FEATURE:
A New Formation
Beyoncé’s Lemonade at Five
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THERE are a few albums from 2016…
that I am marking in features through the coming weeks and months. Most would say that a fifth anniversary is not a big one. I would disagree. I feel it is good to look back on an album after that period of time and see how it has influenced and aged. On 23rd April, Beyoncé’s sixth solo album, Lemonade, turns five. After putting out the Beyoncé album of 2013, there was a gap until her next album arrived. I love that eponymous album and feel that it is among her very best. It was developed as a ‘visual album’; its songs are accompanied by non-linear short films that illustrate the musical concepts conceived during production. Another reason why the album is so extraordinary and connected with critics is because of its dark, intimate subject material, which includes feminist themes of sex, monogamous love, and relationship issues (inspired by Beyoncé's desire to assert her full creative freedom). Lemonade was a similar album in terms of its release and impact. Another amazing visual album, its concept boasts a song cycle that relates Beyoncé's emotional journey after her husband's infidelity in a generational and racial context. I am going to end by talking about the legacy of Lemonade. Not only is the album one of the best of 2016. I think it Beyoncé’s finest release. Focusing on infidelity in Black relationships, she also used the album as a form of recognition, commemoration and celebration of the culture and history of Black people in the Deep South and in the United States as a whole.
Alongside this are powerful songs of Black feminism. It is an exceptional album that is so important and powerful, but it is accessible at the same time. I think that Lemonade is an angrier album that a lot of Beyoncé's earlier work. I also think it is broader in terms of sound. Moving away from a mostly R&B sound, Beyoncé covers Rap, Hip-Hop, Jazz, Art Pop, Soul, Blues and so many other sounds through the twelve tracks (the physical release had twelve tracks, whereas Sorry appears on the digital release). Although there are vocal collaborators like James Blake, Jack White and Kendrick Lamar, it is Beyoncé's incredible performances and voice that burns brightest and leaves the biggest impression. The reviews, unsurprisingly, were phenomenally positive! So many were stunned by an album that sees Beyoncé's at her absolute peak. This is what Entertainment Weekly wrote:
“Like her “Formation” video, the visual album’s imagery—a mostly female and nonwhite affair—makes the point with haunting clarity. Black women in antebellum dresses populate eerie plantation tableaus; home videos of kids playing in the yard bleed into coffins and the mothers of Trayvon Martin and Eric Garner holding portraits of their dead boys; Serena Williams, whose otherness has long been scrutinized by the very not-woke tennis world, dances with abandon. Her body belongs to herself—no small thing in the context of African-American history. “Did he bend your reflection?” Beyoncé whispers. “Did he make you forget your own name?”
For the magnetically spare emotional ballad “All Night,” we see footage of the women in Beyoncé’s own family and get a sense of how their pain links them through the generations: “Grandmother, the alchemist, you spun gold out of this hard life, conjured beauty from the things left behind.” Lemons into lemonade, personal into universal.
And then there’s the album’s fiercest banger, “Freedom.” Beyoncé’s victorious voice combusts (“I break chains all by myself”) over a maximalist soul sample, while Kendrick Lamar, the game’s top rapper, explodes in a verse that cuts into our nation’s perpetual civil rights tragedies. “Freedom” is big. Could an anthemic Black Lives Matter jam become mainstream America’s song of the summer? If anyone can make it happen, it’s Beyoncé.
Other things she can do: rock, blues, country, avant-garde, whatever. Lemonade stands as Bey’s most diverse album to date. Sinister strip-club-in-the-future R&B (“6 Inch,” featuring none other than the Weeknd) sits right next to a slab of Texas twang (“Daddy Lessons”). Led Zeppelin and Soulja Boy become bedfellows; Andy Williams and Isaac Hayes both get sampled; and Yeah Yeah Yeahs, James Blake, Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig, and Animal Collective all get credits.
But inevitably, a lot of you are still wondering: What does all this mean for her husband? The guy who was the desired object of Bey’s other surprise visual album, the superb 2013 self-titled record that made married sex seem so hot while also introducting us to the “surfbort”? Fortunately for Jay Z, things look like they might be all right. After wrestling with herself throughout Lemonade, Bey begins to heal towards the back half, as evidenced by the sweet, vulnerable ballad “Sandcastles.” By the time we get to “All Night,” the last track before the Super Bowl-vetted “Formation” closes the album, Beyoncé’s soaring voice indicates that she’s found some peace, at least for now. “Our love was stronger than your pride,” she sings, and it sounds like she believes it.
Of course, many will still obsess over what it was Jay Z did and with whom. If you want to spend your time speculating, cool—that’s your deal. But Beyoncé’s not thinking about that. She’s too busy putting out her boldest, most ambitious, best album to date. Middle fingers up”.
I have been listening to Lemonade a lot since 2016 and it still moves me in a very powerful way. I am not sure what it is exactly. The songwriting and production is incredible. The variety of genres fused is impressive and extremely nuanced, whilst Beyoncé's voice is at its very best! In their review, Rolling Stone concurred that Beyoncé's voice is amazing throughout:
“Yet the most astounding sound is always Bey’s voice, as she pushes to her bluesiest extremes, like the hilariously nasty way she sneers, “He’s always got them fucking ex-cuuuu-ses.” She hits some Plastic Ono Band-style primal-scream moments in the devastating ballad “Love Drought.” (“Nine times out of ten I’m in my feelings / But ten times out of nine I’m only human” is a stunning confession from a diva who’s always made such a fetish out of emotional self-control.) “Freedom” and “Formation” reach out historically, connecting her personal pain to the trauma of American blackness, with the power of Aretha Franklin’s Spirit in the Dark or Nina Simone’s Silk and Soul. She can’t resist adding a happy ending with “All Night,” where the couple kisses and makes up and lives happily ever after, or at least until morning. But it’s an uneasy coda, with the word “forgive” noticeably absent and the future still in doubt.
Whether Beyoncé likes it or not – and everything about Lemonade suggests she lives for it – she’s the kind of artist whose voice people hear their own stories in, whatever our stories may be. She’s always aspired to superhero status, even from her earliest days in a girl group that was tellingly named Destiny’s Child. (Once upon a time, back in the Nineties, “No No No” was the only Destiny’s Child song in existence – but make no mistake, we could already hear she was Beyoncé.) She lives up to every inch of that superhero status on Lemonade. Like the professional heartbreaker she sings about in “6 Inch,” she murdered everybody and the world was her witness”.
I am going to round off with a couple of articles that discuss the impact and legacy of Lemonade. In a feature from last year, Pop Dust argued why the album is one of the best pieces of art ever made:
“Not much can be said about Lemonade that hasn't already been written. Lemonade was before its time and yet fundamentally of its time. Rich with history, sparkling with collaborations and features, it's a sonic and visual experience that uses poetry, music, and visuals in a completely innovative way. It was personal and political, private and immensely public, ageless and timely.
Ostensibly about Beyoncé's relationship with Jay-Z and her response to his infidelity, it also dives deeply into many layers of existence, including the experience of being a Black woman in America, the experience of being a woman, the experience of trauma and the experience of finding redemption in community and resurrection in love. "It isn't just a collection of standalone pieces produced for pop-culture consumption; the culmination of these movements spans a broader political perspective of the black female experience," writes Suzanne Churchill.
Despite its lofty themes, Lemonade was produced for pop culture consumption, as much for young girls as it was for academics. It is a pop album in a high-art frame, highbrow and lowbrow, open for the taking and sharing. It reached far more people than any piece of literary theory, yet it broke open boundaries and created new spaces out of fragments, questions, and fractured memory.
PHOTO CREDIT: HBO
"Lemonade reflects and advances a black womanist Afrxfuturism that asserts Itutu, precision of self-expression and direction within instability. Conjuring balance in the maelstrom of antiblackness produces an Afrxfuturist aesthetic teeming with seeming paradoxes that can be best understood through the idiom of diasporic vertigo," writes Valorie D. Thomas. In its contrasts, in its flickering multimedia images and constantly shifting soundscapes, it performs the alchemy that inspired its name. Lemonade is life out of lemons, it's shoots growing out of concrete, it's hope at the end of the world.
"[Lemonade] invokes so much of the Yoruba tradition, which is grounded in African tradition," said Dr. Amy Yeboah, associate professor of Africana studies at Howard University. "But it spreads across the diaspora. So you see it in Cuba, you see it in Louisiana. It's a cultural tradition that connects women of the diaspora together."
"This Womanist fairytale — featuring American Southern, Voodoo, and Afrofuturist utopian imagery — is most of all a personal film, though co-directed by seven people, including Beyonce Knowles-Carter herself," writes Miriam Bale for Billboard.
All in all, Lemonade is gospel for the modern era. Lemonade is a literal and figurative story of rebirth, of baptism by fire and of birth through death. Each time it's watched, the video offers more and more gems of wisdom, more hints about how we might all be reborn.
"Lemonade shimmers: history and current events remain co-present. As Beyoncé says, 'The past, and the future merge to meet us here,'' writes Carol Vernallis. More than ever we need recipes for rebirth and healing. Luckily, Beyoncé wrote us one in 2016”.
I know Beyoncé has released other music since Lemonade, though it is the most-recent solo album. I wonder whether we will get another album from her soon, and whether it has a similar ambition and tone as Lemonade. I think it is an album that created such shockwaves that it might take a while for Beyoncé to follow it! This Wikipedia article reveals the sonic, visual and wider impact of a remarkable album:
“Lemonade has been credited with reviving the concept of the album in an era dominated by singles and streaming, and popularizing releasing albums with accompanying films. Jamieson Cox for The Verge called Lemonade "the endpoint of a slow shift toward cohesive, self-centered pop albums", writing that "it’s setting a new standard for pop storytelling at the highest possible scale". Megan Carpentier of The Guardian wrote that Lemonade has "almost revived the album format" as "an immersive, densely textured large-scale work" that can only be listened to in its entirety. Myf Warhurst on Double J's "Lunch With Myf" explained that Beyoncé "changed [the album] to a narrative with an arc and a story and you have to listen to the entire thing to get the concept". The New York Times' Katherine Schulten agreed, asking "How do you talk about the ongoing evolution of the music video and the autobiographical album without holding up Lemonade as an exemplar of both forms?" Joe Coscarelli of The New York Times describes how "some brand-name acts are following Beyoncé’s blueprint with high-concept mini-movies that can add artistic heft to projects," with Frank Ocean's Endless and Drake's Please Forgive Me cited as examples of artists' projects inspired by Lemonade. Other projects said to have followed the precedent that Lemonade set include Lonely Island's The Unauthorized Bash Brothers Experience, Thom Yorke's Anima, Sturgill Simpson's Sound & Fury, and Kid Cudi's Entergalactic, which were all albums released with complementary film projects.
Several musicians were inspired by Lemonade. American rapper Snoop Dogg named his fourteenth studio album Coolaid (2016) after Lemonade. British girl group Little Mix cited Lemonade as an inspiration for their album Glory Days (2016). American singer The-Dream wrote a response to Lemonade titled "Lemon Lean" in his EP Love You To Death, saying that the album changed the way people think about their relationships. American singer Lauren Jenkins used Lemonade as the inspiration for her album and long-form music video No Saint. American comedian Lahna Turner released a visual album entitled Limeade in homage to Lemonade. American singer Matt Palmer was inspired by Lemonade to create his visual EP Get Lost. American musician Todrick Hall's second studio album Straight Outta Oz was made as a visual album due to Lemonade. British singer-songwriter Arrow Benjamin was also inspired by Lemonade for his 2016 EP W.A.R. (We All Rise), saying: "Every piece on this project was created from a visual, so that's why I was extremely inspired when I saw Lemonade." Cardi B was inspired by Lemonade for her upcoming album, which she says is "going to have my Lemonade moments".
Jenna Wortham for The New York Times drew a parallel between both albums as "blueprints for how to take in all that emotion and kind of how to push it back out in a way that’s cathartic and constructive". Dan Weiss of Billboard wrote that Shania Twain's Now "couldn't have existed without" Lemonade, as an album that "completely changed the course of breakup album history" in which the artist is "someone at their full creative peak pushing herself into new niches, dominating new musical territories."
Kadeen Griffiths from Bustle states that Lemonade, as an album that deals with issues related to black women, "paved the way" for Alicia Keys' Here and Solange's A Seat At The Table. Danielle Koku for The Guardian stated that Lemonade aided the return of African mysticism to pop music, writing: "By taking African mysticism to the world stage, Beyoncé stripped it of its ancient pagan labels”. Many critics have noted that Jay-Z's thirteenth studio album 4:44 (2017) is a response to Lemonade, with Jay-Z referencing lines from Lemonade, such as the "You better call Becky with the good hair" line on Beyoncé's "Sorry", with Jay-Z retorting: "Let me alone, Becky" in "Family Feud”.
Ahead of its fifth anniversary on 23rd April, I wanted to write about a very special album. It is an album that everyone should own on vinyl, as I think we will be talking about Beyoncé’s Lemonade for decades to come. This was a musical icon delivering such a profound, staggering and hugely vital album that makes me (and many who hear it) feel so many different emotions each time. Even if you were not invested in Beyoncé’s career up until 2016, everyone has to concede that Lemonade is impossible to ignore and dislike - such is its potency, confidence and brilliance. Five years since it was released into the world, Lemonade must go down as…
A modern masterpiece.