Beyonce in 2016 - 'Formation' and Lemonade

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?

Or, you know, you could just let Beyonce have these feelings. A whole bunch of women seem to get where she coming from.

so the "Maps" and "My Girls" samples are just her copping lyrics from those songs? wtf

Any time I've ever been in a therapy like situation, I feel like I've simultaneously been very sincere and very calculating. So the opposition between those two states which most people seem to accept always seems very foreign to me.

xpost

I had actually been hoping for a real sample when I heard about that one, not just her singing the chorus of "Maps" to fill in gaps in the song (a common contemporary practice that I admittedly just don't get).

What is "My Girls?"

an animal collective song. she does the same thing in 6 Inch, uses the hook from My Girls about "material things"

could replace "therapy" with "marriage" here, but yeah, I agree.

and ultimately I don't care if something's calculated if it makes me feel shit.

uh xxpost

i feel like this album's very similar to the last one (mostly aesthetically/production-wise, and mostly in a good way) but 20 minutes shorter, and specifically with 20 minutes of the more upbeat clubby/pop radio-friendly stuffed removed. and honestly that's kind of what i want since the last 2 years of constant "drunk in love"/"partition"/"flawless" remix"/"7/11" on the radio kinda wore thin with me relative to how i feel about the rest of that record.

xpost

Oh, right. I guess I had been successful enough in blocking that song from my memory that the quote went right passed me.

so the "Maps" and "My Girls" samples are just her copping lyrics from those songs? wtf

― flappy bird, Sunday, April 24, 2016 8:46 PM

the "Blurred Lines" influence, like Miguel ceding a writing credit to Billy Corgan last year.

it's kinda funny to have a divorce album w/o the divorce like the venom
of 'idiot wind' yielding toward the therapeutic attempt at understanding how this shit happened to you of parts of like a prayer and then extrapolating that understanding to a larger scale insight of the culture, the personal is political. on one listen i don't like it as much as the last two and i doubt that will change but holy shit am i impressed. kinda think she doesn't give af about radio but i hear three maybe four tracks w/ potential there.

I listened to it three times last night and then once more today. Now I've just watched the visual counterpart on HBO and holy shit. No words, really, so I'm not even going to try.

doing the HBO premiere was kind of brilliant because it made so many people experience it together in real time so that there was this whole tense reaction to the angry 1st half of the album before the kind of soft forgiving resolution of the 2nd half. like people were totally sure at 9:30 last night that the divorce papers had already been filed but at 10:00 it was a whole different vibe.

Yeah one thing that seems incontravertible is that this album feels like Beyoncé going all in on measuring her success almost solely in terms of cultural impact ("you know you that bitch when you cause all this conversation") rather than, like, hit songs.

What does a hit song even get you anymore?

Macklemore, that's what.

there are like four outright classics immediately i think. totally agreed on the thrill of watching the twitterwave going from the first to the second half of the convo.

er, by convo i mean movie.

I'm feeling the straightforward stuff like "All Nite."

That's the secret story here: the way that Beyonce has transformed into an artist who can sing a "straightforward" love song like "All Night" and have it sound like nobody else.

There's a quality to that song that reminds me of Teedra Moses' debut: openly part of a tradition and continuum yet still sounding completely, arrestingly singular.

otm!

(Which is connected to but different again from the powerhouse performances on "1+1" and "Love On Top")

One thing that's very clear from watching the film is how completely and resolutely it does not give a fuck about the tastes and wants of a straight white male audience. So yeah, you can get over that she's not thrown you a couple of club bangers as part of your adjustment to this not being for you. And then you can adjust to it being wildly popular regardless. But to flip that into saying that there's not good songs on this just seems deranged.

"love drought" is incredible

Straight white dudes love club bangers?

yes

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i think sonically this album is really cool and unique. more all over the place than it really seems as you're listening to it. some of it ("don't hurt yourself, "6 inch", "daddy issues") sound sort of noirsh to me, but there are also some crystalline r&b songs and the little island influences. it's an interesting combo that works. i like how "pray you catch me," "sorry" & "love drought" sorta take their cues from the "jealous"/"no angel" sector of the last album. that said the songwriting isn't always there for me... i want "hold up" and "sorry" to do a little more than they do. they're nice songs but feel a bit underworked & not sure how often i'll come back to ones like the jack white collab or "freedom." as a piece of popular art it's pretty insanely compelling tho, and she really sells the shit out of it (i.e. that little dip into rap on "hold up", her vocals across the album in general)

Definitely curious to see how this works in concert, arrangement-wise.

Tim F. otm:
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).

Can't wait to hear a live version of Sandcastles.

and ultimately I don't care if something's calculated if it makes me feel shit.

Sure, otm, and all art is calculated to the degree that someone makes the conscious decision to produce it and present it. Taylor has obviously made a specialty of intimate confessions with massive corporate packaging. The trick with this album is its sense of immediacy, like she just caught him and this is her processing it in real time. Which of course it's not, it's art, with elaborate trappings.