Lemonade – Beyonce

Year	Album	Artist	Stars	Score	Genre
2016	Lemonade	Beyonce	★★★½	78	Hip-Hop	R&B

On Lemonade, pop and R&B icon Beyonce explores recent struggles in her personal life surrounding her husband’s infidelity, dabbling in a range of different genres on her way to both self appreciation and forgiveness. 

Although some of the concepts and lyrics are pretty basic and elementary, you can track the narrative easily through the record. Compared to her other albums, it makes this one feel much more personal, even if the sometimes showy production and repetitive hooks still present it all as accessible pop tracks. 

Musically, the opening track “Pray You Catch Me” is presented as a normal R&B track, followed up by a light, warm song in “Hold Up,” which includes lyrical and melodic references to The Yeah Yeah Yeahs and Soulja Boy. Then “Don’t Hurt Yourself” combines some more summer pop vibes with rock guitars, drums and a feature by Jack White.  

From there, things continue to grow, with “6 Inch” being this grand, swagger-filled R&B song with this sexy 1960s soul sample, a top-level chorus by The Weeknd and a dramatic conclusion that interpolates “My Girls” by Animal Collective . “Daddy Problems” starts as a New Orleans-big band melody and slides into a country guitar groove. 

“Sandcastles” is a  fine,  standard, sentimental R&B ballad that leads into a James Blake interlude that opens the album’s final, exciting leg.

 “Freedom” is a proud hip-hop track that grabs old blues samples and energizes them with booming drums and screeching organs. Beyonce’s confidence and self-empowerment is on full display here, before Kendrick Lamar jumps in and turns the micro themes of the song into a macro political perspective. It’s not the best Kendrick has sounded on a feature, as his flow is much more tame and a bit softened for a pop audience, but it really brings the energy level and stakes of the album up to the max. “All Night” then pulls the reconciliation theme in to essentially close out the record, with a great vocal performance over an epic interpolation of OutKast’s “SpottieOttieDopaliscious” that’s probably my favorite part of the entire album. 

I don’t really understand why “Formation” was the last track on the album other than, sometimes artists tack singles onto the end that came out ahead of the album. “All Night” could have been a perfect closer, and the glitchy energy of “Formation” would have been fine sandwiched between “6 inch” and “Daddy Problems,” especially since her references to where her family’s from would have thematically fit in there as well. 

Overall, Lemonade is a very good record and represents Beyonce’s artistic peak compared to everything that she released before it. But, I do think it’s a little overrated, in part because of the simplistic lyrics used to tell her story. Some of the mid-tempo tracks here also get lost among the heavy hitters that are more dynamic and stylistically interesting.