Good Or Shit: Solange Knowles

He leant forward, his eyes half closing with the weight of that same smile he'd been smiling all night, a smile that said, I love you all, I love life, I'm on a spiritual plane right now and I have perfect clarity. He looked at the guy sitting across the coffee table from him, the one who was navigating this little kitchen party. The captain of our ship, the one ensuring we remained above the murky waters of 'Shit. Is That the Time? I Have To Get Up and Move House in a Few Hours'. Basically, the dude with the laptop and several YouTube tabs open.

As the smiley one leant forward he howled the same thing he'd cried out countless times since we'd left the pub for the sanctuary of this kitchen – “play Solaaaannnnge”.

I love a kitchen party. To be perfectly honest I much prefer them to pubs, clubs, and groovy pop up bars in car parks and alley ways. The booze is much cheaper, you don't have to queue to get to the fridge, the crowd is usually pretty good because you've handpicked it yourself, it's not hard to turf out wankers, and there are no bouncers to tell you you've had enough. But the best aspect of a kitchen party is the music. You can play whatever you damn well want and you can play it over and over again. Which brings us back to Play Solaaannnnge. We did, we played it a lot.

This all started a month ago when I received an email from one of my girlfriend's containing two YouTube clips. One of them was Disclosure, Control, above which she had written “I am the sweaty Asian guy with the buzz cut” (in reality she is actually none of these things) and the second, above which she had written “basically, clothing envy,” was Solange Knowles, the track Losing You.

I watched this clip for the clothing but ten seconds into it my body was unwittingly bopping. I played it again and then I played it again. I turned it up loud. I sent it to other people. 'Look whose kid sister is a hipster', I shouted. 'Hey, this is great', they said. 'Who's her sister?' they said.

Really? Knowles? No? Last name doesn't ring a bell?

Solange Knowles is Beyonce's sister. But that's more interesting than relevant because this chick is her own kind of person and musician. She released her first album when she was a teenager (between back up dancing for Destiny's Child) which had as much impact on the world as the movies she's been in. The second album was much better. An exercise in classic soul influenced R&B titled Sol-Angel And The Hadley St. Dreams. But now, now she's a 26 year old 80s pop star co-writing and producing with Blood Orange's Dev Hynes and releasing music on a label co-owned by one of the dudes from Grizzly Bear. Everyone's calling her a hipster, she says it's “just a lazy way to describe someone who doesn't define themselves in a narrow way, culturally speaking.”

I owned Sol-Angel And The Hadley St. Dreams but it didn't have a huge effect on me. Not like her new EP True. Nothing like the effect Losing You is having on me. I practically have Solangitis.

I love this song. I wake up singing it. I've been known to come home drunk, thinking I'm an absolute star, put it on loud and dance in front of my mirror – for hours. It's actually getting to the point where it's starting to make me feel a bit sick because I've listened to it so much. And I was worried that this would happen. I wanted my love for this song to last throughout the radio bashing it's inevitably going to get. That night in the kitchen, every time my smiling friend shouted like a call to war – Play Solaaaannnnge – I freaked out a little bit.

NO, I shouted back at him, You're going to RUIN IT, if you keep playing it we will OVERDOSE, you will take the joy out of the SOLANGE MOMENT. But he just smiled that smile as though he was telling me we should just live in this moment, while it exists, Play Solaaannnge.

And every time he played it I had to get up. Every time it came through the speakers I found my feet moving to the beat. Crossing the kitchen floor through spilt beer and gin and tonic and cigarette ash and they weren't even sticking because my socks were sopping wet and it didn't matter. None of it mattered. Play Solaaannnge.

These days if you mention Solange in front of my housemate she immediately pulls out a rusty fork and stabs herself in the eye.