Solange: "I Decided"

Who the fuck is this? I mean, I get that it’s Solange Knowles, and that when she sees Jay-Z he probably hoots some teasing, affectionate nickname at her, and then she goes back to shutting down Leonardo DiCaprio or David Banner or whoever’s hitting on her. I get that she sleeps on a pillow stuffed with the chest hair of mortal men. I know who Solange Knowles is.

What I do not know is who the fuck produced this slender, winsome, batshit-crazy music video, easy melodies and shuffling tambourine and bouncing piano, all played with coy reserve by the British indie-pop band Field Music. Okay, that’s not true, it’s the Neptunes, but on some bombast-free pop shit we rarely hear from them anymore. Even when a synth line squirrels its way along the chorus, it pirouettes in high, light leaps, which synth lines (and squirrels, really) very rarely do. The video, meanwhile, plays like a conflation of Billy Joel’s “We Didn’t Start The Fire” and Darren Aaronofsky’s The Fountain and the drug MDMA, swirling primary-color hand-jives against Black Panthers, Jimmy Carter, Soul Train. It’s a what-the-fuck rush of giddy pop invention. By the time the ruby-beadazzled Barbie Dream Tank takes aim ninety-seconds in, your your jaw is slack at the audacity on display, like they were like: shit, if Cee-Lo can do it …

But Cee-Lo can’t do it anymore, or at least he barely does it, and when he dresses up like Darth Vader he looks like he’s playing a joke whereas when Solange dresses up like Diana Ross and does shoulder-bobs in front of the Challenger Disaster she looks like she thinks of pop music as a perversion compared to all the pain and injustice in the world and so one of the most important things within that hurting world, which is, you know, pretty accurate, all things considered. Also, at one point in the song when she’s telling this guy that she digs him, she coos as sweetly as anywhere else in the song, “Your mind is like a prism / For God’s light to shine through,” and then goes back to sounding like she wants you to let her wear your letterman’s jacket, which you then do, assuming you have one, which I do not, but I forget that sometimes when Solange sings to me. Also, the only two guests on her forthcoming record = Lil’ Wayne and Q-Tip. Also, that album is called Sol-Angel and the Hadley St. Dreams, which is approximately five million times cooler than B’Day (2006). Also: the string lines kinda suck, but “Pt. 2” smacks the shit out of anything on the new Coldplay record.

Youtube won’t let us embed, but you can watch this hot mess of awesome here:

Part 1 :: http://youtube.com/watch?v=pD8wzrBLrLI
Part 2 :: http://youtube.com/watch?v=pTAHCmtnjKw