Music lovers, we were spoiled rotten in 2016. It was the year of Rihanna’s ANTI, Kanye West’s The Life of Pablo, Beyoncé’s Lemonade, and Frank Ocean’s Blonde. There were many more projects that graced 2016, but through innovative promotional campaigns and an unprecedented level of substantive honesty, these particular albums shifted the industry paradigm as we knew it.
While the aforementioned works were transformative in their own ways, there was one album that shook the culture to its core: Solange’s A Seat at the Table, which turns five years old today. By weaving together threads of collective heartache and transcendent overcoming — long-held facets of the Black experience — Solange transfixed listeners and found commercial success, with A Seat at the Table debuting at No. 1 on the Billboard 200 chart. Hundreds of millions (if not billions) of streams later, Solange’s opus is aging gracefully, and widely discussed in the coveted classic album conversation.
