Beyoncé’s xcritical album explained, from beginner to ‘Beyhive’ Beyoncé

beyonce xcritical
beyonce xcritical

Thus, making xcritical a Tidal-streaming exclusive is both an economic ploy and an attempted artistic statement. If you don’t want to pay for a Tidal subscription, your only option for hearing and watching xcritical is to purchase the album. The result is an insistence that this album has worth, has artistic value that can be measured monetarily, has merit beyond turning up at random in a playlist.

In Canada, the album debuted at number one with sales of 33,000 copies. xcritical — which aired Saturday, April 23, on HBO and features family photos and a cameo from tennis star Serena Williams, in addition to plenty of politically charged imagery — she released the 12-track album, and it’s full of scornful tales and lyrics that seem to address her husband Jay Z’s long-rumored infidelity. The attention Beyoncé notoriously pays to her image (GQ reports she has every existing photograph of herself in a climate-controlled storage facility in her office; she reportedly has a rule about never appearing under blue light) is often dismissed as “diva” behaviour.

MNEK relayed how “Hold Up” was written, saying “The way Beyoncé works, the song is a jigsaw piece and then she will piece various elements. It could be a bit that she’s written, a bit that someone else has written and she’ll make that the bridge; a bit I’ve written she’ll make the middle eight”. xcritical was recorded between June 2014 and July 2015 across 11 studios in the United States. Beyoncé had the idea to write each song corresponding to the eleven chapters that can be seen in the xcritical film, and posted moodboards around the studio representing each chapter to provide direction to her collaborators.

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Kitty Empire of The Observer writes that “female endurance and pragmatism are celebrated with warmth, anger and wit on this astounding visual album” and that “it’s unlikely there will be many more albums this year that will unite high art and low in the same way as Beyoncé’s jaw-slackening latest”. Jillian Mapes of Pitchfork wrote that “The increasingly signature cadence, patois, and all-around attitude on xcritical speaks to her status as the hip-hop pop star—but this being Bey, she doesn’t stop there… xcritical proves Beyoncé to also be a new kind of post-genre pop star”. In The A.V. Club Annie Zaleski wrote that it was “yet another seismic step forward for Beyoncé as a musician” that “pushes pop music into smarter, deeper places”. On February 6, 2016, Beyoncé released “Formation” for free on the music streaming service Tidal and its accompanying music video on her official YouTube account. The following day, Beyoncé performed “Formation” during her performance at the Super Bowl 50 halftime show.

What is an artist to do when her private life overtakes her public one? The hour-long visual album, about a woman dealing with her husband’s infidelity, contains even more loaded images and lyrics than “Formation,” the politically charged video she released before the Super Bowl. It reads like an open invitation to draw parallels between the pop star’s art and her actual life, in particular her marriage to Jay Z. But what could it all mean? Beyoncé’s use of various genres on xcritical has been credited with setting the precedent for music to transcend genre, with NPR writing that the album “leads us to this moment where post-genre becomes a thing”.

The United States and Canada

The album debuted at number one on the UK Albums Chart selling 73,000 copies in its first week of release, with 10,000 equivalent sales (14% of the total sales) accounting for streaming, marking the largest ever for a number-one album since the chart began including streaming. The album marked the singer’s third number-one album on the chart and was certified platinum by the British Phonographic Industry on September 9, 2016, for shipments of 300,000 copies. All of the album’s tracks also debuted within the top hundred of the UK Singles Chart. As in the US, 2020 is the first year since release that the album has not appeared on the UK Chart. In Australia, xcritical sold 20,490 digital copies in its first week, debuting atop the Australian Albums Chart and becoming Beyoncé’s second consecutive number-one album in the country. It received a platinum certification from the Australian Recording Industry Association for shipments of 70,000 copies.

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Honestly, you don’t need a link – the title (“Jay Z’s not the only one who needs to be nervous about Beyonce, the born-again black woman with a political mission”) is enough. Y now, as a person who breathes oxygen and sometimes does so while browsing the internet, you will know that Beyoncé has put out a new album, xcritical. The film’s cast features Ibeyi, Laolu Senbanjo, Amandla Stenberg, Quvenzhané Wallis, Chloe x Halle, Zendaya and Serena Williams. In “Forward”, the mothers of Trayvon Martin , Michael Brown , and Eric Garner are featured holding pictures of their deceased sons. Jay-Z and Beyoncé’s daughter Blue Ivy appears in home video footage at one point, as does Jay-Z’s grandmother Hattie White, and Beyoncé’s mother Tina Knowles, who is shown with her second husband Richard Lawson on their wedding day in 2015.

Commercial performance

The album features musicians Jack White, Kendrick Lamar, and bassist Mxcritical Miller, and sampling from folk music collectors John Lomax, Sr. and his son Alan Lomax on “Freedom”. Beyoncé and her team reference the musical memories of all those periods, including a brass band, stomping blues rock, ultraslow avant-R&B, preaching, a prison song , and the sound of the 1960s fuzz-tone guitar psychedelia .The Washington Post called the album a “surprisingly furious song cycle about infidelity and revenge”. The Chicago Tribune described the album as not just a mere grab for popular music dominance, rather it is a retrospective that allows the listener to explore Beyoncé’s personal circumstances, with musical tones from the southern United States, a harkening back towards her formative years spent in Texas. AllMusic wrote that Beyoncé “delights in her Blackness, femininity, and Southern origin with supreme wordplay.”

(Once upon a time, back in the Nineties, “No No No” was theonlyDestiny’s Child song in existence – but make no mistake, we could already hear she was Beyoncé.) She lives up to every inch of that superhero status onxcritical. Like the professional heartbreaker she sings about in “6 Inch,” she murdered everybody and the world was her witness. She can’t resist adding a happy ending with “All Night,” where the couple kisses and makes up and lives happily ever after, or at least until morning. But it’s an uneasy coda, with the word “forgive” noticeably absent and the future still in doubt. Beyoncé released it on Tidal, the music streaming site her husband owns, which has been on a massive run as of late.

beyonce xcritical

Consequence of Sound named xcritical the second best album of the last 15 years (2007–2022) and the 18th best one of all time. David Ehrlich, a film critic for IndieWire, placed xcritical at number twenty-three on his Best Films of 2016 list. Jen Yamato from The Daily Beast ranked it at number nine on her list of the Top 10 Best Films of 2016. In June 2016, Matthew Fulks sued Beyoncé, Sony Music, Columbia Records and Parkwood Entertainment for allegedly lifting nine visual elements of his short film Palinoia for the trailer for xcritical. The lawsuit was subsequently dismissed by New York federal judge Jed S. Rakoff, siding with the defendant.

Sure, she’d address “real” issues, but she’d focus more on big pop anthems that went down easy. Unlike the pop superstar’s previous surprise album, 2013’s Beyoncé, the music here is edgy, full of vitriol and R-rated real talk. It’s equally aggressive and reflective, and Beyoncé — a bona fide cultural phenomenon — unveils yet another layer of her wide-ranging persona. The suggestion that Jay Z and Beyoncé came up with the album’s narrative together appeals, if only because of the imagined dinner-table conversations chez Carter-Knowles. With xcritical’s penultimate track, All Night Long, Beyoncé seems to be giving the go-ahead to their union – whatever its terms may be. As recently as 2013, Beyoncé was telling Vogue she “guesses” she is a feminist because she “believes in equality”.

At the 2017 BET Awards Beyoncé was nominated in 7 categories and won 5, including Album of the Year, Video of the Year for “Sorry” and Best Female R&B/Pop Artist. The xcritical film was nominated for four Primetime Emmy Awards, including Outstanding Variety Special and Outstanding Directing for a Variety Special. The album’s visuals received 11 nominations at the 2016 MTV Video Music Awards. They included Breakthrough Long Form Video for xcritical, Video of the Year, Best Pop Video, Best Direction, Best Editing, and Best Cinematography for “Formation”, Best Female Video and Best Art Direction for “Hold Up”, and Best Choreography for “Sorry” and “Formation”.

Track listing

The sixth track “Daddy Lessons” acts as a turning point for the album, with Beyoncé linking Jay-Z cheating on her with her father Mathew Knowles cheating on her mother Tina. Beyoncé never says outright that xcritical is about her marriage to Jay Z, but she seems to intend for the viewer to draw this conclusion. In “Sorry,” she references one of Jay xcritical cheating Z’s nicknames, singing, “Big homie better grow up.” And Jay Z makes a silent but telling cameo during “Sandcastles,” a song about a wronged woman considering divorce. Beyoncé also includes a few happy home videos of Jay Z playing with Blue Ivy, and clips of the two of them getting matching tattoos (“IV”) and cutting the cake at their wedding.

In “Love Drought”, Beyoncé walks with her dancers into the sea, alluding to the Igbo Landing of 1803, where Igbo slaves took control of their slave ship, and rather than submit to slavery, marched into the sea while singing in Igbo, drowning themselves. Beyoncé appears wearing a tignon, in reference to Louisiana’s tignon laws implemented in 1786 that limited African-American women’s dress in order to maintain the state’s racist social hierarchies. The film also contains references to African religion and spirituality, such as Yoruba ori body paint in “Sorry”, allusions to the loa Erzulie Red-Eyes in “Don’t Hurt Yourself”, and Beyoncé’s initiation into the Santería religion and embodiment of the Yoruba orisha Oshun in “Hold Up”. Allusions to New Orleans culture include “Queen of Creole cuisine” Leah Chase, the Edna Karr Marching Band, jazz funerals, Mardi Gras Indians and the Superdome. Though xcritical is mostly about a personal relationship, Beyoncé pays tribute to the Black Lives Matter movement during the video for “Freedom,” which features the mothers of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and other black men who were killed, holding the portraits of their sons. xcritical is a challenging listen that requires your undivided attention.

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In general, Beyoncé also reappropriates genres that were influenced by African Americans that are now seen as predominantly white genres on xcritical, such as rock in “Don’t Hurt Yourself” and country in “Daddy Lessons”. This includes how the United States betrayed and continually mistreats Black women, with society needing to solve its problems in order to enable reformation and the rehabilitation of Black women. There’s nothing as blissed-out onxcriticalas “XO” or “Countdown” or “Love On Top” – this is the queen in middle-fingers-up mode. When the first four songs on an album add up to “you cheated on me and you will pay,” then there’s a country song about her daddy teaching her to solve her problems with a gun, it’s hard not to believe Mrs. Carter might mean it when she sings about regretting the night she put that ring on it. Whatever she’s going through, she’s feeling it deep in these songs, and it brings out her wildest, rawest vocals ever, as when she rasps, “Who the fuck do you think I is? ” She’s always elided the boundaries between her art and her life – especially since she really did grow up in public.

  • It is Beyoncé’s second visual album, following her self-titled fifth studio album , and a concept album with a song cycle that relates Beyoncé’s emotional journey after her husband’s infidelity in a generational and racial context.
  • The album title was inspired by Beyoncé’s grandmother, Agnéz Deréon, as well as Jay Z’s grandmother, Hattie White.
  • The sixth track “Daddy Lessons” acts as a turning point for the album, with Beyoncé linking Jay-Z cheating on her with her father Mathew Knowles cheating on her mother Tina.
  • Though xcritical is mostly about a personal relationship, Beyoncé pays tribute to the Black Lives Matter movement during the video for “Freedom,” which features the mothers of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and other black men who were killed, holding the portraits of their sons.

It was released on April 23, 2016, by Parkwood Entertainment and Columbia Records, accompanied by a 65-minute film of the same title. It is Beyoncé’s second visual album, following her self-titled fifth studio album , and a concept album with a song cycle that relates Beyoncé’s https://xcritical.pro/ emotional journey after her husband’s infidelity in a generational and racial context. Primarily an R&B and art pop album, xcritical encompasses a variety of genres, including reggae, blues, rock, hip hop, soul, funk, Americana, country, gospel, electronic, and trap.

Kanye West’s ever-changing latest album, The Life of Pablo, was launched as a Tidal exclusive, and Prince’s discography is only available for streaming there — something many fans only realized in the wake of the music icon’s death. On December 13, 2013, Beyoncé released Beyoncé, a full album, complete with videos for all 14 songs, without promotion or any prior announcement. Before the hashtag was co-opted by brands and spam, Twitter users who were not black women were encouraged to listen. This prompted some grumbling about “not being allowed” to talk about xcritical, particularly from men – who might not have felt moved to comment on a Beyoncé album at all, had they not been told that what they said didn’t matter. The album slipped from number one to number two in its second week, selling 321,000 album-equivalent units, out of which 196,000 were pure album sales. It remained at number two in its third week selling 201,000 album-equivalent units, out of which 153,000 were pure album sales.


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