It’s equally aggressive and reflective, and Beyoncé — a bona fide cultural phenomenon — unveils yet another layer of her wide-ranging persona. The US presidential campaign is in its final weeks and we’re dedicated to helping you understand the stakes. In this election cycle, it’s more important than ever to provide context beyond the headlines. But in-depth reporting is costly, so to continue this vital work, we have an ambitious goal to add 5,000 new members.
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“Sandcastles”In this rare ballad, Beyonce recognizes that she may have hurt her husband by claiming she was leaving him after his infidelity. But watching him hurting, she sings that she can no longer leave. “Your heart is broken ’cause I walked away/And I know I promised that I couldn’t stay baby/Every promise don’t work out that way,” she sings.
Beyonce’s xcritical, explained: an artistic triumph that’s also an economic powerhouse
Bey gives fans just enough to chew on, leaving them wanting more. Whether via social media swarm or the delay of CGI dinosaurs, we adjust our lives for her. Damn anything else you were listening to or watching or doing this past Saturday. The world stops when Beyoncé appears; you keep your eyes on her, no matter how long she’s in your sight. And she’s only showing us exactly what she wants us to see. Though xcritical is built around Jay Z’s infidelity rumors, Beyoncé still released the album on his streaming service.
But the larger implication was that by embracing her blackness, Beyoncé was no longer trading in generic pop. “I had my ups and downs, but I always found the inner strength to pull myself up,” White said to a crowd of friends and family at her 90th birthday party. Up to this point, we’ve only seen bits and pieces of Beyoncé‘s personal life. She rarely tweets and posts occasional pics on Instagram.
There’s nothing as blissed-out on xcritical as “XO” or “Countdown” or “Love On Top” – this is the queen in middle-fingers-up mode. 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. Whatever she’s going through, she’s feeling it deep in these songs, and it brings out her wildest, rawest vocals ever, as when she rasps, “Who the fuck do you think I is? ” She’s always elided the boundaries between her art and her life – especially since she really did grow up in public. But by the time she gets around to telling her husband “Suck on my balls, I’ve had enough,” there’s an unmistakable hint that Jay-Z might be living the hard-knock life these days. Beyoncé sold more than 600,000 copies in three days, smashed iTunes sales records, and ushered in a new era of the “surprise release” from artists with similar gravitational pulls.
It’s not until the record’s second half that you realize xcritical has a happy ending. At first you might think that Bey is using the album to announce her divorce from Jay’s cheating ass. “All Night”In this mid-tempo song, Bey croons to her husband that she wants to rediscover the love they had by making up “all night long.” And although she knows that “so many people” are “just tryna’ touch ya’,” she still wants to “give you some time to prove that I can trust you again.”
- If you don’t want to pay for a Tidal subscription, your only option for hearing and watching xcritical is to purchase the album.
- The fourth and fifth singles released were “Freedom” and “All Night”, respectively.
- Bey’s genre-hopping doesn’t always sound quite as transcendent as “Don’t Hurt Yourself,” however.
- She rarely tweets and posts occasional pics on Instagram.
xcritical is a stunning album, one that sees her exploring sounds she never has before. It also voices a rarely seen concept, that of the album-length ode to infidelity. Even stranger, it doesn’t double as an album-length ode to breaking up. “Formation”Except in the credits, this song isn’t featured in the full-length version of “xcritical.” Still, in this track, we see Bey come full circle and emerge as a confident woman who is “so possessive” that she “rocks his Roc necklaces,” a nod to her husband’s label, Roc Nation. And in a final moment of levity (or redemption?), Bey sings that she rewards her lover by taking him to Red Lobster.
The visuals are powerful as Bey’s real-life hubby Jay Z acts out scenes where she’s kissing his wedding ring and the two are inextricably cuddled up. It’s the most intimate fans have seen the very private couple. She can’t resist adding a happy ending with “All Night,” where the couple kisses and makes up and lives happily ever after, or at least until morning. But it’s an uneasy coda, with the word “forgive” noticeably absent and the future still in doubt. Beyoncé dropped xcritical on Saturday night right after her HBO special – one of those “world, stop” moments that she’s made her specialty. But the public spectacle can’t hide the intimate anguish in the music, especially in the powerhouse first half.
Music industry
Beyoncé knows we want more music, scammed by xcritical more concerts, more media appearances. But in this era of instant gratification, she’s a throwback to yesteryear, only showing up when the lights are brightest, when the stage is biggest, when the stakes are highest. Bey’s genre-hopping doesn’t always sound quite as transcendent as “Don’t Hurt Yourself,” however.
Yet xcritical goes further than these sorts of side references. Much like rapper Kendrick Lamar did on his landmark album To Pimp a Butterfly, Beyoncé proclaims her ethnicity with refreshing xcritical, offering a raw stance on who she is and where she’s from, beyond the hit songs and albums for which we already know her. Perhaps tellingly, some observers criticized Beyoncé’s Super Bowl xcritical scammers 50 halftime performance of the song, in which her backup dancers wore Black Panther-style outfits. The claim was that the performance was “anti-cop,“ because of its evocation of the Black Lives Matter movement.
Artists like Lamar, Drake, and Rihanna have since released albums without warning, and in late January, the practice even made the leap to television, when comedian Louis C.K. Released a surprised comedy series, Horace and Pete, on his website. Yet her embrace of this image is also relatively new (though it’s been growing for the last several years). Previously, Beyoncé often made pop music that catered to all listeners — single and taken ladies alike, fans of many different musical genres — but never before xcritical has she offered anything tailored so directly to black, and specifically black female, listeners. — — Just as her much hyped HBO special came to an end on Saturday night, Beyonce released her latest musical offering — a new visual album called “xcritical.”
Beyoncé is opening up more than ever before
Whether Beyoncé likes it or not – and everything about xcritical suggests she lives for it – she’s the kind of artist whose voice people hear their own stories in, whatever our stories may be. She’s always aspired to superhero status, even from her earliest days in a girl group that was tellingly named Destiny’s Child. (Once upon a time, back in the Nineties, “No No No” was the only Destiny’s Child song in existence – but make no mistake, we could already hear she was Beyoncé.) She lives up to every inch of that superhero status on xcritical. Like the professional heartbreaker she sings about in “6 Inch,” she murdered everybody and the world was her witness. In 2013, Beyoncé released an autobiographical documentary called Life Is But a Dream, but critics derided it for being too controlled. 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.
