Beyonce in 2016 - 'Formation' and Lemonade

I love the New Orleans horns on Daddy Lessons, but the acoustic guitar stomp of the rest of it is so goddamn bad.

really glad i listened to the audio before watching the film

wow @ "daddy lessons", "don't hurt yourself", "freedom" especially

I'm, uh, not much for Jack White but his vocal over those drums is a holy-shit moment.

Is the sound on this kind of muted or is it just my dodgy MP3s? Please don't make me subscribe to Tidal to find out...

Probably the dodgy mp3s.

Yeah it definitely is - Formation just started and boomed out about twice as loudly as everything else.

First impressions are that this is excellent but the one with James Blake is probably the worst Beyonce song since the Sasha Fierce at the very least.

the jack white song is soooooooo good

i have so many favourite parts but b and Serena jamming together in the hallway was so fkn great

This is a good album ain't it.

Atlanta next Sunday!

great post, Tim

after i listened to it for the first time it has a bittersweet taste...
'all night' is an obvious highlight, probably the best song. 'don't hurt yourself' and 'forward' are bad jokes.
i still don't know what to think of it, but i'm not as excited as i wanted do be.

The moment when 6 Inch goes from minimalist trap to widescreen orchestration is wonderful.

damn, i didn't mean 'dont hurt yourself', which is surprisingly good, but '6 inch'. i can't deal with weeknd's voice.

sandcastles seems so out of place for me, no matter how genuine it may be w/in the spectrum of feelings she's exploring. like the song itself was a corporate addition "well, bloomingdales won't play 6 inch in the stores so we need something for 40-something rich wives." the whole album is so dynamic vocally like dyl was saying and it's so... SAFE

Huh? The way I hear it Sandcastles is the one where she is most vulnerable vocally. There is one moment especially where she seems to lose it completely.

The moment when 6 Inch goes from minimalist trap to widescreen orchestration is wonderful.

― Matt DC, Sunday, April 24, 2016 12:24 PM (26 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

lol you mean the part where it goes from the 2nd minute of the Isaac Hayes version of "Walk On By" to the 1st miniute of the Isaac Hayes version of "Walk On By"

Huh? The way I hear it Sandcastles is the one where she is most vulnerable vocally. There is one moment especially where she seems to lose it completely.

― Frederik B, Sunday, April 24, 2016 12:48 PM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I guess the barn-burning speaks to me more. SC is very trad to me

Yeah it's the one very trad song in there (perhaps the same can be said of Freedom?) but it's still very moving.

just watched the visual..

not malick, julie dash

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Daughters_of_the_Dust

watching this w my 86 y/o grandmother rn

Huh? The way I hear it Sandcastles is the one where she is most vulnerable vocally. There is one moment especially where she seems to lose it completely.

― Frederik B, Sunday, April 24, 2016 12:48 PM (10 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I guess the barn-burning speaks to me more. SC is very trad to me

― How Butch, I mean (Jimmy The Mod Awaits The Return Of His Beloved), 24. april 2016 19:00 (3 hours ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

Oh, I agree with this fully. Yeah, not my favorite track. But the vocals from 1:15-1:50 are quite extreme. Actually, the way she screams 'what is it about you' 1:40 in might be my favorite vocal moment on the album so far. She sounds so scary and ugly right there, as if she completely loses her cool for a moment. I also quite like the James Blake coda, lol.

I should have put this off a bit, because I don't think I'm really in the mood to engage with non-Prince music right now, but this sounded generally fine but rarely spectacular for the most part. I like "Sorry" a lot. "Daddy Lessons" is dreadful, though; essentially her version of Lady Gaga's "You & I."

"Daddy Lessons" is my favorite. I love the horn chart part seguing into the acoustic part.

Well, Gaga's track was divisive as well. The problem may be me: I don't like contempo country enough on its own, so hearing pop superstars do their camp riffs on the genre is really gonna make me itch.

Would it sound backhanded for me to say that I'm happy that its a 40-something minute album? Cause I don't mean it that way.

I don't hear country in this track at all! Sounds like Beyonce over an acoustic riff.

and, no, I'm grateful it's 45 minutes long. I want more 45-minute albums.

6 inch loses its way the moment that sample comes in, imo.

And I'm getting the feeling that the relaxed vocals signify that none of this means v much to her. She has a great voice though.

The "yee-haw" that opens it and the whole fetishization of daddy's gun scan as (intentionally) broadly Country.

I'm grateful when albums are 45 minutes long these days, just like I'm grateful when movies are under 2 hours.

Actually, 6 Inch is a mess from start to finish and this album feels very unnecessary.

sandcastles seems so out of place for me, no matter how genuine it may be w/in the spectrum of feelings she's exploring. like the song itself was a corporate addition "well, bloomingdales won't play 6 inch in the stores so we need something for 40-something rich wives." the whole album is so dynamic vocally like dyl was saying and it's so... SAFE

― How Butch, I mean (Jimmy The Mod Awaits The Return Of His Beloved), Sunday, 24 April 2016 16:32 (5 hours ago) Permalink

Yeah Beyonce groaning "bitch I scratched out your name and your face" is a very 40-something rich wives moment.

If we're talking about Real Housewives of Atlanta maybe.

And I'm getting the feeling that the relaxed vocals signify that none of this means v much to her. She has a great voice though.

can someone find me a gif to respond to this post with

And I'm getting the feeling that the relaxed vocals signify that none of this means v much to her. She has a great voice though.

― human and working on getting beer (longneck), Sunday, April 24, 2016 9:21 PM (20 minutes ago) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

I can't agree with this even if I know what you're getting at.

The film is intense - and utterly pretentious in a way that almost threatens to topple it but ultimately is also its precondition - and in a roundabout way suggests that the album is both cathartic reaction (to Jay-Z's adultery obv) and a very deliberate statement about where Beyonce sees herself as an artist and about the kind of "art" she wants to make (as an aside, it's interesting to observe that while Jay-Z's response to moving in arty circles is just to hamfistedly reference it in lyrics, Beyonce goes away and makes what is essentially a video installation for a gallery of digital media).

In that regard you might say that the songs as songs are no longer shouldering the burden of all of Beyonce's emotional/artistic focus. These songs certainly don't feel laboured over, and I'd not be surprised if a lot more time and effort went into perfecting the visuals that accompany them. But I think that's less because Beyonce doesn't care about the songs and more that she doesn't really view them in isolation from the "project' as a whole.

But even then, it's not the "relaxed vocals" that give this away - the vocals are clearly the aspect of the music she's thought about most! - but the lived-in messiness of the lyrics and production. A lot of it almost feels like Beyonce is writing the song on the spot - a quality one could never have ascribed to the material on her first four albums.

i would call much of the album 'trad' sonically but that's not a value judgment

was pleasantly surprised to hear that the urban station here is playing scattered tracks from the album today. i honestly don't think there'll be much in the way of long-term radio candy from this album, not that that's a bad thing.

Thanks, Tim. This album just doesn't *sound* too personal to me. The whole infidelity narrative just raises so many questions about what sort of statement this is supposed to be, exactly. Why address these issues in this very particular way - after years of silence?

I *like* the relaxed vocals - it's something she's been getting closer and closer to nailing, and here she finally does it. But the songs just aren't that strong. They need the Narrative and perhaps also the film (which I haven't seen yet) to work. Her last album managed to intertwine art and life in new ways and felt like a fresh start. This feels like a lot of loose threads atm - not really cathartic at all. It doesn't even feel like an ending. Just a bunch of okay songs sung very well.

Hold up, is this Apathy track not on the actual album, just in the film?

Or are people talking about Sorry? That must be it, I guess.

Thanks, Tim. This album just doesn't *sound* too personal to me. The whole infidelity narrative just raises so many questions about what sort of statement this is supposed to be,

I wouldn't worry about this at all. She's a star, so what's "personal" anyway?

yeah none of the 'chapter titles' in the film are the same as the song titles, it was pretty confusing in that hour before the album hit Tidal what to call any of them

Well, what her last album managed to do was to tie together a sense of who Beyoncé was as a person, an artist and a... uh... force in the world. It felt very post-knausgaardian, in a way. She moved decisively away from the "hit songs mingled with a bunch of non-hit songs" paradigm that even Rihanna is now trying to move away from - through recourse to the personal. With this album, however, I get the feeling that it needs the "personal" - in this case the b'trayal narrative - as an excuse to even exist. So yeah, it's all about the "personal" - but it still doesn't feel very personal.

xpost to Alfred.

haven't listened to the album yet because tidal, but i thought the film was really good and memorable. i guess it seems really apparent to me that it's a very personal album but maybe i'm taking it too literally. also,

Any wife who outs her husband on an album and in an hourlong video as a cheater, then makes him release that album on his streaming platform — exclusively — is having her cake and making him eat it, too.

That feels only partially triumphant since we’re left in a moral murk. He might be paying for his sins. But we’re still paying him.

Interesting to hear that people found this impersonal; I felt the exact opposite.

I thought she really nailed what it feels like to be in what's going to be either the middle or the end of your marriage -- when you don't necessarily know which one it's going to be, but both options seem both irresistible and soul-crushing. And the vacillation between superhuman confidence and heartbreaking insecurity...

Projecting my own shit on Beyoncé right now but I liked this a lot.

xpost to longneck: I dunno it all feels very personal to me. Maybe the issue is more whether these songs are ones which the listener can make their own.

It's interesting to cast back to 4 and in particular when "1 + 1" emerged. I remember thinking "this is an excellent execution of a transition to artistic "maturity"", with Beyonce investing what sounded like "classic" songs with a performative largesse that rendered them entirely hers (if only by consummately outperforming the competition).

And since then she has almost entirely abandoned that model - the performative largesse is still there but these songs (even "Sandcastles") defiantly reject the mould of "standards". To twist your words, longneck, they need Beyonce's performance of them to exist as songs in the first place.

What Beyonce (which was halfway through this transition and hence didn't necessarily have to nail its colours to the mast) obscured is the question of precisely what (if anything) is lost alongside what is gained by the shift: I suppose for some listeners this transition would seem like a journey from Beyonce showing us how we feel to showing us how she feels.

I guess then the next question (assuming she's gotten away with this so far) is how far Beyonce can drift from writing "great songs" before either (a) the spell is broken or (b) she snaps back.

lol @ everyone calling Daddy Lessons a Beyonce country song. That's some sub-Mumford shit.

The rest of the album is fucking unbelievable, though.

on first watch/listen, daddy lessons was also my least favorite, but i didn't think it was bad

xxxpost

I agree - they definitely need Beyoncé's performance of them to exist as songs in the first place. And it's quite a performance. I do sometimes miss the cold edge of need and ambition that characterized the "old" Beyoncé - somehow Bootylicious strikes me as intensely personal because the agenda was so grand and obviously so important to her. It's so fierce - in a way this album is not, even when she's simulating being angry with her husband. But of course, as her position and status shifted she couldn't keep singing the same songs in the same way.

The movement toward Beyoncé is very much, as you say, a movement away from the grand statement songs toward a more intimate art - because intimacy was pretty much beyond her reach back before 4. On that album, to me, she struck the right balance between intimacy and "great songs" but what was missing was the self-awareness of Beyoncé, which confronted the space between the public perception of Beyoncé and her own perception of who Beyoncé was (a person with a history and a family) and what she wanted to be. And it did so very successfully. So now we get a bid for more intimacy,
- at the cost of great songs.

But part of me - the married part, I guess - wants to know why these feelings, genuine though they may be, ended up taking this form. I don't get the feeling that this particular couple - who are still married - had a difficult conversation and then B sat down to write about her difficult feelings concerning her relationship and then decided to whack him in the head with them through releasing them on his streaming platform. I get the feeling that thease songs are responding to media chatter rather than to strong emotions and difficult conversations. I guess maybe I just need better songs if I'm going to project my shit onto them.

*these etc. etc.

So now we get a bid for more intimacy,- at the cost of great songs.

Too early for me to have an opinion about whether it has great songs -- it's a good album, but I don't know yet which songs will be my favorites a week or month from now. But I don't discount the possibility of great songs here. The opening trio is really strong, and the closing quartet too. (I like Sandcastles a lot.) But I have the same curiosity about the process behind the album. It's on the one hand so apparently revealing, but on the other kind of still behind a bit of a curtain, or at least a window sheer. It doesn't matter to its artistic integrity whether xyz "really happened," but it does create a sort of dissonance -- can something that suggests reckless candor really go hand in hand with a skillfully plotted multimedia marketing campaign?