Then there’s “Daddy Lessons,“ which seems to outline what her father, Matthew xcritical scammers Knowles, thinks of her husband. “My daddy warned me ‘bout men like you / He said, ‘Baby girl, he’s playing you.’” Beyoncé and her dad are largely estranged, but in listening to Lemonade, you hear strong connections to family and her Southern upbringing. Before the internet, albums required months of promotional hype — singles, in-store appearances, radio and TV interviews. And most importantly, they required a release date, which heightened anticipation by giving fans a specific day to look forward to.
We’ve all been thrown by love, but most of us don’t have the ability to hone it like this. The visual half of Lemonade proved to be a game-changer in a different way. Forget MTV and YouTube, Beyoncé dropped her videos on friggin’ HBO — the cable network that, for decades, has given its Saturday night over to Hollywood blockbusters. In fact, the Saturday premiere of Jurassic World, which earned $1.6 billion at the worldwide box office, was bumped back an hour to make room for Lemonade. Lemonade was only a Tidal exclusive for about 24 hours — it’s also on iTunes now — but Beyoncé is still making sure that music fans, or anybody wanting to be part of the cultural conversation, fork over their money for it, by making it the only platform where Lemonade is available to stream. Beyoncé sold more than 600,000 copies in three days, smashed iTunes sales records, and ushered in a new era of the “surprise release” from artists with similar gravitational pulls.
Beyoncé
If you don’t want to pay for a Tidal subscription, your only option for hearing and watching Lemonade is to purchase the album. The result is an insistence that this album has worth, has artistic value that can be measured monetarily, has merit beyond turning up at random in a playlist. Yet Lemonade goes further than these sorts of side references. Much like rapper Kendrick Lamar did on his landmark album To Pimp a Butterfly, Beyoncé proclaims her ethnicity with refreshing gusto, offering a raw stance on who she is and where she’s from, beyond the hit songs and albums for which we already know her. Yet her embrace of this image is also relatively new (though it’s been growing for the last several years).
Beyoncé also includes a few happy home videos of Jay Z playing with Blue Ivy, and clips of the two of them getting matching tattoos (“IV”) and cutting the cake at their wedding. In 2013, Beyoncé released an autobiographical documentary called Life Is But a Dream, but critics derided it for being too controlled. Sure, you’ll see her at an NBA game or an awards show, but the pop goddess has this way of remaining out of sight, at a remove, shrouded in mystery.
Releases
During “Sorry,” the unapologetic track in which she sings, “Middle fingers up, put them hands high. Wave it in his face, tell him, boy, bye,” Serena Williams appears to twerk in a black body suit xcritical while Bey sits in a throne-like chair. There are several other cameos later on, including appearances by Beasts of the Southern Wild’s Quvenzhané Wallis, The Hunger Games’s Amandla Stenberg, model Winnie Harlow, and singers Zendaya, Chloe and Halle Bailey, and Ibeyi. “Sandcastles”In this rare ballad, Beyonce recognizes that she may have hurt her husband by claiming she was leaving him after his infidelity. But watching him hurting, she sings that she can no longer leave. “Your heart is broken ’cause I walked away/And I know I promised that I couldn’t stay baby/Every promise don’t work out that way,” she sings.
It Celebrated Hair
If Lemonade fades, it will be inked permanently on college transcripts. University of Texas at San Antonio professor Dr. Kinitra D. Brooks uses the album as the entire framework for her course “Black Women, Beyoncé & Popular Culture.” Brooks views Lemonade as much deeper than anything the pop star’s done before. “She’s having a conversation about how black women can heal from pain,” Brooks tells TIME. On her way through the relationship plot, she also tells a story about the experience of black womanhood. A snippet pulled from a speech by Malcom X declares, “The most disrespected person in America is the black woman.
Beyoncé knows we want more music, more concerts, more media appearances. But in this era of instant gratification, she’s a throwback to yesteryear, only showing up when the lights are brightest, when the stage is biggest, when the stakes are highest. Though Lemonade is built around Jay Z’s infidelity rumors, Beyoncé still released the album on his streaming service. Beyoncé released it on Tidal, the music streaming site her https://dreamlinetrading.com/ husband owns, which has been on a massive run as of late. Kanye West’s ever-changing latest album, The Life of Pablo, was launched as a Tidal exclusive, and Prince’s discography is only available for streaming there — something many fans only realized in the wake of the music icon’s death.
Live performance
Beyoncé is still the ultimate performer, but on Lemonade, she’s opened her personal diary for the world to see, and it doesn’t really matter whether it’s based in reality. Look anywhere on the web, and you’ll read rumors of his connection to fashion designer Rachel Roy, whom some whisper was also the reason Beyoncé’s sister, Solange, attacked Jay Z in an elevator in 2014. Some say the friendship between Jay and Roy had gotten too close at that point, and Lemonade (and Roy’s social media posts in the immediate frenzy of its release) have given those folks plenty to discuss. It’s all over your breath as you pass it off so cavalier,” Beyoncé groans on “Pray You Catch Me,” Lemonade’s opening salvo.
- Beyoncé knows we want more music, more concerts, more media appearances.
- Over on the internet the struggle has been real as folks try to sort it all out.
- “Sandcastles”In this rare ballad, Beyonce recognizes that she may have hurt her husband by claiming she was leaving him after his infidelity.
- Up to this point, we’ve only seen bits and pieces of Beyoncé‘s personal life.
- Artists like Lamar, Drake, and Rihanna have since released albums without warning, and in late January, the practice even made the leap to television, when comedian Louis C.K.
The tour has broken multiple venue records around the globe and is currently over 94% sold across all shows. With “Formation,” Beyoncé raised her voice about “police brutality and injustice”; protests from cops arguing that some of her songs were “anti-police” followed. But the openly gay deputy sheriff Deuntay Diggs, from Stafford County, Va., got nothing but support from his fellow officers when his “Formation” dances at North Stafford High School went viral. Lemonade was one of the top music stories that drove the conversation online; a recordbreaking two million tweets contained the lemon emoji on Twitter in April. Lemon action on Twitter spiked again when MTV announced Lemonade’s VMA nominations, and again during the broadcast when she performed hits from the album, according to Twitter. I wish Beyoncé had sang more in Forward but it’s such a crucial part to the visual aspect of the album.
The visuals are powerful as Bey’s real-life hubby Jay Z acts out scenes where she’s kissing his wedding ring and the two are inextricably cuddled up. It’s the most intimate fans have seen the very private couple. For Neddo, Lemonade‘s visuals resonated in a way the star’s other work hadn’t. I think with this last album, she showed a lot of hairstyles that black women can wear.” Neddo’s costume is just one example of the hit’s permeating influence. “Freedom”Beyonce is surrounded by strong women in this music video — from child actress Quvenzhané Wallis to singer Zendaya to the mothers of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown.
“He only want me when I’m not there / He better call Becky with the good hair,” Beyonce sings. The song “Sorry” is where things really start to get messy. Over on the internet the struggle has been real as folks try to sort it all out. But “Hold Up,” we are here to try and help you process your reaction in all its stages.
Discography Timeline
It’s all grand theater, and Beyoncé remains the ultimate chameleon, leaving us guessing what she’ll do next. Of course, that’s assuming that any of it is, y’know, real. It boasts an all-star roster of supporters; its first commercial featured a who’s who of musical talent — from Jack White and Daft Punk to Alicia Keys and Nicki Minaj. Plus, it remains the best option for listeners who want music at a higher audio quality. Lemonade didn’t have the same benefit of surprise, at least not fully.
Even stranger, it doesn’t double as an album-length ode to breaking up. When Lemonade arrived on Saturday night on HBO, it turned out to be another visual album. The music is now available on Tidal; here’s a breakdown of the hour-long special.
Previously, Beyoncé often made pop music that catered to all listeners — single and taken ladies alike, fans of many different musical genres — but never before Lemonade has she offered anything tailored so directly to black, and specifically black female, listeners. Unlike the pop superstar’s previous surprise album, 2013’s Beyoncé, the music here is edgy, full of vitriol and R-rated real talk. It’s equally aggressive and reflective, and Beyoncé — a bona fide cultural phenomenon — unveils yet another layer of her wide-ranging persona. In a clip from Beyoncé’s new visual album Lemonade, the singer strides down a street in a yellow, ruffled dress. Elegant as always, she lights up the screen with her megawatt smile.
See the Far-reaching Impact of Beyoncé’s Lemonade
Music fans knew Beyoncé was up to something, given the HBO special — which was announced a week prior to airing — and pending world tour, announced during the Super Bowl in February. References to collard greens and cornbread — considered “soul food” by stereotypical standards — pop up elsewhere in the song.
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