Skeptical and a little repelled when radio in the early Bush years gave her okay singles blanket airplay, I came around when a friend put 2006’s “Suga Mama” on a CD-R. After Lemonade I waved the flag.
1. Lemonade (2016)
“Whether Jay Z “really” cheated on Beyonce matters less than the way in which an album as tart and refreshing as Lemonade exists as a demonstration of her prowess as a singer of impeccable control and synthesizer of almost every worthwhile strand of popular music,” I wrote two years ago. “The object of her scorn exists because she sings about him. I say that Beyonce and the imagination are one.” Take that, Wallace Stevens! Also:
To my ears Lemonade‘s most obvious precursor is the work of Erykah Badu, still too little appreciated despite recording two of the new century’s most vital albums: 2000’s Mama’s Gun and 2008’s New Amerykah Part One (4th World War). Dense and aqueous at once, these albums channeled several decades of black literary and political history into a lissome groove: Questlove, Madlib, and Dilla meeting Roy Ayers, Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye and Farrakhan. Like Badu, Beyonce wears the influences lightly; she retains the insouciance of what Badu would call a master teacher. She’s not alluding to her sources: the formal sweep of her collages match Badu’s own swirl. She’s heady and exuberant where Badu is contemplative and rueful because Beyonce has pop in her bones.
In Lemonade her obsessions and record making prowess come together, and that summer its ubiquity was Beatles-esque in my circles. The first black female editor of our student paper blasted “Formation” and “Don’t Hurt Yourself.” Around my condo complex’s pool a quartet of high school girls put their phones on a deck chair and did the routine in “Sorry.” Driving back to my place, my paramour and I heard our voices crack singing the chorus of “All Night.”
2. B’Day (2006)
Beyonce’s tightest album has a few of her fiercest tracks: the Rich Harrison-produced “Suga Mama,” crunchy and hungry thanks to Beyonce’s attempt to out-sex the “Searching for Soul” sample; “Freakum Dress”; and the radio-only “Kitty Kat,” feline in its menace. As a single and Hova duet, “Déjà Vu” remains somewhat obscure; I’ll take it over what came before and after. But listeners remember B’Day for “Irreplaceable,” which she might sing with more restraint in 2018 but who would want her to?
3. Beyonce (2013)
Innumerable singers of every sex and have color have used sexual metaphors to explain their relationship to the Lord of Hosts; Beyonce is one of those who uses her relationship with the Lord of Hosts to explain her love of sex. In “Rocket” she orders the Lord to sit his fine ass down as she plays in his deep. Using feminism as a means of limning her self-definition, which apparently confused a few listeners four years ago, Beyonce assembled material that worked like the sharpest Hollywood star vehicles; like Bette Davis in Now, Voyager or Katherine Hepburn in Holiday, Beyonce used the elements of what men would derisively call women’s pictures to become a mirror, for if being pretty hurts and even the world’s most famous female black musician succumbs to jealousy then the rest of us have hope. Weaving contributions from Boots, Frank Ocean, Justin Timberlake, 40, and others, every one of whom a man, into the most febrile mix of her recording career to date, capping it with an apt interpolation of Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Beyonce demonstrates the uses of polyphony. And “Blow” sounds fucking great on the radio.
4. 4 (2011)
In a sign of the times, pop radio moved away from Beyonce as her singles sounded even better on the radio. Had she released “Love on Top” or “Countdown” in 2007 they might have bestrode the world like colossi, but in 2007, still learning how to hire producers and songwriters who could channel her prodigious vocals into less obvious displays of prodigiousness, she couldn’t have recorded those two critically adored singles, the former one of the supreme pop achievement of last eight years (“Countdown” might swap places on Tuesday). I overlooked 4‘s flaws at the time. Leading with one of her more obnoxious ballads — one of the last to exist for the sake of muscle flexing — she turns to Chad Hugo and Jeff Bhaksher for a couple decent Alannah Myles imitations, to Kanye and André 3000 for a dictionary example of Phoning It In, and gives shape and nuance to Frank Ocean’s “I Miss U.” She would do better with the trope in “Run the World (Girls)” on the next two albums.
5. I Am…Sasha Fierce (2008)
While I giggled at this parody at the time, and like any icon Beyonce needed somebody goofing on her, it hasn’t worn well: white guys showing up the beautiful black bodies in her video — at the dawn of the Obama era, no less. Despite the marketing — a double album? — Sasha Fierce was skimpy in 2008 too, her thinnest collection to date and the only one on which she audibly treads water. It’s as if she needed to release this material to divest herself of it forever. I’ve kept “Sweet Dreams.”
6. Dangerously in Love (2003)
I was not blown away by “Crazy in Love” in the summer of 2003, and “Naughty Girl” was an annoyance. Revisiting this album a couple days ago, the languid horoscope-quoting Missy Elliott duet “Signs” and the Big Boi and Sleepy Brown tracks shone. Barely singles plus filler.
Humanizing The Vacuum 