Will Solange’s Shaved Head Cause People To Stop Sleeping On Her Completely Underappreciated Album?

noah | July 23, 2009 2:30 pm

“Solange new haircut” is currently lighting up Google like crazy right now, thanks to it being something of a big change for the singer: She’s buzzed her tresses so that they’re barely longer than an Army-regulation cut. It’s an easy way to beat the heat and an opportunity to save money that would be spent on product! The haircut is sort of a perfect opportunity for me to talk about why Solange has been something of an interesting character to me over the last 18 months of this site’s existence; namely, because of the way that her music is pretty much the last thing people take note of when discussing her. She has celebrity-by-association thanks to being the younger sister of Beyoncé, and her Twitter, which has around 250,000 followers, is pretty much constantly updated with rants about Fame In The New Millennium and name-drops of bands she’s into (last night, she rhapsodized about meeting the marker-wielding singer-songwriter Sia). Meanwhile, Solange’s last album Sol-Angel And The Hadley St. Dreams had sales tallies that fell far short of that number, despite it being really good. Sure, you could say that following someone on a microblogging site, or clicking through a 20-picture gallery of them on a Web site, is a very passive form of engagement with a celebrity while plunking down money for an album and taking time to listen to their songs is both a) active and b) kind of hard to do if you want to find an actual CD copy of something that isn’t in the Billboard album chart’s upper reaches at that very moment, but I still think it’s worthy of mentioning that more and more musicians these days are becoming famous for just existing, with any record releases only serving as nice bits of trivia. (Related: The faierie-queene singer who goes by the name of A Fine Frenzy just passed the million-follower mark on Twitter. Not to make an egregious Arrested Development reference, but: Her? Am I the only person who sees a serious disconnect here?) All this is to say that I think this is a fine moment to remind anyone out there that yes, Solange’s Sol-Angel And The Hadley St. Dreams is a fine R & B album, and one that you can pick up for as low as $7.99 right now. Here is one video from the album, for the gently throwbacky “I Decided!” “I Decided”

There is also a clip for “Sandcastle Disco” that’s unembeddable. And there are more songs at her MySpace page, too. RANDOM PICS: SOLANGE’S NEW BUZZ CUT AND EVENT PICS FROM THE DITA VON TEESE SHOW [ConcreteLoop] Solange [MySpace] Solange Knowles [Twitter]