An ILX roundtable discussion of Beyonce's Lemonade for people who don't feel like listening to it right now.

so there's this kid -- maybe 10 or 11? -- who has been setting up a lemonade stand directly in front of our house regularly, and it kind of irks me. shouldn't she be doing it in front of her own house? what if my kid wanted to have a lemonade stand? that would be awkward. it's kind of a "hot" corner in the neighborhood, so she's totally cleaning up. should i demand a cut of her earnings?

I wish Charles Mingus had left us a lemonade recipe to go with his eggnog. Maybe I can make one up.

LEMONADE (in the style of Charles Mingus)

Take 6 lemons (or 12 or 20, depending on how many people)
Squeeze out all the juice, try to not get too many seeds in
Add about a cup of water per lemon
A pound or two of sugar
A fifth of whiskey (I like bourbon, but rye will work)
Maybe some cherry brandy
Throw some mint leaves in there
Stir, serve over ice

last time we went out to eat at my friend's brick oven pizza place i got a ginger margarita and it was the best thing. ginger salt! i had two of them...

http://www.dunnsfoodanddrinks.co.uk/wp-content/uploads/2013/09/CURRIES%20POSTER-200x300.jpg

I'm definitely going to try that vanilla-thyme lemonade from upthread. I never thought about putting either of those things in lemonade.

I like lemonade a lot. When I was little and lived in California it was so easy to set up a lemonade stand. Now and here it's a little tougher, but I do find it interesting that every kid I know (ours and others) pretty much always ends up donating lemonade stand proceeds to charity.

I have a good friend whose drink of choice is Mike's Hard Lemonade, which is so gross.

So many cocktails require lemon - almost most of them - but I can't think of many lemonade cocktails. It's just there to work with the sweet and strong.

Homemade Red Kola can be made by mixing vimto cordial and lemonade.

http://farm6.static.flickr.com/5148/5686837090_dd00d3bcb5.jpg

http://i45.tinypic.com/fz0nbs.jpg

TRUE or FALSE: NABISCO is on the money:

It’s not as if I made some principled choice not to listen to it. It’s just that Beyoncé released “Formation” on a Saturday, and then performed it at the Super Bowl on Sunday, and as of Monday I hadn’t gotten around to it, for reasons that are incredibly uninteresting: I happened to have been doing other stuff, which seems as if it’s probably among my rights as an American.

By then, though, the song had become such an intense focus of discussion at the digital water cooler — to the point where it felt difficult to turn on a computer without someone’s views about “Formation” and its various sociopolitical valences reaching out and grasping for your throat — that my not having heard it acquired some kind of political dimension. A decision had to be made. Either I needed to dutifully consume this object of conversation and develop an opinion about it or I needed to develop a defense of why I hadn’t yet done so.

The point being: Here, for a moment, was music that actively dragooned me into paying attention to it, based not primarily on sound, performance or composition, but on the rolling snowball of perspectives, close readings and ideological disputes accreting around it.

It’s songs that do this now; individual songs and mass opinion, working in tandem. This wasn’t always the case. We’ve spent the past century or so trying, in creaky and convulsive ways, to figure out what music is even for, and how we intend to use it. When and where will we listen to it? Will other people be there? Should people own music? Who should write it — the performers? What’s a normal amount to release at once? How will we find out about it? Will there be pictures? Are you absolutely, definitely sure we have to pay money for it? For the moment, there’s only one answer to these questions that seems to connect strangers in a truly monocultural way: We shall gather in huge, fawning riots around towering pop singles to trade politicized takes on them.

It’s not the worst thing. One of the great tricks of pop music is that no matter how much we like to imagine it’s about musicians expressing themselves, it tends to be more useful as a way for listeners to figure out their own identities: Each song lets us try on a new way of being in the world. For a long while, the idea was that young people could use music to shape their style — their clothes, their haircuts, their sense of cool. Then came high-speed Internet and a touching enthusiasm for the idea of playlists: With so much of the world’s music at our fingertips, we’d express our intelligence and taste by playing D.J. and curator, sorting through songs to assemble our own reflections. That didn’t last, either. Showing off your eclectic, handpicked treasures? This has become such a common online performance that there’s no one left in the audience.

So these days it’s the song, and the scale of the event surrounding it. One song, one digestible thing, with millions of people standing in a circle around it, pointing and shouting and writing about it, conducting one gigantic online undergraduate seminar about it, metabolizing it on roughly the same level that cable-news debate shows metabolize a political speech. This is an ever-greater share of the public life of music. A song like “Formation” isn’t set up as a story, or an interior monologue — it’s set up as Beyoncé, the public celebrity whose biography you already know, addressing the world, like an op-ed with drums. Thus can we argue not about what the song says to us, but about what we think the rest of the world needs to be told, and whether Beyoncé is telling it right. What do we make of her dancers’ Black Panther styling? Is she “allowed” to work with beloved artists from New Orleans or use references to the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina? How does the song sound through a feminist lens, through a queer lens, through an anticapitalist one? Can we have a conversation about her daughter’s hair, and also about police violence? People talked about these things until, three days in, I’d been quoted every last line of a song I still hadn’t heard.

We’ve found a way to collect around the handful of songs we all have in common, yoke them with our opinions and make a (mostly) joyful noise. I don’t begrudge Beyoncé or the world one second of it. But it does throw into stark relief the things we have a much harder time talking about, at least with strangers: the way songs make us feel, the things we discover in them that aren’t already on other people’s minds, the obscure pleasures we’re willing to risk trying to explain from the darkness. The ever-larger private life of music. How do we talk about that? ♦

(all rights reserved nabzyorktimes/2016)

it is the worst thing

Echo chamber pop.

I think that if Beyonce danced to an instrumental at the Super Bowl people still would have had digital water cooler debates or whatever. Because Super Bowl, and people are dumb, and people are smart, and love and hate Beyonce/women/black people/dancing/fun/halftime shows.

Damn Nabisco, back at it again with the OTMs.

a: don't talk about it. definitely don't talk about it online.

There is definitely a feeling for me that I can't even tell what I think about Formation as a song, because it's an event more than a song. It may be a song that 10-20 years from now I look back on as innovative, but right now it feels lost in the noise.

these pictures are so great!

https://www.flickr.com/photos/alcue/sets/72157649121163541/page1/

h/t the raggett.

http://sonicfield.org/2016/01/pauline-oliveros-on-the-difference-between-hearing-and-listening/

this vegetarian cookbook i have has a pretty good recipe for mint lemonade. the cookbook lady tends to favor blander recipes than i would like, it's taken me a few years to realize this. but a lot of the non-traditional ingredient combos are a good foundation, i say foundation, because i'm not vegetarian, but i will take her acorn squash kale thing and add chicken. But the lemonade recipe doesn't suffer from her "over-subtlety"

for a cocktail, it would probably be great with vodka. You can pretty much add vodka to anything.

Those pictures are amazing.

last great siouxsie album? a controversial statement, but it could very well be.

No way, Scott. You're way off. Tinderbox and Peepshow are easily just as good as Hyæna. And Through the Looking Glass is at least good fun.

Oh to be Steve Slutzah in 1978.

https://www.simplemarketingnow.com/blog/social-flooring-index-blog/bid/146101/Tile-Industry-Forum-Selling-Tile-Online-Steve-Slutzah-Westside-Tile

https://info.simplemarketingnow.com/hs-fs/hub/103148/file-28048575-pdf/docs/businesstimes-dec-2012.pdf

does it for the love of tile. we should all be more like Slutz.

Same mustache all these years!

Now the Lefsetz of the tile industry, calling them like he sees them.

I could get into tile. I think it's probably pretty underappreciated by music nerd hipsters like us. But could you imagine being on the cutting edge of tile design? Could be a good gig with room to grow.

"I have managed over 100 stores from New York to California. Getting tired of being told I made too much money, I opened Westside Tile and Stone in 2005."

Still got that Slutzah sass. I bet the hospitality suite at national tile shows is a place to be.

WAIT, did jack white produce the whole Lemonade album??? i had no idea. and he SINGS on it? ewwwwwwww...............

also, does Beyonce have the worst rock tastes on earth??? was glancing at some rolling stone thing that the raggett posted on FB and beyonce's rock connections a long list of stuff to avoid like the plague: coldplay, eddie vedder, animal collective, jack white.....yuuuuuuuuuuuuuuk.

now i really never want to hear this album...

Jack White is only on the one song (and it's good -- sounds like Kelis).

"And Through the Looking Glass is at least good fun."

this seriously might be the only rock covers album that i love.

new rule: every new album can only have 1 article written about it. doesn't matter if it's by Lefsetz.

i feel like we alternate b/w reminiscing affectionately about monoculture and cursing it for still existing.

y'all, here's the real secret ingredient for some dope lemonade: lavender.

THANK YOU, Buzzfeed...

http://www.buzzfeed.com/emofly/amazing-ways-to-spike-lemonade#.jiEzApR2o

yeah, okay, this:

14. Lavender-Thyme Lemonade (Add Gin)

Salt! I will live and die by salty lemonade.

do you guys have any tips on getting information?

so there's this kid -- maybe 10 or 11? -- who has been setting up a lemonade stand directly in front of our house regularly, and it kind of irks me. shouldn't she be doing it in front of her own house? what if my kid wanted to have a lemonade stand? that would be awkward. it's kind of a "hot" corner in the neighborhood, so she's totally cleaning up. should i demand a cut of her earnings?

I'm surprised by this. I don't think I've ever seen a neighbourhood lemonade stand. My sister and I tried to set one up when we were kids because we saw them in comics and cartoons. We sold absolutely nothing (and, no, we weren't selling the salty stuff). I figured it was because lemonade can be bought or made so cheaply and have always looked back on this as my first real lesson in economics. But apparently, more enterprising children are actually succeeding with this model these days??
xp

I've seen small lemonade stands in my current neighborhood. Never ever saw anyone trying to run one when I was growing up.

i feel like they only exist in upper-middle class neighborhoods as a quaint attempt to teach kids about the value of hard work that they will not have to do irl.

the true lil hustlers are out selling sealed m&ms for fictional sports teams.

We are pretty much lower-to-middle middle class.

i love how the temptation to listen to that Beyonce/Jack White song is remedied by the title: DON'T HURT YOURSELF.

STILL TEMPTED THOUGH. in a masochistic way....

just do it, scott. it's pretty good!

(totally over-generalized and projected my own class anxieties onto the lemonade stand thing; been doing that SO MUCH lately.)

i didn't even know that janet put out an album last year. that is so sad! black rock pioneer janet jackson! sorry, JJ...

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2_t0ffY3JvE

culture shock upon moving to canada from Scotland: lemonade here is not carbonated

I had no idea a half lemonade/half iced tea was called an Arnold Palmer until this year. Honest Tea makes that and it's really, really good

Just picked some up to have with lunch, inspired by this thread.