Beyonce - 4

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