Beyonce’s Lemonade Tastes Like Grammys
On Beyonce’s sixth album Lemonade she shares aspects in her personal life that spark rumors of alleged infidelity from her husband Jay-Z. Like her self-titled fifth album, Lemonade album had no promotion and was projected to sell half a million within hours of it being for sale.
Unlike her previous work, this “visual” album takes Beyonce’s sound to new levels with original spoken word pieces by Warsan Shire and several genres slayed by Queen Bey. Premiering on April 23,2016 to be viewed on HBO and later available on Tidal and iTunes, Lemonade is in shown in the form of visual art as a movie like experience that’s 1 hour and 5 minutes you can’t take your eyes off.
Beyonce takes her lyrics to the next level with raw vocals of passion, pain, anger, sorrow, and love. The lyrics give listeners a small peek into experiences that she usually does not share. She stays mysterious and holds your attention with lyrics like “You better call Becky with the good hair.” This line along caused lots of buzz from the Beyhive and caused multiple attacks on Jay Z’s alleged infidelity.
On “Hold Up, Sorry, and Don’t Hurt Yourself”(featuring Jack White),Beyonce mixes genres with reggae, trap, and rock. As she mentions in “Formation”, “I got hot sauce in my bag”, and that same “hot sauce” is revealed as a bat used for destruction in “Hold Up”, along with ‘Yonce running over several cars in a monster truck. Bey also decides to host a full blown celebration on a bus and for her to gracefully on her throne as Serena Williams dances in “Sorry”. Making it clear for all to see with these break up and revenge songs, Queen Bey is one fed up, mad black woman who also happens to be a lyrical genius with help from producers to aid her writing process.
At the end of “Don’t Hurt Yourself”, she scowls, “This is your final warning, you know I give you life. If you try that **** again, you gon’ lose your wife?” Then she proceeds to throw her wedding ring at the camera.
When she says,“What are you going to say at my funeral now that you’ve killed me?” there is a mutual wince from listeners due how raw and real Bey is being. She’s speaking on things we’ve dealt with before like heart break showing us a different side of her that the Beyhive loves.
Lemonade is a journey of intuition, denial, anger, apathy, accountability, reformation, forgiveness, emptiness, redemption, and hope as told throughout the visual album that features the likes of cultural ambassador Amandla Stenberg, Disney actress and pop artist Zendaya, Beyonce’s Parkwood entertainment artist Chloe and Halle, and French-Cuban duo and twins Lia-Kinse and Naomi Diaz.
Beyonce’s visual album shows a chilling vocal range, fresh fashion trends, and an long overdue ode to black excellence and women. Her lyrical creativity gets better with time, and the tea it spills is just a bonus to the journey you take with her. She may be the Queen of the Beyhive, but she’s still human like us. Life gave her lemons, so she made Lemonade.
