Review: Beyoncé Makes ‘Lemonade’ Out of Marital Strife
Beyonce with her husband, Jay Z, before the streaming music service Tidal was introduced last year.
Marital strife smolders, explodes and uneasily subsides on “Lemonade”
(Parkwood Entertainment), the album Beyoncé flash-released on Saturday
night. “You can taste the dishonesty/It’s all over your breath” are the
first words she sings in “Pray You Catch Me,” and that’s just the
beginning of an album that probes betrayal, jealousy, revenge and rage
before dutifully willing itself toward reconciliation at the end. Read more at The New York Times
Many
of the accusations are aimed specifically and recognizably at her
husband, Shawn Carter, the rapper Jay Z. “Tonight I regret the night I
put that ring on,” she talk-sings in “Sorry,” a twitchy, flippant song
that’s by no means an apology. It’s a combative, unglossy track on an
album full of them.
“Lemonade”
is the kind of album that a star like Beyoncé (as well as, lately,
Rihanna) can release in the streaming era because she’s already
guaranteed attention for her every utterance. The album is not beholden
to radio formats or presold by a single; fans are likely to explore the
whole album, streaming every track and hearing how far afield — a brass
band, stomping blues-rock, ultraslow avant-R&B — Beyoncé is willing
to go. As she did with her 2013 album, “Beyoncé,” she has also paired the music with full-length video that expands and deepens its impact.
On
their own, the songs can be taken as one star’s personal, domestic
dramas, waiting to be mined by the tabloids. But with the video, they
testify to situations and emotions countless women endure. It’s not a
divorce announcement; the singer, songwriter and director is credited as
Beyoncé Knowles Carter.
Beyoncé
released “Lemonade” online at 10 p.m. on April 23, immediately after
the HBO showing of the hourlong “visual album” version. It’s a
quick-cutting music video that intersperses the songs, and broadens
them, with compelling poetry from the Somali-British writer Warsan Shire,
poems that often extend women’s physicality toward the archetypal. As
Beyoncé recites them, Ms. Shire’s words radically reframe the songs, so
they are no longer one woman’s struggles but tribulations shared through
generations of mothers and daughters. The video is filled with images
of female solidarity, family and Southern and African roots; often,
Beyoncé is joined by African-American women in white clothes enacting
communal ceremonies. Beyoncé, in multiple hairstyles and fashions, is
shown both alluring and unglamorous: hard-faced, unhappy, sweaty,
harshly lit. For the last few songs she often appears in a puffy-sleeved
antebellum-style dress remade with fabric patterns derived from African
textiles, a rich twist.
The
album title comes from a family gathering that’s shown in the video and
heard on a track: the 90th birthday of Hattie White, Jay Z’s
grandmother, who says, “I was served lemons but I made lemonade.”
Photo
Beyoncé performed at the Super Bowl in February.Credit
Doug Mills/The New York Times
“Lemonade” is not necessarily the album listeners might have expected after “Formation,” the song Beyoncé performed at the Super Bowl
with dancers in Black Panther-style outfits and in a video clip using
images of New Orleans, of African-Americans in a plantation mansion and
of Beyoncé atop a police car, sinking under a flood. It’s the last song
on “Lemonade,” almost a postscript; it’s not in the extended video.
One
other song on “Lemonade” mixes preaching and a prison song (both
collected by John and Alan Lomax), a Kendrick Lamar rap and 1960s
fuzz-tone psychedelia (sampling the collectors’ item Puerto Rican band Kaleidoscope) to call for “Freedom”: “I break chains all by myself/Won’t let my freedom rot in hell,” Beyoncé vows.
But
most of “Lemonade” arrives like a follow-through to “Jealous” on the
2013 “Beyoncé,” a song that moans, “I hate you for your lies.” “Jealous”
is offset on “Beyoncé” by songs about ecstatic lust, a topic largely
absent on “Lemonade.” In most of the new songs, Beyoncé has been taken
for granted or pushed aside. It’s a situation that, she finds, is both
“a wicked way to treat the girl that loves you” and also flabbergasting
given that she is, after all, Beyoncé. Beyoncé!: “The baddest woman in
the game,” as she sings in “Hold Up.” Fact-check: She is.
Her
reactions swing from sorrow to rage to determined loyalty, and she
reaches beyond the electronic-R&B of “Beyoncé” to embrace new
influences and collaborators: the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Father John Misty,
Vampire Weekend’s Ezra Koenig, Animal Collective and Led Zeppelin.
“Don’t Hurt Yourself,” a collaboration with Jack White, is a
funk-bottomed blues-rocker that has Beyoncé fighting back, declaring,
“You ain’t trying hard enough/You ain’t loving hard enough,” working up
to a scream. “Pray You Catch Me” is one of two collaborations with the
British songwriter James Blake: slow-motion ballads of suspicion and
longing.
Yet
eventually, she makes peace with trying to hold on. “Love Drought,”
with whispery vocals amid pillowy synthesizers, points out that “10
times out of nine I know you’re lying,” but strives to reconnect.
“Sandcastles,” a slow piano hymn that eventually gathers a choir,
recalls a dish-smashing fight but turns a double negative into a
positive: “I know I promised that I couldn’t stay, baby/Every promise
don’t work out that way.” By the time Beyoncé reaches “All Night,” a
gospelly ballad roughened with electric guitar, she resolves to “Give
you some time to prove I can trust you again.”
Will
it work out? No one knows. But in the meantime she sings
wholeheartedly, encapsulates deep dilemmas in terse singalong lines and
touches on ideas and emotions that so many people feel. She is a star
whose world is vastly different from that of her listeners. But in
matters of the heart, with their complications and paradoxes, Beyoncé
joins all of us.
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