Beyonce in 2016 - 'Formation' and Lemonade

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.

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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.

I just watched this. It was incredible. There's no direct sonic connection but throughout the whole thing the name that kept popping into my head was Tina Turner.

As an artistic statement, I think this is tremendous. Also on just one watchthrough, I feel like people are conflating forgiveness with reconciliation; the second half felt to me like a goodbye more than anything else.

My mom is visiting and watched part of the beginning with me. She asked me "So what do you think?" and I said "I think Jay-Z better run"

Ha!

I can't stop listening to All Night. Easily 25-30 times since last night.

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.

it is interesting to hear this said when many of the collaborators this go-around are people that the, em, "passionate millennial males" are very into. still not an untrue observation tho!

i am still very confused about the "my girls" '''''''sample''''''', like the only lyrics she lifted were the two words "material things" yes? it's not like anco invented that phrase or even first used it in a song so ... ? what is the point?

http://pitchfork.com/news/65028-beyonce-producer-boots-explains-animal-collective-credit-on-6-inch/

Over on Genius, the track's co-producer Boots explained that the connection between Beyoncé's line ("She too smart to crave material things") and Animal Collective's ("I don't mean to seem like I care about material things") was initially "accidental." He compared the songwriting process to George Harrison's "My Sweet Lord," which was famously the subject of a lawsuit when the Beatle was accused of "subconsciously" lifting the melody from the Chiffons' "He's So Fine."

like Alfred said above, the Blurred Lines effect. no one wants to get sued. i thought Miguel giving a co-write credit to Billy Corgan on Leaves because it sounded like 1979 was hilarious, considering Corgan stole that song from the Frogs.

Copyright has a striking similarity / substantial part test under which one of the factors they balance is the more distinctive the infringed part is the smaller it has to be to infringe. There's cases before Blurred Lines (Coffey v Warner/ Chappell Music Ltd comes to mind) around a single lyric without regard to melody. So it's not out completely crazy to seek permission for 'they don't love you like i love you' and 'material things'. Also mens rea doesn't exist for copyright, so whether Beyonce knew of the original or sought to copy is irrelevant. It's not a particularly satisfying part of law.

The idea of Animal Collective deciding to take on a full battalion of Beyonce lawyers based on two words is hilarious. Then again stranger things have happened so you can't blame them for being cautious.

Was the collaborator list kept secret before this dropped by the way? I'm assuming so because if it been common knowledge that she was working with Jack White and Ezra Koenig and The Weeknd we would not have heard the end of it. When you consider all that, choosing to precede it with Formation was even more of a masterstroke.

imagining Lex's reaction to that pre-album press release.

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

― human and working on getting beer (longneck), Sunday, April 24, 2016 4:30 PM (Yesterday) Bookmark Flag Post Permalink

...The fuck?

Favorite song is "love drought" which is funny cuz it only had 2 other writers while ever other record is brimming w them

Incredible album and Johnny fever's complaints about "daddy lessons" are going to age like eggs on the radiator

Not sure I like it more than the s/t but I identify w al's take and I don't think it's a remotely static move, feels like a bold step forward and I think a smart one

Who cares about Radio Singles (I mean, I do, sentimentally, but) Lana del Rey sold hella copies of an album w no radio records, this is the way the fractured silo'd viral Internet has destroyed Traditional radio music

A lack of radio singles* is far from the biggest commercial problem when you consider the record is being released exclusively on Tidal.

*Whatever that means, I really don't understand behaviours of US radio, there are four or five songs here that would get heavy UK rotation.

My favourite vocal moment so far is the bit on Love Drought when her voice just whoops upward.

idg the "no radio singles" angle, i know we live in an age when ppl interpret "radio single" as "as formulaic as possible" but "hold up", "6 inch" and "freedom" all seem like big radio singles in terms of hooks, mood etc. already heard "freedom" on radio 1.

watching the film after listening to the album, the spoken word interludes obviously leapt out - some really incredible imagery ("i plugged my menses with pages from the holy bible"!!!!!!!) at the start but i felt like they lost their impact as the film went on. also, having listened to the album first, i'm not sure the film did justice to all the songs...a lot of striking visual moments (posses of women looking like elite covens, i like bey taking #blackgirlmagic to its logical conclusion) but the only one i remember working as a ~music video~ was "hold up" (nb only one watch and i have a bad memory)

strictly autobiographical obsession is v boring in this case. i know she's underlining it for us (must be the influence of hanging out with taylor swift) but every single bit of speculation i've read about her marriage reveals some p depressing things about how ppl seem to think a) relationships b) creating art actually work

who remembers the country version of "grown woman"! https://soundcloud.com/beyoncehd-1/beyonc-grown-woman-country-mi