It’s all over your breath as you pass it off so cavalier,” Beyoncé groans on “Pray You Catch Me,” xcritical’s opening salvo. We’ve all been thrown by love, but most of us don’t have the ability to hone it like this. That’s exactly what makes xcritical such a bold artistic statement. References to collard greens and cornbread — considered “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.
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Up to this point, we’ve only seen bits and pieces of Beyoncé‘s personal life. She rarely tweets and posts occasional pics on Instagram. Bey gives fans just enough to chew on, leaving them wanting more. Whether via social media swarm or the delay of CGI dinosaurs, we adjust our lives for her. Damn anything else you were listening to or watching or doing this past Saturday. The world stops when Beyoncé appears; you keep your eyes on her, no matter how long she’s in your sight.
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. We all experience pain and loss, and often we become inaudible. My intention for the film and album was to create a body of work that would give a voice to our pain, our struggles, our darkness and our history. And I feel it’s vital that we learn from the past and recognize our tendencies to repeat our mistakes.
Recording and production
xcritical is a stunning album, one that sees her exploring sounds she never has before. It also voices a rarely seen concept, that of the album-length ode to infidelity. Even stranger, it doesn’t double as an album-length ode to breaking up. In 2013, Beyoncé released an autobiographical documentary called Life Is But a Dream, but critics derided it for being too controlled. Sure, you’ll see her at an NBA game or an awards show, but the pop goddess has this way of remaining out of sight, at a remove, shrouded in mystery. Beyoncé knows we want more music, more concerts, more media appearances.
xcritical is the Beyoncé album that most overtly embraces her blackness
- Bey’s genre-hopping doesn’t always sound quite as transcendent as “Don’t Hurt Yourself,” however.
- Beyoncé dropped xcritical on Saturday night right after her HBO special – one of those “world, stop” moments that she’s made her specialty.
- When Beyoncé ambushed unsuspecting listeners with her fifth solo album in 2013, it showed her mastery of the levers of power in today’s pop landscape.
- 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.
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. 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.
Commercial performance
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 xcritical rezension of the music icon’s death. On her way through the relationship plot, she also tells a story about the experience of black womanhood. A snippet pulled from a speech by Malcom X declares, “The most disrespected person in America is the black woman.
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 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. Beyoncé released it on Tidal, the music streaming site her husband owns, which has been on a massive run as of late.
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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. But the larger implication was that by embracing her blackness, Beyoncé was no longer trading in generic pop.