What defines an album has moved beyond the constraints of its format.
It’s nothing new, really, to connect visuals to an album or even a movie.
Yet something about Beyonce’s latest project, Lemonade, which arrived via a one-hour film on HBO, delves deep into infidelity and relationships in a way that feels bold, intimate and fresh.
Lemonade — named, I assume, after the adage about turning lemons into a sweet drink — fills a popular narrative about break-up albums and records about marital trouble. There’s something romantic, if you’ll pardon that word in this instance, about the narrative of such albums. It parallels the American dream – Anyone who works hard and pays their dues can vault over even the highest obstacles.
People identify with wanting to turn tears, sadness and a broken heart into something better. In the case of Lemonade, it’s about martial issues, but it’s also a concept album and a video musical. It redefines not just break-up albums, but gives a window into where albums and music might go.
For Lemonade, Beyoncé frames the entire record and companion film of same name around an affair.
Whether an affair between Jay Z and Beyoncé is real or imagined is irrelevant. I found myself thinking of the words of piano rocker Ben Folds, who once said nothing is against the rules in creativity.
“If I feel that I want to write in first person and completely make it up, then I’m going to do it,” Folds said. “And I realize that it’s a powerful, uh — The ‘I’ in songwriting is powerful because people tap into the celebrity of it. … (People say,) ‘The guy that’s singing that actually did that.’ ”
Throughout the picture, voiceover serves as the connective tissue between songs. The interstitial moments give it the feeling of a musical, pushing the story forward between bursts of song. Through those snippets of voiceover, some of which cribbed from Kenya-born poet Warsan Shire, Beyoncé's narrator moves through 11 self-decided stages of recovery from cheating.
“With every tear came redemption and my torturer became my remedy,” her character says in the final chapter’s voiceover.
“Formation,” the song which caused an outcry in February after its performance at halftime of Super Bowl 50 at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, closes the record. After Bey's character moves through the stages of grief, loss and rediscovery, “Formation” reads as a powerful closing statement. The first verse, in which she states where she comes from and talks about her body, reads as pride and confidence after a record of heartbreak, pain and rising out of the ashes.
It also sounds like a record only Beyoncé could have made. Her film and the narrator she portrays brings the project into full view in a way the music alone could not. By showing couples at different ages as well as her own home movies and making nods toward her parents’ 2011 divorce, Beyoncé’s Lemonade film either feels like a piercing self-examination.
Video is a field she’s dabbled in before. Her surprise, self-titled 2013 album sold with an accompanying music video for each song. She’s not breaking new ground here, but the idea of such an immersive experience is an area she can afford to explore more easily than others.
Musicians on film and video is nothing new. The Beatles were the subjects of A Hard Day’s Night more than 50 years ago. Elvis Presley starred in movies. Music videos help promote sales. Kanye West made a short film for the music video for “Runaway” in 2010 and even “Weird Al” Yankovic rolled out his last album, 2014's Mandatory Fun, with a series of music videos.
But what Beyonce’s done is use video not just as a marketing tool, but as an essential part of the experience and understanding of the record. It’s impossible to uncouple the film from the music.
She’s testing the boundaries of what an album can be while simultaneously delivering her most insightful and personal work yet.
The project’s title might be referencing turning lemons into lemonade, but it’s hard to think Queen Bey isn’t trying to do the same for the music industry, too.
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