Member Since: 8/22/2009
Posts: 50,646
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Beyonce is the most important pop star of the 21st century.
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HER HIGHNESS
Beyoncé is the most important and compelling popular musician of the twenty-first century. It’s not just that she’s a dazzling, gale-force performer. She’s got the finest set of ears, the sharpest musical mind, of anyone in her pop generation. No one else has blended contemporary sounds and attitudes—the beat and bravado of hip-hop—with so much musical tradition: with vaudevillian pizazz, Ziegfeld Follies spectacle, and nineteen-twenties blues-queen sass; with Motown factory hits and gospel sanctimony; with Barbra Streisand and Bob Fosse and Madonna and Whitney Houston and Michael Jackson. Beyoncé feels like the result, the logical end point, of a century-plus of pop.
She is such an effortless entertainer, such an unerring singer and hoofer, that it’s easy to overlook her music’s defining quality: strangeness. Beyoncé is an eccentric, a vocalist with truly weird and original melodic and rhythmic approaches. Listen to the slippery rap-style syncopations in “Say My Name,” to the melodies that float and dart over the thump of “Single Ladies,” to the jarring timbral and tonal variations in “Ring the Alarm” and “1+1.” Those sounds didn’t exist in the world before Beyoncé. If they sound “normal” now, it’s because Beyoncé, and her many followers, have retrained our ears.
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The constant praise of our Queen is deserved. 
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