Beyoncé’s Lemonade Album (2016)
https://www.beyonce.com/album/lemonade-visual-album/songs/
Beyoncé’s Lemonade album was released in 2016 and shocked a lot of people because it deviated from Beyoncé’s normal pop and party songs. Lemonade is her second visual album and it consists of thirteen songs. Lemonade is a very unique album because most albums tend to stick to one genre but Lemonade consists of multiple different genres. “Pray you catch me,” “6 Inch,” and “Love Drought” are all R&B songs. “Hold Up” is reggae, “Formation” and “Don’t Hurt Yourself” are hip-hop, “Sorry” is dance, “Daddy Lessons” is almost a country song, “Sandcastles” is a ballad, and “Freedom” is a soul song. Beyoncé showed her range and how well she can execute different types of music styles with this album. The album has very few features, four in total. Jack White sings on “Don’t Hurt Yourself,” James Blake sings on “Forward,” “6 Inch” has The Weeknd, and Kendrick Lamar is on “Freedom.” The album was very popular when it was released because it addressed long standing rumors of Jay-Z’s infidelity. Many people enjoyed the angst, anger, and power that Beyoncé exuded in this album. Beyoncé did not just write and sing about a cheating partner, she also addressed a few other themes like police brutality and African American women empowerment with the main theme being black women’s empowerment.
Beyoncé’s Lemonade visual album focuses on many themes, with the main one being African American women empowerment. She focuses on this theme multiple ways. She starts by placing black women with different looks, body shapes and sizes, and social standings in her visual album. Beyoncé even put people who are already in the spotlight like Serena Williams, Zendaya, Amandla Stenberg, Chloe and Halle Bailey, and Winnie Harlow into her music videos. These women have had negative things said about them and have sometimes been portrayed negatively but Beyoncé flips this and portrays these women in a positive light and in a position of power. Beyoncé also empowers African American women by showing a diversity of black women. She shows black women of many different shapes and sizes and different textures and styles of hair. Many people like to think that all African American women look the same and through her music videos, Beyoncé shows us otherwise. There are many scenes in the visual album where we see black women in a position of power. In the “Sorry” music video we see both Beyoncé and Serena Williams sitting on a throne in different points of the video. In “Freedom” we see Amandla Stenberg and Zendaya sitting together on a tall tree branch looking down towards the camera in a show of higher power. The whole visual album was a big stand for African American women empowerment because so many people watched the music videos and were exposed to all of these instances showing black women in power.
A.B.
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