CLEO SOL STANDS center stage at New York’s Radio City Music Hall. It’s March 2025. Her flowing red ball gown doesn’t detract from her grounding presence. Her forehead glistens under the warm beams. My arms are outstretched and tears stream down my face. The room swells as Sol and her backing vocalists sing these words in the song “Build Me Up”:
“Am I invisible? / I’m not invincible”
After the show, I see three young Black people holding hands in a circle. “We’ve gone to church, y’all,” one says, the other two friends guffawing while slapping her shoulders. That’s how it felt, a mass witnessing of divine intervention.
Sol and I were both born in London, yet there we were, thousands of miles across the Atlantic, sharing space with a community whose history is not our own. Her music made strangers kin, and it made me, a Black British woman, feel at home not through place, but through sound. That spiritual high faded soon after I left the venue. An unhoused Black man was sleeping on a bench in the subway carriage, untroubled by the shakes and screeches as the train descended into Brooklyn. We passengers were also unperturbed, giving him at most a quick glance before staring at our phones.
Read the Full Article
