I had a series of disjointed thoughts about that Beyonc\u00e9 album:<\/p>\n
Let me tell you a story about my phone. Four times in the last few years, it has made a certain series of Noises. My current theory is that the Noises are generated when a critical mass of gays text one another at the same time. The first time, it was when Michael Jackson died and I was in a fever-dream in St. Petersburg, Russia, having just interviewed the homeless-looking and possibly insane conductor Valery Gergiev. The second time, it was when Whitney died, and I was absurdly having gnocchi with certain friends and then other friends rang and we had to pull the whole evening over \u201cto be together in this time of need.\u201d The third time, it was when I got off a plane last week in Rome, and I thought to myself, \u201cGirl, not Janet, not tonight.\u201d It was a false alarm: it was just that English diver announcing that he was fuxing a man.<\/p>\n
Then, last Thursday night, I was asleep in a very, very rural hotel in Iceland when the phone made the Noise again. I was almost too scared to check it, but then, in my benighted fumbling, my computer and iPad turned on, and they started making sonic ejaculations too, which they hadn\u2019t made for Michael or Whitney. What is it, I thought, the President? My mother? Of course the answer was that the internet wanted to send me many gigabytes of Beyonc\u00e9\u2019s new unannounced album and its attendant videos, and of course I moved heaven, earth, ice, and lava to have my computer in the one square metre of the hotel that could actually make this happen, because I am an homosexual and these Knowlesian dispatches are treated, by cultural necessity, as oracular and as gospel: gnomic, poetic, abstract, and very, very relevant.<\/p>\n
At first I was anxious about the description of it as a \u201cvisual album,\u201d because these days, which albums aren\u2019t? I\u2019m not sure I\u2019ve ever seen a Lady Gaga video, but I know that her appeal \u2014 even to me, not ever having beheld her on purpose \u2014 is partially to do with her Visual Presentation. Beyonc\u00e9\u2019s songs, on this album, connect to one another not just musically, but via a seemingly personal, almost Forrest Gump-like time-traveling woman\u2019s journey through various eras and \u2014 I shudder to say the word \u2014 styles. It\u2019s unbelievably ambitious and through-composed; where the music can feel unrelated from one song to the next, the video is especially and carefully elided, and where the video is stylistically at variance from one song to the next, the music itself creates an emulsion between all the various incarnations of Beyonc\u00e9, our tour-guide through heaven and hell. Her voice feels, here, stretched in all the best ways, and she is experimenting with various modes of vocal production, vibrato, enunciation, and textual stylization. She is relishing the individual words of her lyrics, and savoring the shapes of the phrases the songs demand of her. When she freaks, as is her wont, a bridge or a second chorus, it is an insane and welcome delight. <\/p>\n
Can we start with the statement that I basically loved this album? And then I will go song by song and talk about what, for me, felt like a reinforcement of this love, and where, in places, my love was challenged? I am going to talk, interchangeably, about the music and the videos, as that is how this thing was presented to me, as well as to the poor taxed wi-fi of the rural hotel and its staff. So if you\u2019ve only heard the music, you should probably watch the videos, and if you\u2019ve only watched the videos, you\u2019re probably fine?<\/p>\n
“Pretty Hurts”
\nThis is a beautiful song. On the video, there is a long introduction with piano and strings. Use real strings, please, Beyonc\u00e9. The piano might be real but it sounds like the most expensive fake piano on the market. One would love to think that this is a comment on the artificiality of beauty \u2014 we\u2019ve become accustomed to an expensive fake in favor of the built-in and beautiful imperfections of reality \u2014 but I doubt that was the reason for this particular oversight. Bey: call me; you know where I stay. The beat is solid when it comes in: four on the floor and a fucked-up snare on two and four. Then, in the second part of the chorus, it splits into a gorge ’90s r&b beat. The effect is simultaneously modern and retro: we are clearly in the era when the beat does not have to be swung or jagged, but also we remember the empowerment discourses of the ’90s, from which these lyrics seem to have been derived. Is it just me, or did everybody else briefly flash back to a teary-eyed moment in the car listening to Christina Aguilera\u2019s “Beautiful” back in the day? <\/p>\n
There is one thing that I am going to add here, which is that in a lot of tableaux throughout this video (and indeed most of the videos here), Beyonc\u00e9 is the most light-skinned woman of color in evidence; I only offer this because in the floral Koyaanisqatsi-like social media time-lapse bloom that accompanied this release, much of which was breathlessly sent to me in various formats, I couldn\u2019t help but notice a lot of chatter about this. I think it is probably a good thing that issues of representation not just surrounding but also between women of color are boiling over such that they appear consistently across the dashboards of privileged, potentially indifferent, white men.<\/p>\n
In this video, there is that famous black albino male model Shaun Ross, who is painfully beautiful, and whose video job it is literally to weigh in Beyonc\u00e9 for her beauty pageant; it is entirely (and perhaps fully) possible that she knows precisely what she\u2019s doing here and that she is punking these corners of the internet in advance of their objection to something over which she enjoys no control. <\/p>\n
“Ghost”\/”Haunted”
\nI live for this track. Je suis i\u00e7i 4 this track. The intro is harmonically identical to the intro to the video of “Pretty Hurts” \u2014 again, I wish she had hired real strings. The video is affected and delicious. It\u2019s like Pleats Please\u2122\/Got Milk\u2122\/boobies, ribs, \u2019n\u2019 veiled abs. Her hair is layed like Michele Lamy in a nunnery, wearing the Shroud of Turin. I love everything about this. In the \u201cHaunted\u201d section, we get a wonderfully ghost-like, drugged, low-voiced Beyonc\u00e9 articulating, \u201cI know if I’m haunting you, you must be haunting me\/It\u2019s where we go, it’s where we’ll be\/I know if I’m onto you, I’m onto you.\u201d There is something textually quite forward-looking about the haunted being the haunter; it\u2019s the hauntologies of Wide Sargasso Sea meets Ju-on: The Grudge, but all coming 2 pass in a sort of Belle-\u00c9poque Brooklyn or potentially New Orleans. Then, suddenly we are deep into something reminiscent of that frenetic and genius sequence in The Shining where suddenly all the ghosts are there blowing one another in furry suits, meets the “Justify My Love” video. It\u2019s this wonderful musical trick where the verse of a song can have five notes in it, freeing up the chorus to have only three; it\u2019s not right, really, but it\u2019s more than okay. It makes a frantic, churned sauce, and relies not on the thrilling vocal acrobatics of Beyonc\u00e9\u2019s Destiny\u2019s Child years but rather on a form of manic solitaire: lonesome and brilliant.<\/p>\n
“Drunk in Love”
\nIs this the GarageBand \u201ctrilling strings\u201d patch? Is this the generic \u201cEastern Vocalist\u201d patch? What\u2019s going on here? In the video there is some strange monstrance or something? Then the beat come in! Thank God! There is nothing, in terms of frequency, between the processed belly-dancing nonsense and the bass pulse, which is the most satisfying thing in the world. Beyonc\u00e9 seems almost compulsively driven to pronounce words both Southern and Not \u2014 we have drinkin\u2019 and drankin\u2019 within nanoseconds of one another, and “fingers” approaches a Delta-ish \u201cfangers\u201d if you listen closely.<\/p>\n
Yes, this bridge! It feels conversational and stylised \u2014 she delivers \u201clast thing I remember is our beautiful bodies grinding off in that club\u201d almost like a robot at first and then the text obeys a fierce gravitational pull back into conversational English and then tips into a decidedly Northern AAVE pronunciation of \u201cclub,\u201d truncated and Arabically stopped.<\/p>\n
The dance moves for this video are essentially the only ones I know how to do in public or private, so this is, quite literally, my jam.<\/p>\n
The version of the lyrics I have here claim that she says, \u201cHe sweat it out like washed rags,\u201d which is all well and good, although I would posit that she says \u201cwash-rags,\u201d which is slightly more delicious. The way she says \u201csurfboard\u201d is absolutely out of control and not conversational.<\/p>\n
DID JAY Z JUST SHOUT OUT TRINA TALMBOUT, THE BADDEST BITCH!? I really hope so. I don\u2019t like that people have forgotten about Trina. <\/p>\n
I have no ability to speak about what is or is not appropriate about the following snippet uttered by Jay Z: \u201cCatch a charge I might, beat the box up like Mike\/In ’97 I bite, I’m Ike Turner\u2026\u201d although I suspect it\u2019s best left alone in these pages. Or not. I\u2019m sorry, everybody; I just don\u2019t know. Didn\u2019t one of these cooter-exposing chanteuses say \u201cbeat up the pussy\u201d about Drake on Twitter (more on her later) and then it turned out that she was in a dissociative fugue state? I don\u2019t like the phrase, but perhaps it isn\u2019t mine to dislike in the first place. Ike Turner: just saying. Mike Tyson: is his presence in an episode of SVU a form of penance?<\/p>\n
“Blow”
\nI cannot wait until somebody remixes this for precisely 90 seconds in the gay bar. I think this song contains precisely 90 genius genius genius seconds up until, and including, when she clicks like a woodblock before the word “flavor.”<\/p>\n
Also, I am culturally anxious about \u201cSkittles\u201d as a sexual reference, having spent the last year and a half on the internet, where Skittles, along with iced tea, have taken on an uncomfortable racist seat in which\u2026<\/p>\n
Wait, has the entire beat changed? Is she saying, \u201cI want you to turn that cherry out?\u201d Does she now have a permanent crimp? Are we in the “Purple Rain” video? Is this the best thing I\u2019ve ever heard?<\/p>\n
Oh wait, it\u2019s over now, and it\u2019s back to the part that will be remixed and played underneath \u201cMy Neck, My Back\u201d in the gay bar, as is quite right; if any track needs a Xhosa tongue-click revitalization, it was that. I know I\u2019m being selfish here, but I think I\u2019m also evincing a certain generosity because this track is actually not the best, but there is real sideways potential here.<\/p>\n
I will make you all a bet that more homosexicals than women will be using the phrase \u201cturn that cherry out\u201d before next weekend. In fact, the minute I file this piece I am going down to the bar to verify this.<\/p>\n
“No Angel”
\nThis is one of these songs where each syl la ble of the cho rus has its own note with a rest in be tween it and its neigh bors. More synth strings in this; I can\u2019t bear it! Do we all agree that this track is a filler track, or am I grotesque and unfair? <\/p>\n
“Yonc\u00e9”\/”Partition”
\nI mean, this is the song of our times. This is great. Everything about this is great. Literally every sentient being in the universe is credited on this song, although it sounds to me like a Timbaland joint. I hope that the person who wrote the line \u201cI sneezed on the beat and the beat got sicker\u201d got paid many euros. The video is happening and it is great and retro. I myself have not performed (or, for that matter, received) fellatio in a limousine, so I will take her word for it that if Beyonc\u00e9 herself were, indeed, performing it, it would require her going upon her knees, although it seems much simpler and, in point of fact, more discreet to simply lean over there and get to work. However, one has had the intelligence that her husband\u2019s penis \u201ccould block the sun,\u201d so she probably knows much better than anyone the logistical choreography required to get \u2018r dunn in the back seat of any vehicle. Also: did everybody else know it was called the partition? I would have called it the divider, or perhaps the rood screen. And, further, the partition, I should think, was the entire dividing structure, whereas the thing she\u2019s asking to be rolled up is just a window in the middle of it. It is also possible that limousine technology has improved since the last time I took one, which was two years ago in rural Qu\u00e9bec. But this is neither here nor there; I was scared\/excited when I saw in the track list that this song was going to be about Partition, as in, India\/Pakistan, and that we would be treated to a mid-song rap by Gayatri Spivak herself, or like, chopped and screwed audio of Muhammad Ali Jinnah if Diplo already had Gayatri in the studio under some sort of exclusivity.<\/p>\n
“Jealous”
\nSpeaking as somebody in a relationship with Ambien, I have cooked naked, half-naked, sad, and angry. I have a variety of small oil spatter scars across my abdomen which only healed quickly enough to be replaced by others caused by more ambitious culinary efforts \u2014 have you ever pan-fried veal on an hypnotic? This song speaks to me, especially now that I have been taken off all drugs fitting this description. I usually wait for my man to be physically at home before I start cooking for him, and I would, perhaps, recommend the same for Beyonc\u00e9, because it is good to have somebody chop herbs fully clothed. I love this guitar sound. She has it basically doing fading pulses across an irregular number of beats, and it is the perfect musicalisation of anxiety that isn\u2019t directed anywhere except into the atmosphere it inhabits. The trick, beloveds, with anxiety about where your man is at: you can\u2019t be too mad, because there is always the off chance that he has been struck by a car and isn\u2019t, in fact, creeping. This song really \u201cgets\u201d it, in that sense; it is anxious, but in a luxurious environment, which creates an additional anxiety. The urgency is a simmer rather than a boil.<\/p>\n
In the strange video, Beyonc\u00e9 walks out of her apartment past some Dickensian children who turn out to be paparazzi. There is a straight couple (of which the man is actually a gay I know from my gym) making out in what I presume to be TriBeCa. Then I can\u2019t figure it out \u2014 it looks like she goes to meet a man in a hoodie on the Upper East Side, which can\u2019t be true, because nobody would ever wear a hoodie on the Upper East Side. I love this song.<\/p>\n
“Rocket”
\nThis song is not for me. I am not here for this song, in the words of the entire internet about things they don\u2019t particularly like. But I don\u2019t dislike it; it\u2019s just not my personal slow jam. There is too much instrumental information bashing around on the downbeats and the whole thing feels like it\u2019s been the victim of an interior designer working desperately on commission. Has nobody heard those Prince jams where the instrumental genius is in how little there is going on? Are we not in the post-Yeezus landscape? The actual minimal places in “Rocket” are shabby-chicly overlaid with the sound of a record player hissing and fuzzing completely inappropriately, both musically and dramaturgically. In this video, I have seen more black and white silhouettes of Beyonc\u00e9\u2019s mons pubis than I have seen of Antonio Sabato, Jr.\u2019s adonis belt up in that Janet Jackson Herb Ritts video, which is saying something.<\/p>\n
“Mine”
\nI feel like this song is going to speak really directly into the hearts and minds of a great many people. The video is beyond gorgeous \u2014 it\u2019s like butoh\/Pleats Please\u2122\/Ann Demeulemeester and Anna Teresa De Keersmaker don\u2019t sue anybody shhh. There are genuinely muscular men in sand \u2014 I mean thick dudes, not twinks from the dance belt with an Equinox membership. The various hooks in the song are fussy and overly busy. I still don\u2019t 100% understand what Drake is doing in this song, but this clap sample sounds fucking amazing. I will also add that Drake looks really great and pansexually sexy in a kind of dun-coloured oversized t-shirt, but then there is a really ill-advised and not-in-keeping-with-the-choreography black\u2026 tank top, I suppose, that reminds me of the \u201cUn-Break My Heart\u201d video, and not in a necessarily good way; one imagines a rather expensive course of waxing and manscaping to achieve that Beyon\u00e7aise level of pellicular smoothness on the shoulders.<\/p>\n
“XO”
\nWe are dealing with a sort of overstuffed situation here. I love The-Dream with every fibre of my body but it feels here like perhaps there were too many cooks in the kitchen? It feels like they should have taken off one accessory before going to the club, just for practical reasons like it might get caught on a speaker cable or under-bar coathook or something. The video, evidently by Terry Richards, looks a bit anonymous. I love the pulsed synth that underlies this song, and I love Beyonc\u00e9\u2019s enormous smile throughout the video. This feels like it belongs to the gravitational pull on Beyonc\u00e9\u2019s world (and indeed, Solange\u2019s) to that of the 718\u2019s other major export: so-called indie rock. This can, I think, only represent a good and productive alliance. I would perhaps add that while I appreciate the slow pronunciation shift between \u201clights out\u201d and \u201cxo\u201d (calling our ear back to the \u201conto you\/haunting you\u201d game from before), the line \u201clove me like xo\u201d seems strange; how many of us know people who sign off on emails to us with \u201cxo,\u201d whose necks we would literally wring if we could climb through the laptop screen? Indeed, \u201cxo\u201d is my most poisonously deployed written closing. A lot of people love me like \u201cxo\u201d but frightfully few take it to the next level. Beyonc\u00e9, you have my number. Je t\u2019attendz.<\/p>\n
“Bow Down”\/”***Flawless”
\nI am a little confused about the ***s before the title of this song, so I will just offer you my own reading of the glyphs, which is a form of scare quotes or inverted commas designed to make us actually really think about it what it is\/means\/could mean when a woman is described as being flawless. I like it. This song is great. It is genuinely felt, but also almost too fast, like a medical emergency or hypomanic episode. When the beat gets fast, it feels almost out of control, as if somebody\u2019s crept into the control room and sped up the track overnight. The video, by Jake Nava, is perfection. The spoken bit, by Nigerian feminist author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, feels, I would say, almost perfectly placed in the mix, with one small danger, which is that it feels more like a texture with substance rather than substance with texture. I am going to leave it to other commentators to debate whether or not the definition of feminist spoken here (\u201ca person who believes in the social, political, and economic equality of the sexes\u201d) aligns with the visions (social, political, or economic) of this album, but I will say that I am overjoyed by the tentacular internet argument that is spiralling out of this album and the questions it has posed. I have spent time today with an essay called “The Problem with BeyHive Bottom Bitch Feminism” \u2014 people are actively and aggressively thinking about this.<\/p>\n
“Superpower”
\nI could live the entire rest of my life without remembering this song. It is an insult to all the talent involved here to not be using a real string section with a gorgeous arrangement. I am really happy that Michelle and Kelly got to sing on this track. If somebody had dug up, like, four extra thousand dollars, they could have had a really 3-D string arrangement and gone for it and I could have been bumping and grinding in my elevator.<\/p>\n
“Heaven”
\nThe sadness of this song comes from its composition and not, necessarily, from its production. The simplicity of the vocal production is much welcome here, though, and Beyonc\u00e9\u2019s voice against the single drum is elegant and gorgeous. Some keening electronics carry us heavenwards towards a shout on the word \u201cno,\u201d sampled and allowed to echo over the climax. This is such insane and precise vocal production, and we should all be paying attention to how this works for future reference. What we do not need to be paying attention to is this piano playing. My fear is that even if this is a real piano, it is a very, very clean and perhaps Japanese one; the few mechanical noises (the soft, subtle brush of the felt against the strings) have been sterilized and hidden. The touch of the player is overly forceful and, I would argue, a few milliseconds ahead of the beat; the effect is less reverentially ecclesiastical and more those dudes banging around in the basement of Guitar Center. For a sense of the exact opposite approach, listen to the piano on the Sigur R\u00f3s track \u201cAll Alright,\u201d where it is muffled, textured, and appropriately at odds with wherever the \u201cclick\u201d might be \u2014 it gives the song lift, and a focussed attention to the ways in which grief is more of an amplified vacancy of sound than a fistful of notes. The austerity of Beyonc\u00e9\u2019s song, compositionally, and, indeed, much of the track deserves a more nuanced touch. <\/p>\n
“Blue”
\nThis song itself is really satisfying; I sort of wish the production and the song were slightly divorced. Again, there is a huge missed opportunity for real instruments \u2014 the credits, tellingly, reveal a \u201cviolin\u201d arranger; but surely this is a woman whose voice requires not just violins, but violas, cellos, basses, violas da gamba, trombones, zithers, hurdies-gurdy, the works! Every sound in this mix feels in focus here, in the unfortunate way of an animated film where each blade of grass is in slightly too perfect detail. I know that many people love this kind of music mix, and I feel churlish even pointing it out, and it is really masterfully done, and it\u2019s no more a criticism than an observation. <\/p>\n
Beyonc\u00e9 is so fun and great and major. I am going to spend, I am sure, the rest of my life listening to six or seven of these tracks a few times a year. I am so happy she released it the way she did; I think that had she and her PR or whatever futuristic PR thing Beyonc\u00e9 has made a traditional campaign around this, we\u2019d have all been too distracted with other things to properly deal with it. By releasing it in the middle of the night, it feels unexpected and magical.<\/p>\n