The cover image of Why Solange Matters, the first book in Faber’s new Music Matters series charting the story of groundbreaking musicians (Marianne Faithfull and Karen Carpenter to follow), shows the singer washed in red light, her arms loose by her side, gazing towards the audience, or at someone she recognises. In that moment she is bordering on heavenly. Though the photograph was taken five years ago, around the time of Solange’s A Seat at the Table album, for me it conjures a lyric from Down With the Clique on her 2019 LP When I Get Home:
We were rollin’ up the street
Chasing the divine, oh
For Solange fans, myself included, there is something of the sublime in her music. Chords loop, horns slide, vocals riff and run, and a connection emerges from the honesty in her work and the activism of her everyday life. Solange, in short, is unashamedly herself. Stephanie Phillips, a singer and guitarist who has played with various punk bands, seeks to ground Solange’s journey in her own adventures. She describes her voyage as a Black woman trying to find moments of peace and freedom in a society that doesn’t offer such liberty so easily.
The narrative doesn’t homogenise the Black experience. Solange Knowles was born in 1986 in Houston, Texas, where she was surrounded by a strong family – mother, Tina, father, Matthew, and older sister, Beyoncé – and community. But at the majority white school she attended, Solange’s confidence was misconstrued as “crazy… attention-seeking”, leading to her being home schooled before entering the music industry.
Phillips, meanwhile, recounts her own upbringing in Wolverhampton, where many of the spaces she occupied were predominantly white and failed to reflect her father’s collection of reggae or her “quietly revolutionary” mother. When writing about her parents, the author’s prose sparkles. Her account of her father’s migration story from Jamaica to England is as moving as it is insightful.
We follow Phillips from Wolverhampton to Kingston, for university, then to Brixton, where she forms her Black feminist punk band Big Joanie. It’s wonderful to read Phillips’s own story alongside Solange’s – the two are similar in age and share a DIY ethic, as well as a belief in the power of community, and their lives are vividly detailed. Though Phillips’s focal point is Solange’s groundbreaking A Seat at the Table (2016), the artist’s early years are also explored, as are her struggles in an industry that didn’t believe she could succeed outside of R&B.
Singer and author share a story as Black women moving through spaces that weren’t built with them in mind. Why Solange Matters asks not only who Solange is, or who Stephanie Phillips is, but who Black people are and what they can be. Before A Seat at the Table was released, a critic suggested that Solange should be worried about “not biting the hand which feeds you”. As Phillips writes, there “is a system designed to keep you in your place… It keeps Black creatives downtrodden and ignores the racism in the scene.”
This is a book about what freedom could look like for Black women, in which Phillips provides a framework, a vision of a new world, one she hopes Solange would be proud to be a part of.
Caleb Azumah Nelson’s debut novel, Open Water (Viking), is out now