Beyoncé empowers fans with new visual album
From political issues to personal life matters, Beyonce’s new album hit titled “Lemonade” incorporates a visual aspect that provides insight into real world issues and allows viewers into the journey of her private life.
Beyonce’s sixth studio album was released on April 23 and came in at number one on the Billboard 200, providing the superstar with her sixth chart topper.
The visual album reveals an unguarded part of Beyonce’s life as it centers around infidelity and the aftershock emotions that follow.
From betrayal to forgiveness, from sadness to revival, the new visual album is layered with every emotion possible and brings the mega superstar into a relatable light.
The visual album displays Queen B drowning in her tears, smashing everything around her with a baseball bat, throwing her ring at the camera and her driving in a monster truck over cars. Her painfully obvious anger only becomes more clear with lyrics such as “big homie better grow up” and “middle fingers up, put them hands high, wave it in his face, tell him, boy, bye.”
The album does take a turn in attitude. What’s life without trials – or, as Beyonce calls them, lemons?
It is not until the second half of the album that the viewer can begin to see a happy ending. With songs titled “Forward,” “Freedom” and “Formation” and lyrics such as “nothing real can be threatened,” the mood begins to lighten.
The main focus of the album seems to be infidelity but Beyonce does not forget to powerfully enforce the idea that ‘Black lives matter’ into her album.
As Beyonce’s album gets more personal it also gets more political. Malcolm X is quoted early in the film with “the most disrespected person in America is the black woman.”
Scenes of African American women gathered in circles are repeatedly shown through the album, along with images of Trayvon Martin and his mother.
In home-video footage of Hattie’s, Jay-Z’s grandmother’s, 90th birthday, “we see her say she took lemons and made lemonade, as all black women who want to work, survive and also thrive must do,” said Miriam Bale on Billboard.
Beyonce does it again with this hit album that even though we see her at her most vulnerable, viewers still describe the album as “defiant,” “brave” and “powerful” in addition to feeling that the visual album was one of her strongest to date, according to Stephanie Smith-Strickland on Highsnobiety.