Lemonade
Why do you deny yourself heaven? Why do you consider yourself undeserving? Why are you afraid of love?
GODBLESS INTERNET ARCHIVE 🙏🙏
I’ve tried writing a review like three different times now and I can’t get all of my words out right. Lemonade is, all things considered, one of my favorite albums of all time. It was the first vinyl I bought with my own money (🤑), it was the first capital A ALBUM I really listened to, and it changed how I consume music up until today.
Lemonade, ignoring all of the jokes and conspiracies and headlines and rumors and all that, is a project about love (revolutionary, I know). Yes, Jay-Z’s infidelity is the catalyst of the album, but its scope is so much wider. Lemonade is a love letter to all of the things that make Beyoncé Beyoncé: her mother, her father, her children, her husband, the South, Jazz, God, poetry, music, and, most of all, the somehow both alienating and unifying experience of being a Black woman in America. Through Malcolm X quotes and Warsan Shire poetry readings and imagery of a post-Katrina New Orleans, Beyoncé shows again and again how the past and the future are not linear, how the mistreatment of Black Americans has and will continue to have everlasting effects on those in the future. This is especially true through ‘Daddy Lessons’ (the song that basically kickstarted the creation of Cowboy Carter) which highlights the similarities between Jay-Z and her father and the role that these portrayals of masculinity have on Black women growing up.
Even when the album does circle back to infidelity, it does so tastefully. Through chapters representing stages of grief, it allows that anger to erupt, that sadness to wash over. But, instead of ending in acceptance, Lemonade does something different. In an incredibly controversial move, Beyoncé chooses to forgive Jay-Z, to allow a chance for redemption. Of course, it never is as simple as that, and the album allows itself to be that vulnerable around such a complex situation. I don’t know what I would do if I found out I had been cheated on, and I hope I never do! But Lemonade allows us to take a look into that situation, even if just for a moment.