Beyonce in 2016 - 'Formation' and Lemonade

panda... panda... panda...

in pop music these days anyone who breathes near the track gets a songwriting credit

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HWqq-CYKs50

father john misty says:

About a year and half ago, my friend Emile Haynie played Beyonce some of my music, along with some tunes I've written for other people, back when she was looking for collaborators for the record...Pretty soon after they sent along the demo for "Hold Up", which was just like a minute of the sample and the hook. I'm pretty sure they were just looking for lyrics, but I went crazy and recorded a verse melody and refrain too that, unbelievably - when you consider how ridiculous my voice sounds on the demo - ended up making the record - right between picking up the baseball bat and decapitating the fire hydrant.

I was mostly kind of in the dark, my involvement with the record kind of ends with me just sending off the demo, it wasn't until she came to my Coachella set in 2015 and told me personally it had made the record that I really had anything concrete with which to convince my friends that I hadn't actually gone insane.

the timeline of this seems weird

i think it speaks to how long she was crafting this album and its themes, probably with Jay-Z's full knowledge, that "Hold Up" is over a year old

note that AnCo did not give Frankie Knuckles any co-writing credit

i love "your love" about as much as any record and it barely even occurred to me that some indie guys shouting over indie music with an arpeggio was in any way similar whatsoever. if they copied it might sound similar. it's always amusing when someone who hates a record also claims it is nothing but a ripoff of a record they like, as if that doesn't imply difference from the get go.

seriously bullshit invoking of "your love" itt anyway. it has nothing to do with this album.

It's fiction, y'all.

how very typical that the original koenig version of "Hold Up" (or at least chorus) was about god.

Occam's razor suggests this is not some brilliant secret meta-joke by Beyonce about copyright and race relations that to date only one person appears to have gotten, but I could be wrong.

― Tim F, Monday, April 25, 2016 6:09 PM (1 hour ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

if only jay would show up james brooks-style on beyoncé ilx threads to set us straight on these matters

Also worth remembering that songwriting credit could be, liked 1% and not a straight split.

Copyright is also split into economic and moral rights, one of the latter being attribution.

AC didn't give Frankie Knuckles credit because the song was written with a piano loop and changed to a synth in the studio. probably never crossed their minds, maybe they weren't even aware of the song. it's not some under pressure / ice ice baby shit

Look, all this talk about copyright is a bit blergh and ITT it's being pretty euphemistically used as 'contribution'. It gets real thorny when it comes to legality. There's no mens rea for copyright, so intention doesn't matter. It wouldn't matter whether AnCo had ever heard of Frankie Knuckles, or had any intention to copy, if they My Girls was found to infringe. As far as attribution goes, the law is most strict on false attribution. There's a case where a photo of Princess Mary included a painting in the background and the artist of that painting was wrongly identified by a tabloid and that fell foul of copyright provisions. In a way, it can be more strict than attribution as for false attribution there's no reasonableness defence, so it doesn't matter if a person reasonably thought the person wrongly stated held the copyright. Something consider that next time you say that this person did this or that.

i don't really get crediting AnCo for that line, it's barely referential of the AnCo line. Sounds like copyright ass covering to an absurd degree. The only thing that stuck out on that song to me was the Isaac Hayes sample that Portishead also used.

Where is that old garbage thread?

you're in it

Portishead used a different Isaac Hayes sample ("Ike's Rap II"), the trip hop group that used the same Hayes sample as Beyonce ("Walk On By") was...Hooverphonic i think?

yeah that song was good!

the timeline of this seems weird

― a self-reinforcing downward spiral of male-centric indie (katherine), Monday, April 25, 2016 6:32 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

i think it speaks to how long she was crafting this album and its themes, probably with Jay-Z's full knowledge, that "Hold Up" is over a year old

― some dude, Monday, April 25, 2016 6:40 PM (2 hours ago) Bookmark

on instagram diplo said he needed to keep his involvement secret for "like a year" https://www.instagram.com/p/BEkUnorqMqB/?taken-by=diplo

On the uncredited-influences side, maybe I'm just Dawn-centric, but "6 Inch" sounds like somebody was listening to Dawn.

idk the Weeknd sounds like he's been listening to an ATM dispensing cash

Al is consistently on fire in this thread today

(Alf, I mean. Al, you're doing okay too.)

IDG this "debate", isn't it obvious beyonce has catholic (small "c") tastes and draws on all kinds of stuff and there are like a million streams running into what became this album and because she's so high-profile and has good lawyers she was really careful to err on the side of generosity in crediting everyone who contributed to the music?

(also FWIW i guess Eza Koenig is seen as 'indie' b/c of his main band but haven't folks from that band contributed songs/production to a number of capital-P Pop albums in recent years? i mean you could easily view him/them as just songwriters who have one 'indie' band project among other projects.)

also i still can't find a way to see the 'visual album' i guess i am dumb. :(

this record so easily repeatable, the loop goes on and on and it's always fun, no matter how much I focus on the individual tracks I'm enjoying it.

Are there any drawbacks to a big tent approach to collaboration and credit when nobody is going to seriously doubt this is Beyonce's vision?

bey should do a version of pirate jenny

Just to be clear

I said that I noticed that there were a list of white co-writers on this record

(Was delighted to hear that I unconditionally loved the contributions of both James Blake and Jack White)

Noticed that the people with whom I was watching the video were trying to piece together all the credits, hear those white voices

And then very few white voices were heard!

I was delighted in the aftergoogle to see that many of these white co-writers were actually just gestures, words, moments, instead of features

Laughed at the dichotomy between Animal Collective writing a song, (which had the same meat as one of the most famous house songs of all time, and not giving the author of that song credit (Frankie Knuckles Jamie Principle)), and Beyonce’s staff incorporating a single line from that song and giving the band credit

Laughed with my friends that it was kind of a reversal of appropriation (“I’ll pay you for accidentally biting a couple words but fuck if anybody’s gonna hear your garbage music on my track”)

Laughed with my friends that a lot of people with indie-interests might approach those tracks expecting a substantial collaboration, and smirked at their imagined displeasure

Did not theorize that Bey or anybody else did it intentionally
Simply took delight in this small fact

Did not take any delight in the conversation that followed where the lack of featured female black performers who-were-not-Beyonce was brought up as a glaring misstep, "this album tries to subvert the status quo while simultaneously upholding the status quo" said my critical friend, was told also by her that bell hooks had called Bey a terrorist (I had read things she'd said against her but didn't know "terrorist" was used), anyway that conversation was more challenging than pleasant

This needs context:

hooks and the gang were discussing Beyoncé's recent Time magazine cover; hooks said the singer probably didn't have much agency in choosing her outfit or the cover's pose. Mock disagreed and told a story about how the introduction of Beyoncé through Destiny's Child was very influential for her as a girl because, amid MTV's TRL and white pop stars like Britney Spears, these four black girls from Houston were the contemporary Supremes. Here was someone she could identify with, said Mock, adding that she drew strength from Beyoncé's "Partition" as she was finishing her book Redefining Realness about her sexuality and sex work.

But hooks wasn't impressed. She responded to Mock saying, "Then you are saying, from my deconstructive point of view, that she is colluding in the construction of herself as a slave." hooks said that she sees a "part" of Beyoncé as "a terrorist especially in terms of the impact on young girls." She went onto explain that "the major assault on feminism in our society has come from visual media and from television and videos." To continue her point, and by Beyoncé ascribing to the dominant standard of beauty in photos like the one of her on Time, she is part of the problem of women being encouraged to uphold impossible beauty standards.

Because others are throwing around the whole terrorist thing for different reasons

Anyway, sandcastles is such a grower.

I have never heard anything from Beyonce since "Crazy in Love." Should I start with this or 4 or the self-titled or something else?

I bet Jay Z calls her a terrorist too.

how very typical that the original koenig version of "Hold Up" (or at least chorus) was about god.

― Tim F, Monday, April 25, 2016 4:05 PM (7 hours ago)

even with the lyric as "man above you" in bey's version i at first assumed it was reference to god/deities and found it rather shocking to hear from her, but then the more literal interpretation came to mind on subsequent listens

Anyway, sandcastles is such a grower.

― ive seen enough Good Wife episodes (s.clover), Tuesday, 26 April 2016 05:36 (1 hour ago) Permalink

literally cannot deal with people dissing this as some kind of adult contemporary ballad. The bit where she breaks down in the second verse is just O_O

it's sort of like what rihanna was aiming for, and fell so short of, on "higher"

the GOD IS GOD AND I AM NOT black screen flashing up in the film was the funniest moment

There are some really gloopy cadences on Sandcastles, it doesn't do it for me at all, which considering its the centrepiece of the album is a bit of a problem. A ballad on the level of the last album would have worked incredibly there but that song and the Blake coda just feel so out of place,musically if not thematically.

i think bey's takes on traditional balladry (even the dreaded 'adult contemporary' kind, i.e. when she sang diane warren on 4) are quite beautiful and "sandcastles" is no exception. "pray you catch me" is a gorgeous, haunting intro too.

It's probably wrongheaded, but perversely I do think that starring in Dreamgirls was something of a turning point for Beyonce in terms of her thinking about balladry, and how to really perform ballads.

Especially the final stretch of the film when Beyonce's character morphs from a hit machine to a singer with agency (whose agency as a singer has been dismissed or ignored). This is the subject matter of "Listen" obv, but "Irreplaceable" (albeit only vaguely related to balladry) is the real evidence of the shift in Beyonce's own music: the first song, I think, in Beyonce's catalogue that feels elevated out of the realm of the generic by Beyonce's sense of character and the sheer investment of her delivery (before then, it seems to me that Beyonce could only fashion greatness out of songs that still would have been pretty ace in someone else's hands).

(Similarly I Am..., for all that it's a bit glutinous, on a performance level is actually a lot better than it has any right to be)

Since 4 certainly, it's been clear that Beyonce is increasingly focused on delivery, and thinking about how to create maximum identification and emotional effect without necessarily just going for big notes (though she does that too). It makes her ballads so much more fascinating, because there's an increasing sense of risk and also presence in her performances.

sandcastles is like _just_ the really good bridge of a song, with nothing else, in terms of how like the topline works.

When a video starts with the pop star in front of a red velvet curtain (as this one does), I always assume that signifies "oh this is a play and what's happening isn't real" (cf. "Like A Prayer").

it's weird, the initial shock of this record really captivated me but now I think about 30 percent of it doesn't work for me? i really love "love drought" and "all night," especially the latter, for some reason the "spottieottiedopalicious" horns make me cry; something about its texture and structure seem really connected to the s/t as well, it sounds so open and generous. i'm not really wild about "6 inch" because it seems in search of something it never actually finds, and "freedom" feels kinda inflexible in a bad way. every time I try to remember what "sandcastles" sounds like I remember the dawn richard song instead

the film is really awesome though

I love how the Hold Up chorus is like stageblocking an altercation

Sorry is not a song I remember offhand yet but the plethora of vocal moments on it make it such a delight to listen to

"all night," especially the latter, for some reason the "spottieottiedopalicious" horns make me cry; something about its texture and structure seem really connected to the s/t as well, it sounds so open and generous.

with you on this. Not just the alubm's best hook, but it melds so well with the rest of the track.

Reporting from the trenches, on first run-through my 11-yr-old son's favorites (besides "Formation," which he already loved) are "Freedom" and "All Night." (Though he would say anything with Kendrick on it was his favorite.)

Also he says everyone in 5th grade is talking about the album and the videos, so even if she's not getting airplay she's getting through.