A few years back, Solange Knowles, kid sister of Beyoncé, recorded one of the most underrated songs of the young millennium. Co-authored by soul specialist Cee-Lo Green, "Sandcastle Disco" coasts on a shuffling beat and a relaxed vocal, then punches the accelerator into an ecstatic, girl-group chorus: "Bay-b-b-b-bay-bay, don't blow me away!" It's pure Motown, a 21st-century answer to "You Can't Hurry Love."
With this year's "Losing You," Solange goes both more current and more mainstream, exploring the downtempo aesthetic preferred by many of today's R&B artists. The ambivalent lyric, alternating between entreaties ("Just treat me good baby and I'll give you the rest of me") and threats ("I'm not the one you should be making your enemy"), wouldn't seem out of place on a Drake track. And yet something of Solange's predilection for vintage party music remains in the song's jubilant, Family Stone-like beat.
Despair and self-assurance, brooding and boogying: it's this emotional and textural complexity that, in a year full of remarkable R&B singles (see: Usher's "Climax," Miguel's "Adorn," and my soon-to-be-revealed #2 song of 2012), sets "Losing You" apart.
"I don't know why I fight it, clearly we are through. / Tell me the truth boy, am I losing you for-eh-eh-ver?"
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