Beyonce in 2016 - 'Formation' and Lemonade

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.

This article is some bullshit.

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.

― Get Me Bodied (Extended Mix), Wednesday, February 1, 2017 11:12 PM (forty minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Right, if anything Spice Girls were stealing (some of their) ideas from TLC.

But that just underscores why DC as the Black Spice Girls is an odd idea.

totally

Listening to "Lemonade" for the first time, it's pretty good!

does "Don't Hurt Yourself" sample Battles, because I'm like 80% sure it does

it samples 'when the levee breaks.'

imagine how pissed Battles must be that AC are getting royalties and they aren't

still fantastic

lol who's got Tidal

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

:)

As I remarked on FB: "This is one wild Westworld episode, a day early"

fuck this sounds pretty good

Thanks Tidal, another Beyonce album j won't hear

Well, there's this: https://tidal.com/ca/store/album/90521280

It'll be everywhere in a week or so - that's how this always works.

Lemonade still isn't on Spotify.

4:44 isn't either.

(or anything else besides a handful of singles)

Man, "Heard About Us" is great.

Yep, it took the self-titled album a year to show up on spotify, which is when I heard it. Still haven't heard Lemonade.

just get tidal it’s like 10$

(My bad, folks. I subscribe to Apple Music, and just assumed Spotify users were getting everything we were.)

Annnnnd realizing Apple Music doesn't have "Lemonade," but since I wasn't into that I never looked for it there. We do have all of 4:44, though.

Pharrell produced "Apeshit" ^^ with them

lol at all the trap flow from jay

best thing about NICE is bey quoting half baked tho

Man, "Heard About Us" is great.

― self-clowning oven (Murgatroid), 17. juni 2018 01:11 (eleven hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Otm. But this is disappointingly more like a Jay-Z album than a Beyoncé. Perhaps not surprising when they're calling themselves 'The Carters'

i've only listened once and would like to spend more time with it but so far i would agree w/ that assessment

i didn't notice this yesterday but there's an additional single separate from the album, "salud!"

The Carters deserves its own thread so we can shit all over the ignorant class politics and antiquated cool-in-2016 production flourishes, plus how stupid Tidal is

Nah, I'm fine with skipping all that.

tidal hasn't paid royalties to anyone for over a year and has been lying about the plays Jay Z gets, is having this exclusively on there an attempt to bolster subscriptions?

i mean, yeah?

tidal hasn't paid royalties to anyone for over a year

Wait, what?

The lovey-dovey quotes I'm seeing from this are nauseating enough to keep me away in any case.