Originally posted by Keir's bitch

Yasssssssss preach this masterpiece

Originally posted by Guardian

Last month, Beyoncé Knowles made one of her frequent appearances in the lists compiled by Forbes magazine, this one being The Best Paid Celebrities Under 30. She had earned, Forbes claimed, $35m in the last year. The magazine felt obliged to add a footnote. She had only earned so little, it advised any readers perhaps worried about her ability to scrape by on $35m, because she hadn't released any records or toured.

In fairness, being heralded as the Eighth Best Paid Celebrity Under 30 represents something of an anticlimax for Knowles in Forbes list terms: the last time she appeared in one, the magazine claimed she was more powerful than the first female speaker of the US House of Representatives, the secretary of homeland security, two supreme court judges and the prime minister of Australia. Nevertheless, a pop artist for whom a $35m salary represents a crushing disappointment is clearly a pop artist who can do whatever she wants. "They do not make mistakes: there is a feeling they have somehow gone beyond the foibles of being human to a place where perfection is effortlessly within their control," claimed the New Statesman of Mr and Mrs Jay-Z recently, having apparently hired Davros to write about them. Under the circumstances, what record company hireling is going to be brave enough to tell her to pull her head in?

Excitingly, advance publicity for her fourth album suggested Knowles had decided to start fully exercising the power that selling nearly 90m albums brings. She apparently recorded 72 tracks. Among the producers and writers were not just old hands such as Rodney Jerkins and Tricky Stewart, but Frank Ocean of Odd Future, MIA producers Diplo and Switch, and noisy Brooklyn duo Sleigh Bells. There was talk from one producer, Jim Jonsin, of a pronounced Depeche Mode influence, and, from Knowles herself, of employing the sound of Fela Kuti. You couldn't hear either on the single Run the World (Girls), but that scarcely mattered. What its frantic melange of dancehall rhythms and squealing electronics effects recalls is the futuristic R&B of a decade ago, when every new single by Aaliyah or Brandy appeared to have arrived not from America but Mars: when it crops up on daytime Radio 1, it sounds strange and disruptive. You could argue that anyone familiar with Pon De Floor by Diplo and Switch's Major Lazer project had heard almost everything on it two years ago, but more important is the fact Knowles chose to be influenced by a weird, experimental underground track rather than the vogue for music that sounds like David Guetta's brand of ravey pop house.

If there's nothing like it in the charts, there's also very little like it on 4. Countdown rides a similarly disjointed military rhythm, its agitated Afrobeat brass stabs the one moment you hear anything resembling the influences mooted in the advance publicity. More often, 4 retreats into R&B's past. The fantastic Rather Die Young – written by, of all people, Luke Steele from the Sleepy Jackson and Empire of the Sun – refracts a dramatic Philly soul ballad through gauzy modern production, but for the most part, 4 heads straight for the 80s. Even opener 1+1, which sets out to make Knowles's link to the raw energy of 60s soul explicit, winds up in 1986. Her vocal is visceral and amazing, even if the lurches into falsetto occasionally seem less startling than startled, as if persons unknown have snuck into the vocal booth and goosed her. Still, it would have more impact if the backing was as gritty, if the concluding guitar solo sounded less like it was being performed by a man with a mullet and a white suit with the sleeves rolled up.

The 80s influence isn't always a bad thing. It leads to the Frank Ocean-penned I Miss You, a woozy update of an old-fashioned slow jam: it's probably pushing it a bit to call it an R&B equivalent of Ariel Pink's hypnagogic pop, but there's something enveloping and dream-like about it. It also leads to tracks that just sound dishearteningly like pre-crack Whitney Houston ballads, not least Best Thing I Never Had, the most interesting thing about which is the curious image conjured by the chorus's lyric. Everything was going well, apparently, until the protagonist's former amorata "showed your ass", which somehow makes you think of Beyoncé rolling her eyes and tutting while a man drunkenly moons in a Wetherspoons car park.

This isn't by any means a bad album. There's nothing wrong with a song such as Love on Top, which is well written, has a great vocal and will doubtless help ensure Knowles doesn't have to manage on a mere $35m in the next 12 months. It's just that it isn't the album you might have been led to expect. The highpoints offer hints of what it might have been: it's hard not to feel that what it might have been sounds better than what it is.