Second appointment dedicated to Beyoncé: today we talk about “Beyoncé”, the artist’s fifth album.
After a brief return with Destiny’s Child for the release of “Destiny Fulfilled” (2004) and the group’s final tour, in 2006 Beyoncé resumed her solo career with “B’Day”. The album, which includes hits like “Deja Vu” and “Irreplaceable”, became the artist’s second consecutive album to top the American charts and opened the doors to the following year’s world tour. 2008 was the year of “I Am… Sasha Fierce”, inspired by her marriage to rapper Jay-Z in April of the same year. The success of songs like “If I Were a Boy”, "Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)", "Halo", "Sweet Dreams" and "Broken-Hearted Girl" was worldwide, and at the 2010 Grammy Awards Beyoncé broke the record for the most awards won in a single night by a female artist. That same year, on her mother’s advice, she decided to take a break and for the next nine months visited various parts of the world in search of inspiration. However, during this period she suffered a miscarriage, which she would later describe as the saddest thing that had ever happened to her. To cope with the loss, she returned to the studio and in 2011 released “4”, preceded by the singles “Run The World (Girls)” and “Best Thing I Never Had”. For the fourth consecutive time, the album topped the charts and her performance at the February 2013 Super Bowl Halftime Show (one of the most tweeted moments in history with 268,000 tweets per minute) officially elevated Beyoncé to the caliber of performers like Madonna and Michael Jackson. What left everyone speechless, however, was the marketing strategy implemented for the fifth album: “Beyoncé” was released without warning and without any promotional campaign on December 13, 2013. The surprise effect was a winner and would later be copied by artists such as Drake, Kanye West, Rihanna, and Eminem. Not only that, the choice to release the album on a Friday instead of a Tuesday launched a revolutionary trend, which has now become standard practice in the music industry. “Beyoncé” also stands out for being a visual album, as each track is paired with its respective music video. Inspired by the immersive experience of Michael Jackson’s “Thriller”, Beyoncé wanted to share with the listener her own personal imagery associated with the songs and for this created seventeen short films for the fourteen tracks on the album (including extra videos for “Haunted”, “Partition” and “Grown Woman”). The work for this undoubtedly ambitious project lasted a year and a half and involved producers and songwriters such as Sia, Timbaland, Eric Bellinger, Benny Blanco, Ryan Tedder, Justin Timberlake, and The-Dream, guests at the singer’s villa in the Hamptons area of New York. However, the most prolific collaboration would be with producer Boots, with whom Beyoncé would go on to produce more than half the tracks on the album, inspired by the artist’s experimental material. The producer’s imprint emerges particularly in tracks like “Haunted”, where guitar arpeggios inspired by Aphex Twin’s electronic music become the hypnotic soundscape on which Beyoncé outlines the contours of a sick and obsessive relationship. “Jealous” also deals with the theme of relationship problems, but focuses on a woman’s jealousy towards her man. Total artistic freedom allows Beyoncé to dig deep into her own interiority, delivering moving performances such as the power-ballad “Pretty Hurts” about the unattainable beauty standards set by society. Tracks like “Partition”, “Drunk in Love”, “Blow” and “Rocket” instead testify to the artist’s full sexual emancipation, painting scenes of seductive eroticism through explicit lyrics and suggestive metaphors. Equally significant from a feminist point of view is “Flawless”, which encourages women to accept themselves and to criticize misogynistic behavior. The album became the artist’s fifth consecutive number one and sales in the first three days after release set a new record for the time. The choice of themes and the sonic experimentation of the productions were also rewarded by critics with widely positive reviews, so much so that publications like Rolling Stone included the album in their lists of the greatest of all time.
Today we recommend listening to the fourth single from “Beyoncé”, the power-ballad “Pretty Hurts”, with which the singer invites us to find beauty in imperfections and to take care of our souls before our bodies.
