Beyoncé’s LEMONADE turns 10 years old. Our original review shows why the album remains an exceptional work of modern pop formally, politically and emotionally.
Our look back at a record by Beyoncé that has no flaws even after ten years. You can read our six-star review from 2016 here:
The Queen of R’n’B’s sixth album is a film full of disturbingly visual music. In it, the intimate becomes iconic and the personal becomes political.
What was left of love: a fleeting kiss as a sign of suspicion, but also of closeness, of memory, of that goddamn residual hope that turns into hatred and finally into new strength over the course of the album. “You can taste the dishonesty/ It’s all over your breath as you pass it off so cavalier.” It takes exactly two lines before you feel: LEMONADE is not the latest update of the long-running R’n’B hit “Lying stilts and how to deal with them”. It is an extraordinary album from Beyoncé: formal, political, emotional.
An album? A question.
Like BEYONCÉ from 2013, LEMONADE appeared online without any specific advance notice, as a bundle of twelve songs on Tidal and as a one-hour music film on HBO. With this, Queen Bey once again asks the question of what “an album” actually means today. You can interpret this as artistic self-empowerment or as a flexing of muscles by someone who can afford it.
In any case, the images and the music, which is very visual in its own way, are much more important than any strategic castling. How Beyoncé throws herself from a rooftop and dives into the floods of her past. How she marches through the hood in the offbeat with a basi and wrecks show-off cars with a monster truck. How she tells the shithead off to a Led Zeppelin break and shrinks his affairs into girly memes over fully synthetic bouncy ball trap (“You better call Becky with the good hair”). How she closes the circle from unfaithful father to unfaithful husband with scraps of memory from the faux family album. And how she finally opens the narrative from the private to the political: a speech by Malcolm X. A solidarity group photo with the mothers of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown and Eric Garner. A twerk dance from Serena whose full power only becomes apparent when you know what she has had to listen to as a black woman in the white world. #BlackGirlMagic and #BlackLivesMatter. Beyoncé’s own, very personal interpretations of Southernness, of blackness, of femininity, of feminism.
In the light
Beyoncé is pure pop made of flesh and blood. She draws from the canon of contemporary cool: vocals from Kendrick Lamar and James Blake, beats from Diplo and MeLo‑X, cross-country cultural references from Animal Collective to Soulja Boy.
By the way, LEMONADE ends in light, with brass notes of quiet triumph and words of reconciliation: “Found the truth beneath your lies/ And true love never has to hide.” Anyone who still thinks it’s important whether Beyoncé actually means her husband, Jay Z, has really understood nothing.
