The Real Emotion of Beyonce's "Lemonade"
When Beyoncé dropped Lemonade last Saturday, nobody was surprised that it was a veritable masterclass in pop album construction. Nobody was shocked at the bravura vocal performances or the brilliance of the songwriting. Nobody was astonished that Beyoncé had produced yet another opus that would once again reaffirm (as if it needed reaffirmation) her place as perhaps our greatest contemporary pop musician. What left people in such an ecstatic, bleary-eyed, tear-soaked daze was not that Beyoncé had made another exceptional project (album? visual album? film?), but rather how she did it.
Lemonade is an extremely difficult album to listen to.
This is, of course, not to say it isn’t unfailingly beautiful, because it is. Songs like “Hold Up”, “Don’t Hurt Yourself”, “Six Inch”, and “Freedom” are among the best songs Beyonce has ever released, and the way she dexterously maneuvers between genres and steep tonal undulations throughout the album shows just how peerless and confident she is as an artist. It’s nearly impossible to imagine a reality where Lemonade isn’t central in the discussion of album of the year.
And yet, in the same way that Toni Morrison is not always easy to read or that To Pimp a Butterfly is an exhausting emotional gauntlet, Lemonade can make for a hard, uncomfortable listen. It’s an album about many things: love, race, black femininity, the municipal scourge of baseball bat vandalism, but at Lemonade’s thematic core is the spiritual anguish of marital discord and infidelity.
The popular interpretation of the album has overwhelmingly been that it represents at least a semi-autobiographical account of Beyoncé’s personal experiences discovering, being enraged by, grappling with, and ultimately forgiving the infidelity of her husband, Jay-Z. While it’s important that we never presuppose that the subject in a work of art is the artist herself, Jay-Z’s appearance during the emotional climax (the gorgeously arresting reconciliation ballad “Sandcastles”) of the film does seem to suggest there’s some modicum of truth to this narrative.
Rarely in pop music do we see the messy, chaotic viscera of something as personal as marital strife rendered in an album, and we almost never see it rendered as unsparingly and elegantly as Beyoncé does in Lemonade. The seething anger, professions of jealousy, and desperate pain heard throughout the album don’t sound like cheap affectation. The fear of betrayal in a song like “Hold Up” or the defiant self-assertion in songs like “Don’t Hurt Yourself” and “Sorry” don’t feel like fictions or artistic inventions, they feel authentic, like real reactions to real lived experiences. This makes for a profoundly gripping album, but it can also feel intrusive or voyeuristic, like we’re privy to conversations that are really none of our business.
Our consumptive experiences of celebrity artists are defined by access. As the distinctions between artist, persona, and person continue to blur and notions of privacy seem to apply less and less to famous people, we sometimes feel that celebrities should be obligated to keep us at least vaguely informed about their personal lives. We feel entitled to personal details of celebrities just by virtue of their being celebrities. We pore over Rihanna interviews and go giddy at the sight of a Kanye twitter diatribe.
Beyoncé has completely defied this model. The most famous woman in the world has, extraordinarily, maintained a staunchly private personal life, disavowing invasive interviews, carefully curating her social media accounts, and meticulously constructing her public image. Beyoncé, maybe better than any other celebrity, completely dictates how she is perceived by controlling the flow and framing of information. Nothing is known about Beyoncé except for what she has herself revealed.
This is what makes the candor of Lemonade both breathtakingly bold and emotionally challenging. Beyoncé’s marital issues never really caught fire as tabloid fodder, they were never enacted under the callous gaze of public scrutiny. When it came time to make an album about her experiences, she was in full control of the narrative, free to weave the yarn however she pleased. But instead of tawdry abstraction or contrivance, Beyoncé chose to approach the work with sincerity, complexity, and generosity, and the result was an album that is captivatingly real. Real pain, real rancor, real redemption. The realness can be difficult to reckon with, but its nourishment, and that’s what the best art provides.