It was the elevator ride that went ‘round the world.
On May 5, 2014, Beyoncé, her sister Solange Knowles and Jay-Z were leaving a Met Gala after-party at Manhattan’s Standard Hotel. On security video from inside a hotel elevator (shown by TMZ just days later), an agitated Solange appeared to attack her brother-in-law, while Beyoncé stood by, reportedly because she was angry about his treatment of her superstar sister.
In hindsight, it now looks like a trailer for the music that came afterward. Beyoncé hinted strongly at Jay-Z’s marital infidelities in 2016’s “Lemonade,” and just last month, Jay-Z confessed to his misdeeds on the intimate new album “4:44” and referenced the incident directly in the song “Kill Jay Z.”
‘Before I started working with her, I don’t think people were taking her seriously … It makes me smile to see her get her due.’
But Solange — who plays Friday on the main stage of the Panorama festival on Randalls Island — is the one who has moved furthest beyond the elevator incident thanks to her own neo-soul masterpiece, “A Seat at the Table.” Released this past September and created with an impressive cast of collaborators such as Lil Wayne, Q-Tip and Raphael Saadiq, her third album is a rumination on what it’s like to be a black woman in the modern world. Universally praised by critics (Pitchfork, Spin and Vibe heralded it as the best album of 2016, above “Lemonade”), it hit No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart.
“A Seat at the Table” has taken her out of her sister’s artistic shadow, establishing the 31-year-old as one of pop’s premier artists.
“Before I started working with her, I don’t think people were taking her seriously,” says Saadiq, who will be playing at next month’s Afropunk Fest at Brooklyn’s Commodore Barry Park. “But I could hear what she was saying. It makes me smile to see her get her due.”
Solange self-funded the album, which took the better part of a decade to write and record. It’s rich with experience — not all positive, as Saadiq can testify.
“I remember walking into a praline store one night with Solange in New Orleans,” he says. “There was a lady in there that saw us, and said, ‘I don’t have any money!’ She thought I was a panhandler! I was only in town for three weeks. Solange actually lives there, so I don’t know how many experiences like that she’s had. She probably held a lot of that inside her for a while.”
In September — the same month “A Seat at the Table” came out — Solange took to social media to share that concertgoers at a Kraftwerk show in New Orleans threw trash at and harassed her, her video-director husband, Alan Ferguson, and her son from a previous marriage, Daniel.
In an essay she wrote about the incident, Solange said she knew that if she shared the story, “a part of the population is going to side with the women who threw trash … ”
While “A Seat at the Table” vocalized her thoughts about being made to feel like she doesn’t belong in traditionally “white spaces,” Solange has used some of her live shows to actively confront that state of affairs.
In May, she performed inside the Guggenheim Museum’s iconic rotunda, delivering songs to the audience at an almost one-on-one level, instead of from behind a rope or from up on a stage. It was less a performance than an occupation. “Inclusion is not enough,” she told the crowd. “Being a black woman of color, I’m not settling for just being here, but tearing the f–king walls down.”
“Simple traditional inclusivity would have been for her to simply play downstairs,” says the museum’s curator of performance and media Nat Trotman. “But the fact we worked together to have her in the rotunda, which is the symbolic center of this institution, to me goes beyond inclusion.”
Her set at Panorama won’t be as conceptual or intimate, but there’s no doubt that Solange is her own woman now, and the seat at the table is hers for keeps.
“We beat the elevator,” says Saadiq. “People don’t talk about that anymore — they talk about Solange’s music now.”