Album Review: Beyoncé


There some mornings where I do not have time to check the news (aka Pitchfork) after I’ve finished with all of my desperate househusband chores, therefore I do not get to the news until after I’ve arrived at my day job. Friday, December 13th was one of those mornings.

So by, like, 8:15, the internet was collectively shitting itself and melting down over the fact that eight hours earlier, Beyoncé surprised everybody by releasing a new album via iTunes. It was Pitchfork’s top story all day, and some poor bastard at Buzzfeed had probably stayed up all night making a list full of .gifs relating to the album.

And so it is. An incredibly successful and well-known, household name of a pop star unceremoniously released her long awaited and much delayed fifth solo LP.

2013 certainly has been a big year for music, hasn’t it? It’s marked the well-calculated return of a veteran like David Bowie, as well as the contractually obligated comeback of Justin Timberlake. The arrival of Beyoncé lies somewhere between Kanye West’s “no pre-order” strategy for Yeezus, and the “Oh, hey, our new album is coming out in a few hours,” plan adopted by My Bloody Valentine’s 22 years in the making m b v.

I’ll be the first to admit that I am not extremely well-versed in the canon of Beyoncé, although whether you like her or not, you have to admire her ability to have risen from the de facto frontwoman role of her former R&B girl group, to the absolute idol she has become today. I mean people REALLY love Beyoncé. Also I should note that women, SPECIFICALLY, love Beyoncé and look up to her not as another woman, or even a celebrity/artist, but as some kind otherworldly presence.

Queen Bey, they call her.

One of the first things worth noting about Beyoncé is that it’s pretty god damn sexy. It’s not nearly as raunchy/blush-inducing as R. Kelly’s latest endeavor—Beyoncé is far too classy for that, and her metaphors are much more clever than comparing a woman’s vagina to a cookie—she prefers to compare her own “bathing suit area” to a waterfall.

Soul not for sale…probably won’t make no money off this—oh well,” she improvises off the cuff early on in the record—an interesting statement that one can take numerous ways. One is that the surprise reveal of Beyoncé is a more than a bit of a gamble for an artist of her caliber—also, lyrically, this record it may alienate listeners that aren’t comfortable listening to a record where a bulk of the material is about having sex with Jay Z. Saying that her soul is not for sale, however, leads me to believe that with the arrival of her fifth album, Beyoncé  has risen above the standard “pop star” label, and that with this record, she wants to be taken seriously as an artist.

Now seems like a good time to note that she certainly did make money off of this. I think something like 430,000 copies of this were downloaded within the first day alone—and by Monday, worldwide, she had moved 828,773 copies. That is just shy of a platinum album within a few days.

I would stop short of saying that Beyoncé is a “personal” album, but what I would say that it’s incredibly self-aware. It’s a glimpse into her world—as a performer, as a mother, as a wife, and possibly as a regular person. But really, is Beyoncé a regular person? She seems to transcend a label like that—I know that even Beyoncé  has do mundane shit like go to the grocery store, but I’m sure for her, it’s an incredibly glamorous experience.

The record opens with dialogue of Beyoncé answer a question asked of her—“What is your aspiration in life?” Her answer is simply, “to be happy.” Later, on the album’s second track, “Haunted,” you hear a recording of an incredibly young Beyoncé  winning some kind of talent contest, her name being pronounced incorrectly by the announcer. “I love Houston,” she says, before the recording begins to decay into the track. Her past as a child performer is revisited again with the introduction (and ending) to “Flawless,” a song that also (thankfully) makes use of a mysterious, fantastic, and bizarre track that was shared in the spring called “Bow Down/I Been On,” produced by Hit Boy.  And after using an expert of a speech on feminism by speaker Chimamanda Nogzi Adichie, turns into a ready-made anthem for women: “I look so good tonight, God Damn! God Damn!”

Structurally, the album kind of maxes out its potential and energy with “Flawless,” so I mean it nearly makes it to the end of the 14-track run. Beyoncé saves the slower, ballady tracks until the very end—my favorite song on the album, the surprisingly haunting “Heaven,” (a song I may be reading a little too much into the lyrics on it, but then again maybe not) and then closing with an ode to her daughter Blue Ivy, aptly titled “Blue,” a song wherein its namesake arrives within the final seconds to lay it down, the way only a baby that has yet to grasp the English language can do.

There’s some conflicting messages within Beyoncé—in the opening track, “Pretty Hurts,” she sings, “Perfection is a disease of a nation…it’s the soul that needs a surgery,” leading one to believe that they should accept who they are, no matter who they are, or what they look like. On the first part of “Haunted,” she says that she doesn’t trust record labels, and how all the “..shit I do is boring,” before she begins talking about all of the regular-ass people working a 9 to 5 “just to stay alive.”

This is before all of the hot sex, though, on the album, and so by the time that hits, there’s a little bit of an “Oh look at my great life with my incredibly successful rapper husband WHO BETTER NOT CHEAT ON ME OR I WILL FUCK HIS ASS UP. See, ladies, I’m just like you only not really.” Speaking of which, Jigga makes his probably contractually bound appearance early on—“Drunk in Love” serves as possibly a document of how little Blue Ivy came to be—“your breasteses is my breakfast,” he raps, attempting to sound slightly more awake and alert here than he has on anything else he’s been involved with in 2013.

Beyoncé is far from a “concept album,” but it is an album that is tied together loosely by similar ideas—the general take away seems to be that everyday pressures even get to famous people, and that famous talented people have to deal with the same bullshit regular people do. Except that famous people are still famous, so their existence is slightly better than that of you or me. Writing it out like that makes it seem a little mean spirited, or that I’m selling the album short.

I don’t think it’s meant to be mean spirited, and I don’t think I’m selling Beyoncé short. I’m truly uncertain as to how I am supposed to feel about this record. Because the internet, I went into it thinking that it was going to change my life; that this album was different, or special, in some way, and that my jaw would drop to the floor the second it started.

That was not the case.

I will say, however, that I did listen to “Heaven” four times in a row, completely failing to hold back tears while writing an earlier part of this essay in a Dunn Brothers coffee shop, and that even the mere thought that song will reduce me to a gigantic, sobbing mess.


It seems worth noting that since this is coming within the tail end of 2013, Pitchfork has already started phoning it in with their “End of 2013” lists, so they won’t get around to writing a review of it until the first full week of January. Another relatively popular “indie” music website, Consequence of Sound, gave it four out of five stars, and within their review, mentioned that the song “Flawless,” was like “Yeezus, only listenable.” This coming from a website that picked Yeezus as their favorite record of the year.

Comparing this album to Yeezus seems unfair, like comparing apples to a fruit that nobody has ever heard of before. The marketing behind that record was that there WAS no marketing. The packaging for the record is that there IS no packaging, just a red sticker sealing up a jewel case. The music is supposed to speak for itself, and oh how it does—it’s unlike anything Kanye West has ever done before, and unlike anything he’ll ever do again. It captures a moment in time, and the trickle-down effect of influence and imitation can already be seen.

Beyoncé, however, while a slight risk, still also manages to play it somewhat safe, or at least to me, doesn’t seem all that risky. It’s not exactly a groundbreaking record, musically speaking—I mean, sure, the release strategy could be considered that, and I haven’t even mentioned the accompanying “Visual” component to the record—videos shot for each of the record’s 14 tracks. There are some neat production techniques, some more successful than others, but a track like “Pretty Hurts” is straight up radio-ready—big synth arrangements, huge refrain—and that’s a sound that returns towards the end of the record, on the track “XO” (a song, as it turns out, is one of two singles released from the record.)

This album is certainly an album. It exists. The verdict was in almost immediately—people love it. The hype machine and hyperbole behind it is as big, or bigger, than expected. And it’s because of this that I want to like it more than I find myself able to. I don’t dislike Beyoncé, and listening to it certainly wasn’t a chore, but it also wasn’t rewarding. It’s an album that may win her some new fans for those that admire the artistic endeavor, and it may also estrange some more casual listeners that aren’t ready for a leap forward such as this.

Beyoncé is currently available via iTunes in "Album Only" form, and will be available on the 20th in a physical format in retail stores (except Target), as well as available to download song by song.

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