Beyonce in 2016 - 'Formation' and Lemonade

The cultural impact has been wide. Watching four teenaged girls do a choreographed routine to "Sorry" around the condo pool in May remains one of my favorite memories of 2016.

So we can all expect lemonade to pretty much dominate year end list season right?

mods please close ilm til february

frank ocean, kanye, solange, sturgill simpson will probably be up there. whether they'll be higher or not remains a mystery.

oh and chance.

I'd bet on Bowie.

yeah definitely

sturgill simpson

Wasn't everybody disappointed by this, or was it just people with ears?

i forgot he released an album this year. also his voice/schtick grates on me. for the sturgill simpson experience with 100x better results just get high & listen to brand new man

I don't know how Kendrick's surprise album will fare in EOY polls but that's the one I recently went back to and fell back in love with

I imagine it will be a Knowles-off on most year end lists. I like both of these albums a lot.

This is cool but the Solange is way better.

Radiohead will probably show up on a lot of EOY lists.

the album have nothing in common though post

xpost

imagine a world where we could approach two distinct musicians as two distinct musicians instead of sisters who must be compared/contrasted at all times

nope, there can be only one

a) the albums have quite a lot in common.
b) most albums can be contrasted and compared.
c) lol

I ain't sorry

man, this shit is draining

https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/arts-and-entertainment/wp/2016/11/03/cmas-deny-erasing-beyonce-and-the-dixie-chicks-from-social-media-after-backlash/?hpid=hp_rhp-moretopstories2_no-name%3Ahomepage%2Fstory

gonna post it again here (as well as in the country thread) because it is one of the best songs of the year performed with verve and ecstasy and is fucking awesome

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=OabYYlhuxxE

it's a pro-gun, feminist anthem performed by an (in-context only) left-wing country trio, the biggest star in the world, a knockout backing band and one of the best bari sax solos ever performed by an artist in shitkickers

and holy fuck, there's a studio recording and it's spectacular
https://soundcloud.com/beyonce/daddy-lessons-featuring-the-dixie-chicks

this is kind of making me lose my mind right now, it's really really fucking good

https://oneofthosefaces.com/2017/02/01/how-beyonce-invented-mediocrity/

a provocative title for a very smart article

yeah. this is really good

yeah. this is really good

yeah. this is really good

whoops sorry!!

i also think beyoncé being pretty much exiled from pop radio in the us is a huge factor here. top 40'playlists are extremely white, which started to get super noticeable/egregious around the time of gaga's ascent and the introduction of the edm sound to the pop palette

This is great.

I don't buy any of this at all. Aside from the usual issues -- the early 2000s were just as full of Matchbox Twentys and The Calling and Vanessa Carlton and fucking Lifehouse, but everyone elides those in their memory -- the argument is full of holes. Being a singer/songwriter has a negligible effect on one's success (these days it's more likely to make you the uncredited singer on a chainsmokers single than a star) and doesn't account for the existence of Ariana Grande, Rihanna (whose virtual absence from this piece is pretty glaring, considering she's been around and successful for about a decade now), Selena Gomez, etc, none of whom are "songwriters." the x factor and youtube are easy targets invoked with zero thought (you know who else was on a talent show? Beyonce) and undercuts the singer-songwriter thesis totally. there are perhaps other factors in the music industry that accounted for "the end of R&B" more than "Crazy in Love," particularly around 2003 -- the only way that "'Crazy in Love' made an entire genre pack up and go home!" is more compelling than "the music industry crashed, the money ran out, and labels stopped supporting artists" is if you're so deep into standom that there's perhaps no way out.

the bit about the "tools it takes to become even passably decent at being a bedroom studio artist" being inaccessible ignores... pretty much all of rap right now. or if you want to stick to pop, reality; the nature of YouTube means the gatekeepers are a pre-existing pageant/talent circuit fanbase (there's your inaccessible part), a PR apparatus (or maybe it's this), or a huge fandom.

(the latter being the key -- there's unquestionably a whitewashing of top 40 radio going on, but it's a feedback loop between the industry and the listeners, who are just as if not more racist. it's not the industry that complains about snoop being on "california gurls.")

agreed with katherine. like they're interesting thoughts but there are so many facts ignored in service of the thesis that it's hard to see what exactly about the conclusions is valid (esp. as broadly as the author seems to believe). i hope whoever this thoughtful stan is will keep pacing in front of the chalkboard but i also hope some new bits of information will be added on.

Katherine otm here.

I'm with Katherine -- this article's thesis is specious at best.

Let me show my workings, here. Back in the 80s, MTV made generational icons of Madonna and Michael Jackson, forming an archetypal view of what a modern POPSTAR was: provocative, boundary-pushing innovators who were crucially visual in their approach to artistry. They didn’t just sing, they danced. They didn’t just dance, they performed. And they didn’t just perform, they entertained. They were unstoppable forces, larger than life, chart dominating juggernauts of the genre. The way popstars should always be.

I Ctrl-F'ed Lemonade and got no hits.

Releasing ‘Crazy In Love’ switched up the game and tore the rug out from under everyone’s feet. This bold step into the pop arena, previously annexed territory, was a turning point. Anyone heard from Mya, lately? Ashanti? Amerie? Any of those R&B girls? ‘Crazy In Love’ ended careers and an entire genre. RIP R&B.

I mean, on what does the author base these conclusions besides "These women sucked anyway" twaddle?

R&B was regularly crossing over into pop before "Crazy In Love" and for like 5 years afterward.

Amerie had her biggest hit after "Crazy in Love".

Yep.

Article aside, she is pregnant with twins. So that's nice.

Yeah the egregiously incorrect sweeping historical claims are difficult to look past even if I am sympathetic to the attempt to reduce everything to a holy war (it's the kind of approach I would have taken when I first started blogging).

e.g. I Am... Sasha Fierce was certainly not Beyonce's critical highpoint.

Let’s just be real about things. Some pop music is okay, but it could be a lot better if white artists were trying harder. And white artists would be trying harder if we’d told them they had to be as good as Beyoncé instead of lowering our standards to accommodate them. If my favourite movie of all time, Bring It On, taught me anything it’s that white people only get better at stuff if there’s black people to compete against.

Reading this now and it feels really weird to posit Destiny's Child as the Black Spice Girls, when they were simply in the lineage of any number of Black r&b groups. Like what???

TLC actually make much more sense as the Black Spice Girls on a variety of levels. But even then it's always gonna be a flawed analogy.

I always thought of Destiny's Child as Wyclef Jean's late 90's answer to En Vogue.

Yep.

I think this is one of the rare instances where saying "the author is British" explains some of the choices/connections made

xps Well no... Their only association with Wyclef was he was brought in to revamp their lead single. And TLC were around several years before the Spice Girls.

like, I agree that there are currently no "provocative, boundary-pushing innovators" in mainstream pop (which rules out FKA Twigs), but the market just does not reward that anymore. it's still possible to launch a pop star -- the Weeknd managed it, although his pre-existing fanbase probably helped there -- but that support is not there. the four most commercially "successful" new pop stars at the moment are probably Halsey, Daya, Alessia Cara and Dua Lipa, all of whom make very different music, but are treated as interchangeable -- from reading the press I probably know more about the Chainsmokers' overestimate of their respective dick sizes than any of them. the only exceptions are legacy acts (Beyonce, Taylor Swift, Rihanna at this point, etc.) or those who've already built up that personality via TV or other channels (Ariana and the rest of the Nickelodeon/Disney alumni).

(A comparison might be Kesha -- I don't want to discount the massive, raging shittiness of her career management at all, but the pop market at the moment would probably have left her as the uncredited "Right Round" singer.)

or zara larsson, I guess, but again: treated as interchangeable, and given interchangeable material.