Album Review: Lemonade by Beyoncé

It takes a village to make an album. Or, should that be ‘a hive’? Beyoncé has assembled hers for surprise release Lemonade, a seeming take-down of husband Jay Z and tribute to black womanhood, all in one.

Ben Lee once asked, “What Would Jay Z Do?”

Nearly a decade later, the more pertinent question is, “What did Jay Z do?”

In his 13 years on Beyoncé’s arm, the rapper and mogul has been followed by countless infidelity rumours. It all appeared to culminate in an elevator brawl with Bey’s sister Solange at the 2014 Met Ball. In leaked security footage, Beyoncé looks on impassively as Solange strikes Jay, reminding us that the interview-shy Queen Bey is, above all things, unknowable.

She’s been slightly less sphinx-like in her music, alluding to philandering as far back as 2006’s “Irreplaceable”. But, having largely avoided press since that elevator incident, she’s offered fans and voyeurs little insight into the current state of the Knowles-Carter household.

Then Lemonade happened.

Dead-dropped on HBO this past Saturday night (and soon after uploaded to both Tidal and iTunes), Lemonade was teased as “a world premiere event” and ended up being an hour-long film containing all-new Yoncé music. (Yes, we wrestled over reviewing this as either an album or a movie.)

Much more than her self-titled stealth-attack from 2013 (a “visual album”, she called it), Lemonade has a very particular story to tell, progressively tracking the breakdown of her marriage - that is, if we take it all literally. For years, we’d bought into the “Bonnie and Clyde” aesthetic. Turns out it’s been more of a “Team of Rivals” situation; a nightmarish partnership only fruitful in the production of Blue Ivy, and, now, Lemonade. (Marriage is nothing if not a rich mine for the content creators of the world.)

In the movie version of Lemonade, directed by a cadre of talented music videos helmers, we see a grieving Beyoncé attempt suicide, survive, and then, reborn, conduct gleeful carnage in the streets with a baseball bat and, later, a monster truck.

Suspicions over her husband's faithfulness lead to full-blown fury, madness, violence and, improbably, forgiveness.

Besides the lyrics and explicit visual cues, Beyoncé makes her mission clear with haunting narration (“adapted” by Somali-British poet Warsan Shire) that ties together the individual music videos into a somewhat cohesive art film. Not all of it works, though the first half is among the most evocative cinema we’ll probably get all year.

Nonetheless, in just 12 songs (including “Formation”, tacked onto the end), Beyoncé’s status as being totally un****withable becomes indisputable. Twitter agreed, collectively sharing wry "Jay Z watching Lemonade” memes and congratulating him on his 100th problem.

Jay Z watches Lemonade. pic.twitter.com/KiWAv7DnE3

— Libby Hill (@midwestspitfire) April 24, 2016

Jay-Z rn bc he finally got 100 problems pic.twitter.com/Fc8S48F1yA

— sam weir (@98schild) April 24, 2016

Bey looking at Jay on the couch during #LEMONADE like pic.twitter.com/7bLZZe99cD

— Brett S. Vergara (@BrettSVergara) April 24, 2016

Has anyone’s spot been blown up on this scale before?

(For his part, Jay has kept mum. In fact, all we’ve heard of Hov lately is his two-line Tweet-rap from Drake’s “Pop Style”. Not even a month old, his tiny verse – “They still out to get me, they don't get it. I cannot be got, and that's a given.” – now seems terribly dated.)

As a pop cultural moment, Lemonade is massive. In the wake of Prince and David Bowie's passing (and cries that unifying musical legends are now few and far between), Lemonade reminds you that the monoculture is alive and well.

But memes can’t mask bad music. Mercifully, just like ‘13’s Beyoncé, Lemonade is a solid, interesting and idiosyncratic record; socially conscious, adventurous and hugely catchy. Usually, those last three things are mutually exclusive. Bey finds a way.

Opening track “Pray You Catch Me” sees her distorted voice (not unlike experimental Kanye collaborator Caroline Shaw) twist into a melodious admission: that she’s grown wise to Jay’s wandering. Co-writer James Blake’s trademark, synthetic piano tinkling segues into the airy, Diplo-produced kiss-off song “Hold Up” (which offers writing credits to fellow alt heroes Ezra Koenig and Father John Misty).

Rather than being jarring, the transition from mournfulness to the musical equivalent of “Bye Felicia” reminds us this ain’t no pity party. To describe the following two tracks as 'bangers’ would be a gross understatement.

On the demonic “Don’t Hurt Yourself” (featuring Jack White) and bouncy “Sorry”, Bey drops memorable, foul-mouthed diss after diss. “Keep your money; I got my own,” is not the most striking, but it’s the only one I can probably print.

The mood drops to melancholy soon after, about when The Weeknd joins Bey for the ominous “6 Inch”. (James Blake isn’t the only distrusting sad-sack to make an appearance on Lemonade.)

There are no stinkers, although the New Orleans-inspired “Daddy Issues” is highly-skippable. It's maybe worth a listen for the context it provides alone, offering an insight into the dissolution of Matthew and Tina Knowles’ marriage (a partnership, Bey reckons, she’s repeating).

Best guest appearance belongs to the reliably fiery Kendrick Lamar, who joins Knowles for “Freedom”, which follows through on the promise of her provocative “Formation” as a legitimate civil rights anthem. Sampled in the movie but not the album is Malcolm X’s assertion, “the most disrespected person in America is the Black woman.” It remains the lingering theme of the project; the connective tissue that binds Beyoncé’s alleged betrayal with systemic racism.  Even the album cover – which, like the last, keeps Bey’s face obscured – is a statement, with her cornrows a direct contrast to Jay's cryptically-referred mistress, “Becky with the good hair.”

(For more reading on the ways in which Beyoncé intersects with the #BlackLivesMatter movement and how Lemonade is about "the undeniable power of a black woman's vulnerability" - thoughtful takes that, notably, were not written by a white dude - I recommend those two hyperlinked roundtables from Vulture.)

Becky be damned, Lemonade builds to something like a presidential pardon of Jay Z, with the euphoric, magnanimous “All Night” (buoyed by the irresistible horns of OutKast’s “Spottieottiedopaliscious). “True love breathes salvation back into me; with every tear came redemption, and my torturer became a remedy,” she croons. The song convinces you of communion. Still, can any tale that ends with the hero reuniting with their “torturer” really be considered happy?

No artist - not even one as indomitable in stature as Beyoncé - makes an album in isolation. (Even Kanye, offered the 'genius' designation by this very writer for The Life of Pablo, had a little help from more than 100 collaborators.) However, the artist who gives their name to an album gets credit for curation, especially if their name is as big as Bey's. After two decades in the industry, she knows well how the public perceive her and her records. So, it matters not that her latest effort has dozens of producers, song-writers and creatives on board. The ultimate product is hers. So too are her distinctive line-readings. (Her “sh-ee-eets” from “Hold Up” is just one example of an unexpected, delirious-making lyric. See also: “surfbort.”)

There’s always the possibility that Beyoncé isn’t relating an autobiographical tale. After all, why are singers the only artists who can’t create from alternate perspectives? Yet, she must have known how listeners would take to the web weaved here. Rachel Roy and Rita Ora, the usual suspects of Jay’s indiscretions (Beckys?), are also feeling the blowback on social media, and Bey isn't seeking to clear the air. Even if Jay Z willingly participated in this illusion – we see him late in the film, cowed, nursing Bey’s feet – it doesn’t deny the footprint left by Lemonade. The collateral damage is real. The reputations have shifted. The artist has finally spoken, far beyond herself and her sole experiences. And the music's pretty great too.

4.5/5

Lemonade is now available.