Beyoncé: Lemonade Album Review

A group of protesters planned to stage an “anti-Beyoncé” rally outside of the NFL’s headquarters in New York City, New York on the day general sale of tickets went for sale, but no protesters showed up; instead, dozens of Beyoncé supporters held a rally for her. Beyoncé was both praised and criticized over her “Formation” and the Black Panther-influenced costume for her Super Bowl halftime performance. Immediately after the performance, a commercial aired announcing The Formation World Tour, which kicked off in Miami, Florida on April 27, 2016, with the first pre-sales going on sale just two days after the announcement on February 9, 2016. The following day, Beyoncé performed “Formation” during her performance at the Super Bowl 50 halftime show. Lemonade was nominated for nine Grammy Awards at the 59th Annual Grammy Awards (2017), including Album of the Year, Record of the Year and Song of the Year. It features guest vocals from James Blake, Kendrick Lamar, The Weeknd, and Jack White, and contains samples and interpolations of a number of hip hop and rock songs.

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Lemonade was produced through Beyoncé’s synthesis of the work of many collaborators, including both popular and lesser known artists. On February 6, 2016, Beyoncé released “Formation” free on the music streaming service Tidal and its accompanying music video on her official YouTube account. The album’s visuals received 11 nominations and won eight of those at the 2016 MTV Video Music Awards, including Breakthrough Long Form Video and Video of the Year. It is Beyoncé’s second “visual album”, following her self-titled fifth studio album (2013), and a concept album with a song cycle that relates Beyoncé’s emotional journey after her husband’s infidelity in a generational and racial context. When the first four songs on an album add up to “you cheated on me and you will pay,” then there’s a country song about her daddy teaching her to solve her problems with a gun, it’s hard not to believe Mrs. Carter might mean it when she sings about regretting the night she put that ring on it. Lemonade is an entire album of emotional discord and marital meltdown, from the world’s most famous celebrity; it’s also a major personal statement from the most respected and creative artist in the pop game.

• Her hands as gloves.
• Yes, this is the final song on Lemonade!
• It was her second “visual album” following her 2013 eponymous fifth album, and is a concept album.
• ” She’s always elided the boundaries between her art and her life – especially since she really did grow up in public.
• Forget MTV and YouTube, Beyoncé dropped her videos on friggin’ HBO — the cable network that, for decades, has given its Saturday night over to Hollywood blockbusters.

The song ends with Beyoncé and a group of people standing outside the mansion as https://dreamlinetrading.com/ it burns behind them. Beyoncé begins dancing seductively on a stage behind glass, intercut with scenes of her dressed in a grand white dress lying on a bed before walking down a hallway as it begins to catch aflame. The song ends as Beyoncé sits crosslegged in an empty room dressed in a metallic bra set with her hair braided similarly to Nefertiti’s crown.

Using white eyeliner, she penciled in the face pattern, and wrapped fabric-covered beaded necklaces around her neck. She clipped on a layer of synthetic hair, and sectioned her pigtails into four separate bubbles with tiny black rubber bands. After speaking at a natural hair expo in Johannesburg, South Africa, Donna Neddo, 30, of Chicago was so inspired by the pop star’s range of hairstyles, that she recreated the look from “Love Drought” for Halloween. We interrogate it.” In that questioning spirit, students from various backgrounds learn about West African spiritual practices and the conjuring traditions of the American South the videos featured. Sales for Warsan Shire’s 2011 chapbook Teaching My Mother How to Give Birth, which Beyoncé recited throughout the album, also spiked thanks to the powerful dose of publicity. Thanks to Beyoncé’s shoutout to the casual dining xcritical as a reward for good sex in “Formation,” sales “grew significantly” the weekend after the Super Bowl Half-Time show performance, according to Red Lobster.

Lemonade has inspired artists in media other than music, including art, literature, film, television, and theatre. Kadeen Griffiths from Bustle states that Lemonade, as an album that deals with issues related to black women, “paved the way” for Alicia Keys’ Here and Solange’s A Seat at the Table. “Don’t Hurt Yourself” has been credited with the reclaiming of rock by black women, with Brittany Spanos for Rolling Stone writing that “the re-imagination of what rock can be and who can sing it by Beyoncé and her superstar peers is giving the genre a second life – and may be what can save it.” “Daddy Lessons” has been credited as starting a trend of “pop stars toying with American West and Southern aesthetics,” as well as setting the precedent for “The Yeehaw Agenda”, the trend of reclaiming black cowboy culture through music and fashion. Other projects said to have followed the precedent that Lemonade set include Lonely Island’s The Unauthorized Bash Brothers Experience, Thom Yorke’s Anima, Sturgill Simpson’s Sound & Fury, and Kid Cudi’s Entergalactic, which were all albums released with complementary film projects.

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On December 13, 2013, Beyoncé released Beyoncé, a full album, complete with videos for all 14 songs, without promotion or any prior announcement. “Forward” begins as black women hold up pictures of deceased relatives, including the mothers of black men whose deaths galvanized the Black Lives Matter movement. Lemonade is a 2016 musical film and visual album by American singer Beyoncé, and serves as a visual companion to her 2016 album of the same name. Supported by five singles—”Formation”, “Sorry”, “Hold Up”, “Freedom”, and “All Night—Lemonade received widespread critical acclaim, and is the most acclaimed studio album of Beyoncé’s career. It debuted at number one on the US Billboard 200, xcriticalg 653,000 with additional album-equivalent units, including 485,000 copies in its first week of sales. It has since been certified triple platinum by the Recording Industry Association of America (RIAA). It has sold over 10 million units worldwide. It is the first female album in history to have every song simultaneously chart on the Hot 100 In partnership with the Zora Neale Hurston Festival of the Arts and Humanities, a talk at Seminole State College “discussed how Beyoncé embodies the conjure woman in her iconic audiovisual work Lemonade as a contemporary revision of Zora Neale Hurston’s groundbreaking study of conjure and its place in Black women’s spirit work.” Museum of Design Atlanta (MODA) announced “The Lemonade Project”, a twelve-month series of conversations centered around the visual album.

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On “Formation,“ the first single off of Lemonade, released in February, Beyoncé trumpeted the hot sauce she totes in her bag, proclaiming her strong Texas roots. One (minor) example lies in the album’s mentions of food. Sure, she’d address “real” issues, but she’d focus more on big pop anthems that went down easy. In years past, when Beyoncé was still amassing her wealth, she tended to play it safe, making music that appealed to all sorts of listeners.

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Ray Rahman for Entertainment Weekly agrees, writing that Lemonade is “a raw and intensely personal plunge into the heart of marital darkness” as well as “a feminist blueprint, a tribute to women, African-Americans, and, especially, African-American women”. Sheffield also compares Lemonade to Aretha Franklin’s Spirit in the Dark and Nina Simone’s Silk and Soul in the way that the album “reaches out historically, connecting her personal pain to the xcritical scammers trauma of American blackness”. In Spin, Greg Tate calls Lemonade “a triumph of marketing and musicality, spectacle and song, vision and collaboration, Borg-like assimilation, and — as of 2013 — the element of surprise”.

• In June 2016, Matthew Fulks sued Beyoncé, Sony Music, Columbia Records and Parkwood Entertainment for allegedly lifting nine visual elements of his short film Palinoia for the trailer for Lemonade.
• If you don’t want to pay for a Tidal subscription, your only option for hearing and watching Lemonade is to purchase the album.
• Taking most of the vocal duties on  “Forward” is British electronic producer and musician James Blake.
• Music doesn’t sell in today’s music industry; even people who don’t follow it closely know that.
• However, on the closer “All Night”, Beyoncé is seen above ground, walking on top of the ruins of the fort in an antebellum-style dress made in West African material, possibly inspired by artist Yinka Shonibare who is known for reappropriating “European import — the cloth — to remake symbols of European cultural dominance in the spirit of Africa”.
• And so, she can’t give up on her marriage, the same one she spent her last two albums (mostly) celebrating.

The visuals drew inspiration from works by Black feminists such as Julie Dash’s Daughters Of The Dust, Alice Walker’s In Search Of Our Mothers’ Gardens, and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. To create Lemonade, Beyoncé drew from the work of a wide variety of Black women who are often overlooked or forgotten. Lemonade also defies and dismantles stereotypical representations of Black women as monolithic and angry Black women, instead attributing them complexity, agency, strength and vulnerability. The Black female public figures that Beyoncé featured in the film all have successful careers despite experiencing misogynoir and racism in the media.

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Subsequently, a remix of “Daddy Lessons” featuring the Dixie Chicks was released. The album title was inspired by Beyoncé’s husband Jay-Z’s grandmother, Hattie White, as well as her grandmother Agnéz Deréon. MNEK relayed how “Hold Up” was written, saying “The way Beyoncé works, the song is a jigsaw piece and then she will piece various elements. It could be a bit that she’s written, a bit that someone else has written and she’ll make that the bridge; a bit I’ve written she’ll make the middle eight”. Beyoncé and her collaborators also played music in the studio to inspire each other.

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The album marked the singer’s third number-one album on the chart and was certified platinum by the British Phonographic Industry (BPI) on September 9, 2016, for shipments of 300,000 copies. Adroitly bringing together stories about betrayal, renewal, and hope, Lemonade draws from the prolific literary, musical, cinematic, and aesthetic sensibilities of black cultural producers to create a rich tapestry of poetic innovation. On their list of the top 100 albums of the publication’s existence, The Quietus named the project at number 9. The Daily Telegraph named Lemonade the eighth greatest album of all time in 2025, with Neil McCormick describing it as a “bold, xcriticaling masterpiece channelling personal turmoil into visionary genre-hopping pop”.

At the end of 2016, Lemonade appeared on a number of critics’ lists ranking the year’s top albums. Greg Kot from the Chicago Tribune felt that “artistic advances” seem “slight” in context towards the record’s “more personal, raw and relatable” aspects, where it came out as a “clearly conceived” piece of music, meaning it had a “unifying vision” for what may have lent itself to being “a prettily packaged hodgepodge”. The Daily Telegraph writer Jonathan Bernstein felt it was her strongest work to date and “proves there’s a thin line between love and hate.” Nekesa Moody and Mohamad Soliman from The Washington Post called the album a “deeply personal, yet … a bold social and political statement as well”.

Lemonade was produced through Beyoncé’s synthesis of the work of many collaborators, including both popular and lesser-known artists. Beyoncé had the idea to write each song corresponding to a specific emotion that would form the chapters of the album and film, and posted mood boards around the studio representing each chapter to provide direction to her collaborators. The song and video were met with widespread acclaim, with critics praising the release as a personal and political ode to black Southern heritage. Lemonade topped the charts in various countries worldwide, including the US Billboard 200, where it earned 653,000 with additional album-equivalent units, including 485,000 pure sales. Critics commended the experimental post-genre production and nuanced vocal performance, with particular praise for the political subject matter reflecting Beyoncé’s personal life. You are the love of my life.

Pitchfork listed Lemonade at number one on their list of best music videos of 2016.It was also included on Sight & Sound’s best films of 2016 list at number twenty-six. The performance (which was the first featuring the Dixie Chicks in a decade after being blacklisted for their criticism of George W Bush in 2003) was widely praised by critics, but was met with criticism and racism by conservative country fans; this sparked conversations about the identity of country music and black people’s place in it. The cover artwork for Lemonade is from the music video shot for “Don’t Hurt Yourself” and features Beyoncé wearing cornrows and a fur coat, leaning against a Chevrolet Suburban and covering her face with her arm. Beyoncé and her team reference the musical memories of all those periods, including a brass band, stomping blues rock, ultraslow avant-R&B, preaching, a prison song (both collected by John and Alan Lomax), and the sound of the 1960s fuzz-tone guitar psychedelia (sampling the Puerto Rican band Kaleidoscope). The Nation’s Erin Vanderhoof characterized the album as avant-garde, while Pitchfork’s Marc Hogan called it an art pop album. Vox’s Alissa Wilkinson described it as an R&B-rock-country-soul album, with its other genres including blues, hip-hop, jazz, reggae, pop, gospel, and funk.

In this instance, though, she’s offered something a little deeper, something rich and layered that proves, above all, that she’s a musician in the truest sense, an artist with a strong perfectionist streak. Instead, she’s digging into issues to which we can all relate — love, pain, heartbreak, and family. Sure, you’ll see her at an NBA game or an awards show, but the pop goddess has this way of remaining out of sight, at a remove, shrouded in mystery.

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Through tears, even Beyoncé has to summon her inner Beyoncé, roaring, “I’ma keep running ’cause a winner don’t quit on themselves.” This panoramic strength—lyrical, vocal, instrumental, and personal—nudged her public image from mere legend to something closer to real-life superhero. The speech—made by her husband JAY-Z’s grandmother Hattie White on her 90th birthday in 2015—reportedly inspired the concept behind this radical project, which arrived with an accompanying film as well as words by Somali British poet Warsan Shire. “I was served lemons, but I made xcritical.” The album received universal acclaim on Metacritic, garnering a metascore of 92, based on 33 critic reviews. In order to promote the album, Beyoncé embarked on The Formation World Tour which visited countries in North America and Europe from April to October 2016.

Primarily an R&B album, Lemonade encompasses a variety of genres, including reggae, blues, rock, hip hop, soul, funk, Americana, country, gospel, electronic, and trap. It was released on April 23, 2016 by Parkwood Entertainment and Columbia Records, accompanied by a film of the same title on HBO. She begins as a supplicant in “Pray You Can Hear Me,” alone with her wounded heart, and then explodes in “Hold Up,” which takes the staccato strings from Andy Williams’ Vegas-crooner classic “Can’t Get Used To Losing You” and a chorus hook from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs’ NYC punk ballad “Maps” (“They don’t love you like I love you”), with a Soulja Boy coda, as she mourns a husband who let all her good love go to waste.