We Been The Cowboy

Solange, When I Get Home. Columbia Records (2019).

After an extensive hiatus (one presumably spent singing among the stars), Solo has finally made her earthly descent. And like her preemptive path orbiting the Earth before planting her crop circle at home in Texas, the non-linear is emblematic of the new album.

 The newest release, When I Get Home transcends the linear. And like all things that don't exist in sequence, they're difficult to articulate into a neat and orderly analysis. Solange is stretching the boundaries of what it means to be a black woman artist by far. Yet, she can't be easily classified into any specific genre. Couple that with her extreme privacy, that's what makes her so enigmatic and appealing. Both the visual and sonic composition of the album exists in an infinite time loop: the white sculptural pieces, the ring of cars surrounding a moving circle of white and silver clad brown bodies who orbit the Houston goddess, seated on a white disk in silver. "Do nothing without intention!" a friend says closing out the interlude track of the same title. No loose threads here. The message is clear even in its dreamy fluidity.

A Seat At The Table gave us a softer and palatable minimalist elegance; an arrival that was both visually and sonically soft and grounded. Now Solange has asserted herself as a returning incumbent: the 3/4 view of her face partially covered by a set of deconstructed eye armor reads: “I’m sitting there”. Texas is her universe; shes use its tableau to construct a and timeless playground. When I Come Home has whipped us all into real yeet-haw formation. And about time. Solange is establishing herself as a serious contemporary artist, exceedingly not only capable of crafting sonic beauty, but entire worlds.

When I Get Home is a return, an extension of A Seat at the Table, one more matured and comfortable in Blackness, less palatable and easy on (white) eyes and ears. 
Like many great black-ass things, the album has ignited a fascination with a niche in Black history; the lesser-known history of the elusive black cowboy figure. Although public perception of the free-spirited and raw lifestyle is due in large part to deliberately whitewashed depictions in film and history textbooks, the emergence of black cowboys is directly related to white settler expansion into 19th century Texas.

A 2017 Smithsonian article details the economic significance of free black labor sustained settler economy. Formerly a colony of Spain and then absorbed by Mexico, enslavement was declared illegal in Texas. However, anticipating white Americans in search of cheap land, left the United States and unsurprisingly managed to evade this law by bringing their enslaved workers with them. Settler livelihood depended on cotton production and cattle raising, and inevitably the majority of the work fell on unpaid black hands.

What Solange is bringing to the table is a revival and re-invention of the aesthetic and history; she plays with cowboy tableau to give life to her homage to Texas: her brown skin decked in crystals and white cowboy boots, sporting both her staple long black tresses and halo of platinum curls.
Solange showcases a coexistence between decadence and rawness of her hometown Houston, and black Southern life overall. Her discography is consistent with her vocalized disdain for white and white adjacent conventionality,  (cue "Fuck The Industry" and "Mad", or read up on her historic Guggenheim performance)  Still, her work transcends the need to constantly combat the limitations set by the industry and is genuine in centralizing Black women. 

She gives us ratchet in her raspy (and faded) drawl on My Skin My Logo and the compilation of many cute and saucy fits and twerk sessions for the official video Binz. We Deal with the Freak'n (intermission). Got. Damn. is to the innate divine energy of Black women, sampling prophetess Alexyss Tylor. Her Southern lilt introduces "Almeda" with an infectious trap beat, featuring Plaboi Carti and The-Dream, stressing that the resilience of blackness "still can't be washed away". "Stay Flo" gives you strip club vibes with a melodic lullaby and rough demonic beat set in a futuristic cyborg shawty bearing the weight of the machine. Solange is here to let you know that the girls are working. Hard. 
 Black cowboy culture is cowboy culture is Black culture. Solange operates on CP time, and she advises the rest of us to do the same. For our own sake.