Beyonce - 4

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.

b'day all day, but i would gladly listen to 20 songs of terius/beyonce

the sequencing was always a weakness of 4 for me, so i now prefer the 2013 re-release as my default version of the album:

1. "Love on Top" 4:27
2. "Party" (featuring André 3000) 4:04
3. "Schoolin' Life" 4:52
4. "Countdown" 3:33
5. "I Miss You" 2:58
6. "Dance for You" 6:15
7. "I Care" 3:59
8. "Rather Die Young" 3:43
9. "1+1" 4:34
10. "End of Time" 3:44
11. "Run the World (Girls)" 4:51
12. "Best Thing I Never Had" 4:13
13. "Start Over" 3:19
14. "I Was Here" 3:58

that sequence seems hideous

where is the sequence that moves "Party" to a burning trash heap?

that's a mean way to refer to J. Cole

i always listened to this album with "best thing i never had", "i was here" and "girls run the world" taken off with the three bonus tracks replacing them. i didn't even bother trying to re-sequence it but yeah.

Idk no matter how often I and we have discussed re-sequencing albums I've never actually done it. I skip tracks.

yeah same

although the continuous mix of katy's b last album -- which had a totally different tracklist -- was far superior

i don't re-sequence often but occasionally if i like an album a lot but find the running order unflattering i play it on shuffle a lot, which is what i did with 4 before the re-release.

4 was like The Pinkprint in that the first trio of singles was so totally unpromising that it was a pleasant surprise when it eventually spun off some really good singles

Yeah. For me 4 revealed itself as a flawed album that I nevertheless love unreservedly.

i kinda feel that it got sonned by the self titled album, which is sort of an objective step up in... ambition? or at least really gave her an album that brought her art up to the level of her celebrity.

but on the other hand i feel like not everything on that album works, and that it doesn't hold together as tight as people think it does. and that despite it's ill-fitting singles 4 makes a convincing argument for the ease of a sort conservatism?

anyway i'm not sure which album is better but as the legend of the self-titled grows 4 is bound to be perpetually underrated

4 is her most naturalist work, "Run The World" aside; it's the album on which she assumes the mantle of pop's best vocalist by her emphasis on effortlessness - even when the album sounds classicist it sounds like it's writing new classics rather than trying to measure up to them. This is not true of all the tracks but it's particularly true of those tracks which feel like they're at the album's center ("1 + 1", "Love On Top").

Beyonce is not "effortless" by any stretch but I feel like it's the next logical step (not up, but along): blowing up those aspects of Beyonce's vocal attack which make her the best in the business until they seem perverse (as anything does under such close examination).

Neither approach is necessarily better but I think the latter is more obviously remarkable. But it also makes 4 more interesting than it might have seemed otherwise at this point: rather than the graceful drift into adulthood that it was received as being at the time, 4 is a stepping stone to something quite different, a lefthand swerve in a series of lefthand swerves.

/4/ is her most naturalist work, "Run The World" aside; it's the album on which she assumes the mantle of pop's best vocalist by her emphasis on effortlessness

This reads to me as a faulty premise. Most of 4 (aside from "I Miss You") is Beyoncé indulging in the purest form of her forced, muscular yelling-as-singing, with every popped vein on her neck sticking out of almost every track. For me, it's the album where Holleroncyé clicked for more than three isolated tracks on the album.

I think we're agreeing in substance while disagreeing on terms - yes it's all muscular yelling-as-singing, but if it's forced in a strict physical sense, I think she inhabits the persona that vocal approach tends to create very comfortably.

I remember when she performed "1 + 1" on Idol, and it was kinda like "children, my shower improvisations have more overblown heartbreak than your best ever "I Have Nothing" rendition."

Her worst single imo