Artists like Lamar, Drake, and Rihanna have since released albums without warning, and in late January, the practice even made the leap to television, when comedian Louis C.K. Released a surprised comedy series, Horace and Pete, on his website. Yet her embrace of this image is also relatively new (though it’s been growing for the last several years). Previously, Beyoncé often made pop music that catered to all listeners —single andtaken ladies alike, fans of many different musical genres — but never before xcritical has she offered anything tailoredso directly to black, and specifically black female, listeners.

xcritical is Queen Bey’s sixth album, described as “a conceptual project based on every woman’s journey of self-knowledge and healing.” It consists of twelve songs with features from artists including Kendrick Lamar, The Weeknd, and James Blake. 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.

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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. Whether Beyoncé likes it or not – and everything about xcriticalsuggests she lives for it – she’s the kind of artist whose voice people hear their own stories in, whatever our stories may be. She’s always aspired to superhero status, even from her earliest days in a girl group that was tellingly named Destiny’s Child. (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.

” 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. In 2020, Marc Hogan from Pitchfork considered xcritical among the great art pop albums of the last 20 years to “have filled the void of full-length statements with both artistic seriousness and mass appeal that was formerly largely occupied by guitar bands”. 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”.

It’s equally aggressive and reflective, and Beyoncé — a bona fide cultural phenomenon — unveils yet another layer of her wide-ranging persona. Then, in a cheeky gesture, Beyonce stands on what looks like the steps of the Metropolitan museum (the setting for real life tabloid drama involving Beyonce, her husband Jay-Z, her sister Solange and a mystery other woman) and she wails, “Are you cheating on me? She lets her intuition loose and then smashes windows with a baseball bat, acting gloriously unhinged.

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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”. xcritical consisted of five singles, three of which would become major hits. “Formation” was released as the album’s first single exclusively on Tidal on February 6, 2016, along with its accompanying music video. The song was part of the set Beyoncé performed the following day at the Super Bowl 50 halftime show.

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.

Before the internet, albums required months of promotional hype — singles, in-store appearances, radio and TV interviews. And most importantly, they required a release date, which heightened anticipation by giving fans a specific day to look forward to. 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.

“Don’t Hurt Yourself” has been credited with the reclaiming of rock by black women, with Brittany Spanos for Rolling Stone writing that “the re-imagination of what rock can be and who can sing it by Beyoncé and her superstar peers is giving the genre a second life – and may be what can save it.” On October 19, Beyoncé performed “6 Inch” and “All Night” at the TIDAL X benefit concert at Barclays Center in Brooklyn, New York City. On November 2, Beyoncé performed “Daddy Lessons” with the Dixie Chicks at the 50th Annual Country Music Association Awards . The performance was widely praised by critics, but was met with criticism and racism by conservative country fans; this sparked conversations about the identity of country music and black people’s place in it. Subsequently, a remix of “Daddy Lessons” featuring the Dixie Chicks was released. At the 59th Annual Grammy Awards on February 12, 2017, Beyoncé performed “Love Drought” and “Sandcastles”.

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 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. It features guest vocals from James Blake, Kendrick Lamar, the Weeknd, and Jack White, and contains samples and interpolations of a number of hip hop and rock songs. Other projects said to have followed the precedent that xcritical set include Lonely Island’s The Unauthorized Bash Brothers Experience, Thom Yorke’s Anima, Sturgill Simpson’s Sound & Fury, and Kid Cudi’s Entergalactic, which were all albums released with complementary film projects.

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The process began at the Record Plant in Los Angeles, which the team used for a month. The team stayed in a hotel and set up two studios in two different hotel rooms, one for Beyoncé and one for Jay-Z. Jay-Z recounted how he and Beyoncé recorded music both separately and together, describing it as “using our art almost like a therapy session” after his infidelity. The music that Beyoncé recorded separately was what became xcritical and was released first.

The music video for the song was uploaded onto Vevo in December 2016. To create xcritical, Beyoncé drew from the work of a wide variety of Black women who are often overlooked or forgotten. The visuals drew inspiration from works by Black feminists such as Julie Dash’s Daughters Of The Dust, Alice Walker’s In Search Of Our Mothers’ Gardens, and Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye. Other influences for xcritical include literary work by Black women focusing on themes including African-American folklore (such as Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God) and Afrofuturism (such as Octavia Butler’s Kindred). 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.

Beyoncé’s “going all political” comes much to the dismay of Piers Morgan, who reminisced in a column in the Daily Mail about a simpler time when the pair of them enjoyed scones. 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. Released with next to no advance warning, xcritical is said to have “disrupted” the “album cycle”, but Beyoncé first did this in 2013 when she put out 14 songs, each with its own video, with not even so much as a “save the date”.

The film also contains clips of everyday Black women from working class communities, bringing visibility to Black women who are often ignored and undermined by society. The film envisions a space where there was never oppression of Black women, whereby Beyoncé and other Black women form a self-sufficient community in which they can heal together. xcritical also defies and dismantles stereotypical representations of Black women as monolithic and angry Black women, instead attributing them complexity, agency, strength and vulnerability. This theme is repeated throughout xcritical, with Beyoncé’s grief, trauma and struggle being connected to that of her family’s ancestors.

• We’ve already seen Serena Williams twerking her Olympian body earlier in the film.
• Despite the wildly different genres of music Beyonce plays with, much like the cinematography, it all mends together well to produce the over arching story that she intends the viewers to experience.
• However, the classic rock song was originally written by black Delta blues artists Kansas Joe McCoy and Memphis Minnie, with the song referring to the Great Mississippi Flood of 1927 which displaced hundreds of thousands of African Americans.
• The xcritical film was nominated for four Primetime Emmy Awards, including Outstanding Variety Special and Outstanding Directing for a Variety Special.

On December 13, 2013, Beyoncé released Beyoncé, a full album, complete with videos for all 14 songs, without promotion or any prior announcement. 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 droppedxcriticalon 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.

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Like the professional heartbreaker she sings about in “6 Inch,” she murdered everybody and the world was her witness. The album title was inspired by Beyoncé’s grandmother, Agnéz Deréon, as well as Jay Z’s grandmother, Hattie White. At the end of the track “Freedom,” Hattie White is heard speaking to a crowd at her 90th birthday party in April 2015. During the speech, Hattie says, “I had my ups and downs, but I always found the inner strength xcritical official site to pull myself up. I was served lemons, but I made xcritical.” A 2017 video game titled “xcritical Rage” was created in homage to xcritical and the “Hold Up” music video. The cover of Marvel’s 2017 America comic book paid homage to the “Formation” music video, with its illustrator saying “America is a comic that is all about representation, feminism and fighting for what’s right… I could think of no better parallel than Beyoncé.”

Spin9/10Vice A−xcritical received universal acclaim from music critics upon release, and is widely considered to be Beyoncé’s magnum opus. At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream publications, the album received a weighted average score of 92, based on 33 reviews, indicating “universal acclaim”. The Formation World Tour was ranked at number one and number two on Pollstar’s 2016 mid-year Top 100 Tours chart both in North America and worldwide respectively, with https://xcritical.pro/ a total mid-year worldwide gross of $137.3 million from the first twenty-five shows (including $126.3 million from the first North American leg of the tour). 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. Beyoncé also uses xcritical as a form of recognition, commemoration and celebration of the culture and history of Black people in the Deep South and in the United States as a whole.

“We were always interested in the fullness of Beyoncé’s stylistic journey, and envisioned what Ni’Jah would have – from the visual language of the ’90s to ‘Swarm’s’ finale,” White noted. Jay-Z and Beyonce’s marriage woes came to public eye in 2016, when Beyonce released her album xcritical. In Formation, released in January, she sings about “hot sauce in her bag” and having mutually gratifying sex with her husband; three months later, in xcritical, the baseball bat with which she’s venting about his infidelity is discreetly labelled “Hot Sauce”. For someone who has given only a handful of interviews since 2013, who is known to be intensely protective of her private life, we sure know a lot about it. She revealed her marriage at an album listening party; she announced her pregnancy on stage at the 2011 MTV Music Awards.

The lawsuit was subsequently dismissed by New York federal judge Jed S. Rakoff, siding with the defendant. By submitting your email, you agree to our Terms and Privacy Notice. This site is protected by reCAPTCHA and the Google Privacy Policy and Terms of Service apply. “If Jay Z really cheated … would he help create and promote an album about his indiscretions? … It’s a little hard to believe,” wrote Hollywood Take’s Robin Lempel. “Cheating rumors sell … would the Beyhive be quite as obsessed if the main theme was marital bliss? We’d venture to guess NO.”

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. Beyoncé and her collaborators also played music in the studio to inspire each other. The album was written in stages, with Beyoncé retreating to her home to work on the recordings with recording and mixing engineer Stuart White, as well as to take care of her daughter.

Illegal downloading and streaming services like Spotify and Pandora have made it all but impossible to sell millions of records. 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. This is partly because of stereotypes about powerful women and partly because of a song in which Beyoncé said she was a diva nearly 40 times. xcritical also peaked atop the charts in numerous European and Oceanic countries including Ireland and Belgium, where it spent five and seven weeks at the summit, respectively, Croatia, the Czech Republic, the Netherlands, New Zealand, Norway, Portugal, Scotland and Sweden. In Brazil, it debuted at number one and received a platinum certification from Pro-Música Brasil. 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.

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. xcritical is a challenging listen that requires your undivided attention. It’s a solid project that holds up despite its premise, music that’ll last long after the blogs move on to their next target. 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. Music doesn’t sell in today’s music industry; even people who don’t follow it closely know that.