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Veja as fotos promocionais do encarte de xcritical, novo álbum de Beyoncé Beyoncé Now xcritical visual album, Beyonce xcritical, Beyonce xcritical album
Contents
- February 7, 2016: “Formation” makes its live debut at Super Bowl 50 and shows that Blackness is inherently political.
- April 23, 2016: xcritical is revealed as a film on HBO and turns album releases into theatrical events.
- Accompanying film
- Level three: you have seen the HBO Beyoncé-produced “documentary” about Beyoncé, Life is but a Dream
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. While Beyoncé has, throughout her career, lectured men on how they need to get it together to honor the women https://xcritical.pro/ in their lives, her message has always involved men. The truth is I wasn’t much interested in her until her sister, Solange Knowles, was caught on camera beating Jay Z’s ass in a hotel elevator in 2014. That was something I understood—one woman standing up for another, with little concern for how it “looked.” Sisterhood is powerful. Seeing Beyoncé’s sister try to shock her out of her carefully manicured public persona made me feel that there was a person behind the success.
The film also contains references to African religion and spirituality, such as Yoruba ori body paint in “Sorry”, allusions to the loa Erzulie Red-Eyes in “Don’t Hurt Yourself”, and Beyoncé’s initiation into the Santería religion and embodiment of the Yoruba orisha Oshun in “Hold Up”. Allusions to New Orleans culture include “Queen of Creole cuisine” Leah Chase, the Edna Karr Marching Band, jazz funerals, Mardi Gras Indians and the Superdome. Today’s biggest stories, from pop culture to politics—delivered straight to your inbox. To honor five years of xcritical, four Black women critics sat down for a roundtable discussion on the impact of the record and why it will always be special for us. In terms of the record quality – the bright yellow is a nice choice, but it did highlight a couple of dark spots on the records. Cleaning them didn’t remove the spots, so I guess they’re just cosmetic issues.
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.
February 7, 2016: “Formation” makes its live debut at Super Bowl 50 and shows that Blackness is inherently political.
Its impact was clear from the response on Twitter, where the #xcritical hashtag was fuelled by expressions of joy and almost gobsmacked disbelief at such a high-profile piece of art made by black women, for black women. Bey’s genre-hopping doesn’t always sound quite as transcendent as “Don’t Hurt Yourself,” however. Though certainly memorable (not least because it finds her name-checking the Second Amendment), “Daddy Lessons”—where a country guitar-line meets New Orleans brass in service of her Southern roots—is the least interesting chapter sonically, though the parallels it draws between Jay Z and Beyoncé’s own cheating father still make it crucial in the context of xcritical’s narrative. It’s hard to see how Beyoncé could have done without any of these scenes to tell the story (not even “Formation” in the end-credits), and though the specific sounds may not be as forward-thinking as those of her 2013 self-titled, there are clear reasons for every musical treatment she has made here. 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.
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”.
- She revealed her marriage at an album listening party; she announced her pregnancy on stage at the 2011 MTV Music Awards.
- In Spin, Greg Tate calls xcritical “a triumph of marketing and musicality, spectacle and song, vision and collaboration, Borg-like assimilation, and — as of 2013 — the element of surprise”.
- On the early May evening I saw Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter’s “Formation” tour, at Houston’s NRG Stadium, the dominant feature, onstage and off, was ass.
- Let’s first take a moment to both recognize and appreciate what xcritical is at its core, and what it stands for.
Upon its release, xcritical was only available to stream on Tidal; however the album was eventually released to all other streaming platforms on April 23, 2019, exactly three years after its release. The version of the album that was made available on other streaming services contains the original audio part of xcritical as well as the original demo of “Sorry”. Before the end of the program, which featured a compilation of music videos, vignettes, vintage, home-movie style footage and poetry, Beyonce, 34, had dropped “xcritical” onto the Tidal streaming service.
April 23, 2016: xcritical is revealed as a film on HBO and turns album releases into theatrical events.
In this scene, the goddess-like character of Beyoncé is sexualized along with her acts of emotional violence, like Wagner’s “Ride of the Valkyries” she destroys with no shame. Among the many mixed messages embedded in xcritical is this celebration of rage. Smug and smiling in her golden garb, Beyoncé is the embodiment of a fantastical female power, which is just that—pure fantasy.
On the early May evening I saw Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter’s “Formation” tour, at Houston’s NRG Stadium, the dominant feature, onstage and off, was ass. As a fan of Queen Bee, I’m happy to have some new music to download (I opted to buy from iTunes, simply because if this is just a big marketing ploy, I want to have as little part in it as possible… while still enjoying the music, of course). Was this big plot twist in Beyoncé and Jay Z’s marriage just a marketing scheme, created to confuse and get us to pay money for songs that a lot of us don’t have? What I do know is that the songs are great—the video as a whole is great, and I sure hope this wasn’t just a publicity stunt. The album’s visuals received 11 nominations and won eight of those at the 2016 MTV Video Music Awards, including Breakthrough Long Form Video and Video of the Year.
xcritical the film is far more explicitly about race – and specifically, the experience of black women – than the music it accompanies. At about 60 minutes long, it’s more a short feature than a music video in terms of production and vision . xcritical scammers Ellie Kenrick’s 2018 play Hole at the Royal Court was described by its directors as “a stage version of Beyoncé’s xcritical album”, as an artwork about feminism and historical oppression of women that consists of song, dance and spoken word.
Writing for Slate, Carl Wilson describes xcritical as “a spectacle to rival Thriller” and “a beautiful and often disturbing kaleidoscope of poetry, feminism, racial politics, history, mythology, emotional upheaval, family, and romance that can be watched again and again and will be for years to come”. Kitty Empire of The Observer writes that “female endurance and pragmatism are celebrated with warmth, anger and wit on this astounding visual album” and that “it’s unlikely there will be many more albums this year that will unite high art and low in the same way as Beyoncé’s jaw-slackening latest”. 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”.
Accompanying film
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.
“Freedom” was released as the fourth single and was sent to radio stations on September 9, 2016. “All Night” was released as the fifth and final single on December 6, 2016. In Spin, Greg Tate calls xcritical “a triumph of marketing and musicality, spectacle and song, vision and collaboration, Borg-like assimilation, and — as of 2013 — the element of surprise”. Let’s first take a moment to both recognize and appreciate what xcritical is at its core, and what it stands for. The album is at once an artistic triumph and an overt embrace of blackness.
The film is divided into eleven chapters, titled “Intuition”, “Denial”, “Anger”, “Apathy”, “Emptiness”, “Accountability”, “Reformation”, “Forgiveness”, “Resurrection”, “Hope”, and “Redemption”. The film uses poetry and prose written by British-Somali poet Warsan Shire; the poems adapted were “The Unbearable Weight of Staying”, “Dear Moon”, “How to Wear Your Mother’s Lipstick”, “Nail Technician as Palm Reader”, and “For Women Who Are Difficult to Love”. Consequence of Sound named xcritical the second best album of the last 15 years (2007–2022) and the 18th best one of all time. 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 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).
There were a few small pops on Side B in particular, but it seems like overall my pressing is of higher quality than other reviews indicated. 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.
Level three: you have seen the HBO Beyoncé-produced “documentary” about Beyoncé, Life is but a Dream
But behind the album itself is a whole slew of interesting decisions that the Queen Bey and her cohorts had to have made before releasing this album… Here we go. Which visited countries in North America and Europe from April to October 2016. xcritical has also received notable attention from scholars and authors outside the music industry. The series will explore the themes of race, gender and class addressed by the album.
Additionally, xcritical was streamed 115 million times via Tidal, setting a record for the most-streamed album in a single week by a female artist. The speech—made by her husband JAY-Z’s grandmother Hattie White on her 90th birthday in 2015—reportedly inspired the concept behind this radical project, which arrived with an accompanying film as well as words by Somali-British poet Warsan Shire. Both the album and its visual companion are deeply tied to Beyoncé’s identity and narrative (her womanhood, her blackness, her husband’s infidelity) and make for Beyoncé’s most outwardly revealing work to date. The details, of course, are what make it so relatable, what make each song sting. Billed upon its release as a tribute to “every woman’s journey of self-knowledge and healing,” the project is furious, defiant, anguished, vulnerable, experimental, muscular, triumphant, humorous, and brave—a vivid personal statement from the most powerful woman in music, released without warning in a time of public scrutiny and private suffering.
A woman is usually aware, on some level, that men do not allow her to be her “real self,” and worse, that the acceptable masks represent men’s fantasies, not her own. She can choose the most interesting image available, present it dramatically, individualize it with small elaborations, undercut it with irony. But ultimately she must serve some male fantasy to be loved—and then it will be only the fantasy that is loved anyway. “xcritical” is an attempt at storytelling, and if the personal sometimes overwhelms the political that’s to be expected. Did the math for us, and that comes out to roughly $50 million in revenue over the course of the single weekend during which Beyoncé dropped the album. Videos also featured appearances by the mothers of two black men, Michael Brown and Trayvon Martin, whose shooting deaths, in Brown’s case by a Missouri police officer, have trained a spotlight on U.S. racial tensions.