Beyonce - 4

"End of Time" is helpful to me because i can now acknowledge the existence of something i genuinely like that Diplo has done that i can't easily shift the credit to a sample or a collaborator. still crazy to me that it was never a single, i never would've imagined when this album dropped that "Love On Top" would end up the biggest radio hit from the album, with "Party" as runner-up.

isn't it still due to be a single?

"best i never had" was by far this album's biggest UK hit :o

(also, you don't like "climax"?)

Yeah, "Best Thing I Never Had" was I think the biggest hit (as it were) in the U.S. as well. (Also the album's worst single.)

(With "Love on Top" as the best. Wish it had gone bigger.)

it's still a huge mystery to me that "countdown" just was not a hit at all

like not even a minor one. like even "run the world" had way more cultural impact.

As one of the world's only "Countdown" haters, I reluctantly agree. That thing should've taken over.

kind of indifferent to "Climax"

"Countdown" was definitely a minor hit -- around the beginning of the year it and "Love On Top" climbed the R&B charts neck-and-neck for a while, then "Countdown" stalled at No. 12 and "Top" went to No. 1. I heard it a lot for a while there.

in a landscape dominated by bombastic eurohouse and Adele-esque throwbacks, you expected "Countdown" to be huge?

"Best Thing" had the highest Hot 100 peak but that's kind of an iTunes-driven thing because it was the first halfway palatable single in line after "Run The World" flopped, it definitely didn't get the kind of radio spins that "Love On Top" and "Party" got later (xpost)

huh, apparently "End of Time" is being released as a UK single next week, which i guess is maybe why Tracer Hand revived the thread.

Song I've listen to the most after "Love on Top" is "Rather Die Young."

I got caught singing "Love on Top" to myself on the bus the other day :/

some dude, yeah. it's already all over the radio over here

i heard both "countdown" and "love on top" on r&b radio quite a bit! "party" as well come to think of it. so yeah, they didn't get much attn on top 40 and didn't sell a ton, but i would still call them minor hits at least

am i the only one who hears echoes of "father figure" by george michael in the chorus?

"countdown" never grabbed me as much as love on top or best I never had, but I can acknowledge why people like it

rtc linked this interview on another thread with "Countdown" producer Lamb that has some cool info about the origin of the song: http://youknowigotsoul.com/?p=17193

i tried reading that this morning... has to be one of the worst edited interviews i've ever read

Maybe it was attempting to mirror the song's production.

lol

The editor going TEN...NINE as the reporter approached deadline

reverend otm re: "party"

that song has the best harmonies

http://www.splicetoday.com/writing/choice-excerpts-from-beyonc-knowles-selected-letters-vol-1

i cant imagine 1+1 underperforming tbh

― lebroner (D-40), Friday, June 10, 2011 12:24 AM (1 year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Still think 1+1 is a hit

― arachno-misogynist (D-40), Saturday, June 18, 2011 2:34 PM (1 year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

As in a song destined to be one

― arachno-misogynist (D-40), Saturday, June 18, 2011 2:35 PM (1 year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Still think 1+1 will be a hit hold this against me later

― arachno-misogynist (D-40), Sunday, June 19, 2011 11:16 PM (1 year ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

heh just heard this song for the first time in like 8 months and remembered how utterly confident deej was about it how big it was going to be

Why wasn't it released as a proper single though? So weird.

i'm pretty much in denial that "1+1", "love on top" and "countdown" WEREN'T huge hits. it makes no sense. they felt massive, they felt ubiquitous, they were amazing, and i plan to continue ignoring any and all evidence to the contrary

it was the year of COUNTDOWN and SUPERBASS and that is just obvious

even for an album where the radio hits it had didn't have super obvious radio potential, i dunno i have a hard time picturing it in that light. (xpost)

Yeah, "Love On Top" was huge in my world. I'm not interested in deviating from that alternate narrative.

in my world, "End of Time" was a single

"Love On Top" will prob be one of the top 5 biggest R&B songs of 2012 when Billboard does its year-end charts. still hear "Countdown" on the radio pretty regularly too.

I heard Love on Top an awful lot on R&B radio in the spring ,yeah.

it was kinda neat that it ended up peaking around the time she gave birth, in light of the VMA performance

love on top never really made a huge chart impact afaik but it was - and is - quite popular amongst my peers

a student in one of my classes plans to use 1+1 as one of her examples in an essay i just assigned and i dorked out to a ridiculous degree when i discovered it. still love that song the most.

bet that kid's algebra teacher is less thrilled with them

lol

'love on top' and 'party,' especially, were on the radio all the time down here. and then randomly 'dance with you' was really big for a minute too

yeah "Dance With You" is pretty inescapable at the moment. kinda don't know how that one was left off the album proper.

The 3 bonus tracks are the ones I listen to most now.

Schoolin, Life is probably my favorite song on the whole album.

http://bit.ly/V9N7ly

http://thatgrapejuice.net/2015/03/the-dream-reveals-beyonce-recorded-fela-inspired-album/

In an entry on Genius.com, Dream (whose real name is Terius Nash) wrote:
“We did a whole Fela album that didn’t go up. It was right before we did 4. We did a whole different sounding thing, about twenty songs. She said she wanted to do something that sounds like Fela. That’s why there’s so much of that sound in the “End of Time.”
There’s always multiple albums being made. Most of the time we’re just being creative, period. We’re talking about B, somebody who sings all day long and somebody.”

Based on "End of Time" that would be the greatest thing ever made.

4 is my favorite beyonce album

I imagine there's a lot of stuff on the 4 cutting room floor. Didn't she work with Sleigh Bells on that album?

the figure floated at the time was that they recorded 72 songs for the album, and similar figures have been bandied about for some of B's other albums. one wonders if there'll ever be any clearing out of her vaults.

4 is my favorite beyonce album

― nose, Sunday, March 22, 2015 7:38 PM (

Cobbling together 50 of my favorite albums 2010-2015 I realized 4 is the Beyonce album I want to listen to most.