![]() Even more so than her last record, she draws from every corner of popular music, new and old, to make a rich potpourri of songs. If this is all just a performance, a way of stoking the public’s endless fascination with their relationship, it’s a wild feat of storytelling.īut while the album is Beyoncé’s most naked and personal yet, “Lemonade” is also a collage of collaborative artistic effort. “All three of us, immortalized-me, you, and your perfect girl.” It is difficult to overstate how much indignation and emotional clarity emanates from these songs. Nothing has ignited Beyoncé artistically like this pain: “We can pose for a photograph,” she whispers during a spoken-word interstitial, bloodthirsty. “You’re my lifeline and you’re trying to kill me,” she utters later. At one point she prompts her husband to imagine her dead body before him, slain from the pain of betrayal. “What a wicked way to treat the girl who loves you,” Beyoncé says, as she walks through the street smashing car windows with a baseball bat, wearing a fluffy canary-yellow dress. It is so jarring that it prompted a flood of Twitter users to wonder whether “Lemonade” would double as a divorce announcement. The first half is heavy on anger, a vicious map of accusation and vitriol levelled against her disloyal partner. The project is presented in chapters based loosely on the Kübler-Ross model of grief (denial, anger, apathy, emptiness, and so forth). “Are you cheating on me?” Beyoncé asks, just after jumping off the top of a building and landing in a body of water. “Lemonade” declares that misogyny is at its most potent and complex within the bonds of love. This time, she takes that label, turns it inward, and intensifies it. Last time around, Beyoncé announced herself to the world as a feminist. “Lemonade” is the product of a brutal tension: a woman who has been deified by the entire world and yet cannot secure the love of the person closest to her. Her relationship with her husband, Jay Z, which at a distance is a seemingly divine union of power and joy, has in fact been a tortuous journey, a bottomless well of pain, and, in turn, artistic fuel. ![]() What Beyoncé obscures in her everyday public life she makes relentlessly clear on this project. The project is also a piece of spoken word, a narrative film, a map of cultural reference points, and a window into the soul of an icon whose inner life has always seemed just out of reach. It would be insufficient to describe “Lemonade,” which aired on HBO, without much preceding fanfare, as an album. Forget surprise albums and rogue rollout methods “Lemonade” is a revelation of spirit. Anything she could have expressed-about her music, her upbringing, her parents, motherhood, her relationship with herself, her pain and resilience, her views on black female power, and especially her marriage to Jay Z-was put on display last night. Never much of a talker, she didn’t say much. Early this month, Beyoncé gave her first extensive interview in nearly three years, appearing on the cover of Elle magazine. ![]()
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