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Helga Davis of the Q2 Music show Helga released her newest episode on Monday, which featured an incredibly insightful interview with Solange Knowles. In it, the 30-year-old opened up about the very condescending comments of one New York Times music critic that ended up being the “turning point” in her life and inspired the A Seat at the Table album. It all started with a tweet in 2013 to defend the honor of singer Brandy and her Two Eleven album.

“The turning point happened when essentially, I was on Twitter, professing my love for the artist Brandy, who I’m a massive fan of,” Knowles said. “There were a lot of white, indie music critics who criticized, actually, me professing this undying love for Brandy who is an R&B artist. I think they thought there was a little bit of irony to it, which I was not expressing at all. I essentially challenged writers, that if they were writing about R&B music, they needed to know who Brandy was. That was not warmly received by everyone.”

The tweets in question included, “Some of these music blogs could actually benefit from hiring people who REALLY understand the culture of R&B to write about R&B.” That, as well as, “Like you really should know about deep Brandy album cuts before you are giving a ‘grade’ or a ‘score’ to any R&B artist.”

A few months prior to that tweet, Knowles released her album True through indie label Terrible Records based out of Brooklyn. Because of that, she saw a “significant change in my audience” during shows. She went from from a mixed bunch in the past to predominately White hipsters out of the blue.

As for her Twitter comments, she was invited to do a New York Times podcast on cultural tourism to explain them further, but declined. She felt there was no need to have a debate on something she was culturally a part of. Still, her comments were brought up during the podcast by music critic Jon Caramanica.

“A White, male writer actually said, ‘I went to Solange’s concert and I noted who her audience was. And if I were her I would be careful of making these statements because I would be careful not to bite the hand that feeds me.’ It was actually named, ‘Does Solange Know Who’s Buying Her Albums?'” Solange said of the podcast conversation. “Then it became a conversation, yet again, on ownership.”

Feeling as though he was trying to say that her changing White audience had ownership over her and her art, Knowles was “haunted” by the conversation. Ownership over her art during her early years in the music industry was also something Knowles spoke in great length about at the beginning of her of her interview with Davis. Feeling as though she was still being made to feel stifled, Knowles got to thinking, talking, and writing.

“That was kind of the turning point in the transition for me writing the album that is now A Seat at the Table,” Knowles said. “I began to think a lot about that conversation and replaying it and it haunted me. And it haunted my mother to hear someone telling her daughter, ‘Don’t bite the hand that feeds you.’ Also, the racial subtleties, or not so subtle, of what that encompasses when you say that to a Black woman. Then you connect that by saying, ‘Do you know who is buying your records?’ So I was essentially being told to shut up and to silence me.”

She continued, “So I began to write the early stages of the album that is out now, A Seat at the Table, primarily based off of that conversation and a lot of conversations that started to happen during that era of me releasing that album. The feeling of just being silenced through my voice. I started to see the Nina Simone and the Marvin Gayes of our time; who made work about blackness and what it felt like to fill this Black body and occupy space in a country that still does not value our Black bodies at a level and place that they should. People are generally comfortable with you telling those stories through your art, and we see this with Black visual artists, but really uncomfortable with you talking about it outside of that context. And so I started having these conversations very openly.”

Those conversations were with followers on Twitter and with her family. They also included calling out Caramanica in February of this year, prior to the release of her lauded ASATT album. She had not forgotten nor forgiven his past statements.

Via Twitter she said,  “Ps: @JonCaramanica Don’t you EVER tell a Black woman, not to ‘Bite the hand that feeds you’ while speaking in reference to white people. My father ‘fed me’ when he was hosed down and forced to walk on hot pavement barefoot in civil rights marches in Alabama @joncaramanica. With all due respect, the people who you named were responsible for my ‘success’ wish they could feed me half of what growing up in 3rd Ward Houston Texas, fed me.”

The success of the album, the way it’s been warmly received by so many Black people, and the way in which Knowles notes that it even mended her relationships with the father of her son and her own father, Mathew Knowles, has meant the world to the singer. “The universe did more than have my back,” she said, “it really gave us a gift.”

It’s also awakened her in a whole new way to the importance of speaking openly about the issues impacting our community. But she’s always been aware of them thanks, in large part, to her mother, Tina Knowles-Lawson.

“I think that I grew up with really powerful images and voices and connectivity through my mother,” she told Davis. “It was very, very important for her for us to know where we came from. It’s a classic saying, ‘Knowing where you came from to know where you’re going.’ To identify and ground ourselves as descendants of African people has always been at the forefront of how my mother raised us. I think it was also really important for her that, because in Houston, the school systems, as in most big cities, can be really complicated. It was really important for her that if we were going to a predominately White school from August until June or however long, that that summer we were in Ase camp [laughs]. That was super important to her. It was very real. Learning about Kumba and Umoja and all of that. I’m super, super happy that she made that a requirement for us. And so I think through all of my projects, especially visually, it’s always been super important for me to celebrate the beauty and the regality of blackness and Black culture.”

Check out the great interview, if you have a little over an hour to spare, below:

Images via Splash, Saint/Columbia Records

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