Just days after the release of her third album A Seat At The Table, Solange is back with two new videos from the project. She flips two of the album’s highlights, “Cranes in the Sky” and “Don’t Touch My Hair,” into videos directed by herself and her husband Alan Ferguson.
She included an explanation of the videos' contents on her website, calling A Seat At The Table a “musical representation of the spirit within an unapologetically Black woman who is not interested in remaining silent in a critical time of identity, empowerment, grief, healing and self-expression—let alone, artistic expression. Watch as both women and men of color liberate themselves through costumes and choreography, as well as moods conveyed via flawless scenery and set design all by way of a glass of wine, personified, that is Solange Knowles.”
In her “Cranes In the Sky” video, Solange presents a series of mostly still video images. With stunning natural backdrops, she creates an effect of photography in motion, allowing the viewer to focus on the small details of each scene. The song’s lyrics touch on themes of depression and escapism, and the scenes seem to give an opportunity for conveying those complex emotions through slow, deliberate imagery.
Meanwhile, her “Don’t Touch My Hair” video featuring Sampha is a celebration of the style and beauty of black hair. The song title references a common micro-aggression directed at black people, who often face extra scrutiny for their hairstyles. Styles that are celebrated as trendy on white people are often deemed “unprofessional” on black people. A recent supreme court ruling even found that it’s legal to refuse to hire someone with dreadlocks, a common black hairstyle.
Don’t touch my hair
When it’s the feelings I wear
Don’t touch my soul
When it’s the rhythm I know
Don’t touch my crown
They say the vision I’ve found
Don’t touch what’s there When it’s the feelings I wear
Solange puts a celebration of black people and their hair however they choose to wear it—front and center in her video. This is not the first time that she’s touched on this issue either. She wrote a personal essay about her own experiences with racism in September that included a reference to hair touching. “You and your friends have been called the N word, been approached as prostitutes, and have had your hair touched in a predominately white bar just around the corner from the same venue. You know that people of colors’ ‘spaces’ are attacked every single day, but many will not be able to see it that way,” she wrote.
