Soul throwback "6 O'clock Blues"--or when simply wandering through the corridors of casual psychedelia. There's no plan behind tracks like "This Bird" and "Cosmic Journey" with Bilal "rent-some-gravitas" Oliver and while I'd hesitate to call such tracks experimental or even improvisational (not likely given the professed desire to have any up-and-coming R&B Diva punch in those runs), give Knowles and her producers some credit for not needing to control song structure on every occasion.
The fact that Knowles doesn't always have full grasp of her material is a plus; It means she'll do better next time and she'll be a better artist because of it.
© Copyright 2006 SeeingBlack.com
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