Member Since: 4/28/2012
Posts: 37,654
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Quote:
1. Beyoncè - Lemonade
Describing the cumulative effect of the short film Beyoncé created for her sixth album, LEMONADE, novelist Jesmyn Ward wrote, “She’s suffered the pain of infidelity and mistrust and heartbreak, and she’s created and sustained so much beauty from it. A whole family. Songs. Visions. In the end, she walks through the past, present, and future at once, and she is a wondrous new being, arrayed in the intricate lace and tribal cloth of the past, but her garments are cut for the future.”
Weeks removed from the release of the film, the debate continues as to whether the music tells the story of distrust, anger, and reconciliation with the same power as the images that accompany the songs. I think that they do, precisely because the songs contain what Ward described. “The past, present, and future at once,” Ward wrote, and what would that sound like if not a sample of an Alan Lomax field recording and a Kendrick Lamar feature on “Freedom”? Or the voices of James Blake and Beyoncé merging on “Forward”? Or Beyoncé reclaiming traditional rock music for black women on “Don’t Hurt Yourself,” as Brittany Spanos so eruditely described for Rolling Stone?
By invoking the work of Toni Morrison, Clover Hope, writing for Jezebel, made clear that the album is a kind of novel. It has the emotional arc of a great story, opening in media res with “Pray You Catch Me.” (I'd like to take a moment to say that “My lonely ear pressed against the walls of your world” is one of the most beautiful and vivid lines I’ve heard all year.) From there, she eats men and their fenced-off genres like air, using James Blake, Jack White, and the Weeknd as supporting players; absorbing blues, country, rock, and more to refashion them as wholly hers. LEMONADE is the product of a singular unifying vision, and even if the film and the surprise of its rollout aren't passed down to new listeners, it's all right. Because the album already has everything one could need. It's Beyoncé's masterpiece.
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