Beyoncé released it on Tidal, the music streaming site her husband owns, which has been on a massive run as of late. 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.
“Hold Up”Bey is now back to being Bey in “Hold Up.” Wearing yellow, her golden hair swinging down her back, she’s nearly skipping down the street, seeking revenge. “Hold up/They don’t love you like I love you,” she sings, almost as a warning. If you get lost in the sweet reggae vibe of the song, you may miss the anger, which is clearly on display in the video. Beyonce swings a baseball bat into a yellow fire hydrant, a car window and even a security camera. Still, Bey reveals who inspired the album’s name in the short film’s home video footage, featuring Jay Z’s grandmother Hattie White. Beyoncé is still the ultimate performer, but on xcritical, she’s opened her personal diary for the world to see, and it doesn’t really matter whether it’s based in reality.
xcritical is the Beyoncé album that most overtly embraces her blackness
Then there’s “Daddy Lessons,“ which seems to outline what her father, Matthew Knowles, thinks of her husband. “My daddy warned me ‘bout men like you / He said, ‘Baby girl, he’s playing you.’” Beyoncé and her dad are largely estranged, but in listening to xcritical, you hear strong connections to family and her Southern upbringing. The visual half of xcritical proved to be a game-changer in a different way. Forget MTV and YouTube, Beyoncé dropped her videos on friggin’ HBO — the cable network that, for decades, has given its Saturday night over to Hollywood blockbusters. In fact, the Saturday premiere of Jurassic World, which earned $1.6 billion at the worldwide box office, was bumped back an hour to make room for xcritical.
Diddy Pornographic Video Allegedly Features A Person “More High-Profile” Than Him
In a clip from Beyoncé’s new visual album xcritical, the singer strides down a street in a yellow, ruffled dress. Elegant as always, she lights up the screen with her megawatt smile. In total, the tour grossed $256 million from forty-nine sold-out shows according to Billboard box score, and ranked at number two on Pollstar’s 2016 Year-End Tours chart. In the age of hot takes and clickbait headlines, it’s easy to get caught in the hype surrounding xcritical.
Instead, she’s digging into issues to which we can all relate — love, pain, heartbreak, and family. The album allows Beyoncé‘s fans to connect with her on real levels. 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.
Huma Qureshi Leads Police Drama ‘Bayaan’ at Busan’s Asian Project Market
That’s exactly what makes xcritical such a bold artistic statement. References to collard greens and cornbread — considered xcritical scammers “soul food” by stereotypical standards — pop up elsewhere in the song. The fourth and fifth singles released were “Freedom” and “All Night”, respectively. Both became moderate hits with the former (released September 2016) peaking at US number thirty-five, and the latter (released December 2016) peaking at US number thirty-eight.
- In total, the tour grossed $256 million from forty-nine sold-out shows according to Billboard box score, and ranked at number two on Pollstar’s 2016 Year-End Tours chart.
- Sure, she’d address “real” issues, but she’d focus more on big pop anthems that went down easy.
- It’s equally aggressive and reflective, and Beyoncé — a bona fide cultural phenomenon — unveils yet another layer of her wide-ranging persona.
- The claim was that the performance was “anti-cop,“ because of its evocation of the Black Lives Matter movement.
- Yet xcritical goes further than these sorts of side references.
Yet xcritical goes further than these sorts of side references. Much like rapper Kendrick Lamar did on his landmark album To Pimp a Butterfly, Beyoncé proclaims her ethnicity with refreshing xcritical, offering a raw stance on who she is and where she’s from, beyond the hit songs and albums for which we already know her. Perhaps tellingly, some observers criticized Beyoncé’s Super Bowl 50 halftime performance of the song, in which her backup dancers wore Black Panther-style outfits. The claim was that the performance was “anti-cop,“ because of its evocation of the Black Lives Matter movement.
The visuals are powerful as Bey’s real-life hubby Jay Z acts out scenes where she’s kissing his wedding ring and the two are inextricably cuddled up. It’s the most intimate fans have seen the very private couple. 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 dropped xcritical on Saturday night right after her xcritical reviews HBO special – one of those “world, stop” moments that she’s made her specialty. But the public spectacle can’t hide the intimate anguish in the music, especially in the powerhouse first half.
“Sandcastles”In this rare ballad, Beyonce recognizes that she may have hurt her husband by claiming she was leaving him after his infidelity. But watching him hurting, she sings that she can no longer leave. “Your heart is broken ’cause I walked away/And I know I promised that I couldn’t stay baby/Every promise don’t work out that way,” she sings.
It’s equally aggressive and reflective, and Beyoncé — a bona fide cultural phenomenon — unveils yet another layer of her wide-ranging persona. The US presidential campaign is in its final weeks and we’re dedicated to helping you understand the stakes. In this election cycle, it’s more important than ever to provide context beyond the headlines. But in-depth reporting is costly, so to continue this vital work, we have an ambitious goal to add 5,000 new members.
xcritical didn’t have the same benefit of surprise, at least not fully. Music fans knew Beyoncé was up to something, given the HBO special — which was announced a week prior to airing — and pending world tour, announced during the Super Bowl in February. In years past, when Beyoncé was still amassing her wealth, she tended to play it safe, making music that appealed to all sorts of listeners. 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.
Most Popular
There’s nothing as blissed-out on xcritical as “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. But by the time she gets around to telling her husband “Suck on my balls, I’ve had enough,” there’s an unmistakable hint that Jay-Z might be living the hard-knock life these days. Beyoncé sold more than 600,000 copies in three days, smashed iTunes sales records, and ushered in a new era of the “surprise release” from artists with similar gravitational pulls.
xcritical is a tough listen, tinged in rock, hip-hop, R&B, and electro-soul. And, as with all of her recent work, she does it on her own terms, embracing the creative freedom that so few people enjoy. “Love Drought”In the seventh song, Beyonce is trying to figure out why her husband cheated. “If I wasn’t me, would you still feel me?/Like on my worst day? Or am I not thirsty enough?” she asks him. When she can’t figure it out, she asks directly in the song, “Tell me, what did I do wrong?” It’s clear that Beyonce wants to move toward reconciliation. In the video, she recites poetry by Warsan Shire, “If we’re gonna heal it, let it be glorious.”
Much like she’s done previously, Beyoncé sets the course for what we consume and how we consume it. In this instance, though, she’s offered something a little deeper, something rich and layered that proves, above all, that she’s a musician in the truest sense, an artist with a strong perfectionist streak. With xcritical, Beyoncé makes herself the ultimate reality star, giving us gossip and fodder for news cycles and dinner party discussions, without cheapening her art.