On April 23rd, 2016 Beyonce released her sixth studio album, Lemonade. This 46- minute adventure in music features an accompanying one-hour film that can currently be viewed on the streaming service Tidal. This cohesive piece knits together R&B, blues, soul, funk, gospel, trap, hip-hop and more all tied together with an off-kilter bow.
Lemonade features many artists that help tell Beyonce’s story including Jack White, The Weeknd, Kendrick Lamar, and James Blake. These guests may have been part of the reason that Lemonade’s debut skyrocketed to Number One on the US Billboard 200, selling 485,000 copies in it’s first week.
As Beyonce stretches her soul to its ends in order to air out the disappointment and impurities from her past in the only way she knows how, I feel as though I am interrupting an intimate moment. Isn’t this unabashed honesty all we crave from the artists that we choose to give our undivided attention to? How strong must someone be to let the world into the darkest corners of their psyche or the rotten parts of their heart? Would I be strong enough? Would you? Beyonce discusses the complexities of self-discovery, healing, trusting your intuition, unfaithfulness, emptiness, and finally, forgiveness in only 45 minutes of music.
Lemonade stuns every heartstring in the listener’s chest. The complexity of emotion blankets over the masses as everyone can find a song to find solace in. No matter your race, gender or sexuality, we’ve all been let down at some point in our lives. Beyonce plays to this with a calculated precision.
As she makes her way through the stages of grief, we see her creativity and understanding pour out as she crosses the denial stage and reaches the threshold of anger. We see her coming to terms with the anger that moves her to apathy and emptiness. We begin to see the light at the end of the tunnel when we hear the hum of the piano introducing the song “Sandcastles”.
We partied to the mega-hit, Formation, for two months before the album’s release, but somehow after listening to the full story of Lemonade, Formation instills a renewed strength into the listener. Formation now becomes a anthem to overcoming every obstacle no matter how deep the wound, because ultimately the world keeps spinning. This becomes the message of Lemonade as a whole. Beyonce conveys that everyone has problems but it is how we react to them that make us who we are.
Marti Vaughan, Music Director
