Albums of 2016: Beyoncé's Lemonade

(An essay about music writing as political praxis)

Contents:
- Introduction

- Let's Talk About Talking About Lemonade

- I. Authority

- II. Decision

- III. Evaluation

- The Trojan Human

What was Lemonade about? If you answered, “Jay Z cheating on Beyoncé,” dismiss yourself now. (Erica Thurman, Life Behind the Veil)

You may have watched Beyoncé’s Lemonade… but have you seen Lemonade? (Megan Carpentier, The Guardian)

Whether you love her, hate her, or stay strong in your neutrality, our exchanges are kind of the point. This is what art makes us do. (Frannie Kelley, NPR)

Questions—

• What is Lemonade?

(Or, we might now ask, a whole year after it dropped—)

• What was Lemonade?
• What is/was Lemonade about?

Beyoncé’s Lemonade was preceded by questions. We knew it was coming, we knew when and where it would occur, but we didn’t know what it was. All we knew was that it was Beyoncé’s Lemonade.

What was Lemonade? In the frantic flurry of news stories, reviews and think pieces offering an answer to this question, one common conclusion was that Lemonade was ‘a statement’. In this essay, I will argue that Lemonade was also a question. In fact, it was several questions, including those listed above. Beyoncé’s Lemonade asks: ‘What is/was Beyoncé’s Lemonade?’ and ‘What is/was Beyoncé’s Lemonade about?’

Albums of 2016: ANOHNI's Hopelessness

Long-term readers of this blog will know that there is no artist whose work I return to more obsessively than Anohni. As such, she’s the artist who forces me to break my own rules most flagrantly, when it comes to discussing consecutive albums in terms of a ‘career arc’: that ubiquitous one-size-fits-all narrative that I’d usually consider a reductive, insightless crutch.

Anohni’s work—with Antony & the Johnsons and now as a solo artist—has always had a strong conceptual identity and purpose, as suggested by her strident interview statements and her proximity to the art world. For me, the explicit positioning of Hopelessness as a ‘political’ record—a collection of ‘protest songs’—has only clarified the political potential inherent throughout Anohni’s previous work. Indeed, I hear Hopelessness as an album about Anohni as activist: revisiting the political potential of her work as it has evolved across ten years, weighing this potential against the demands of a catastrophic present, and using it to articulate a rich and radical theory of politicised hopelessness.

At every stage, the crucial element has been Anohni’s physical presence (as voice) within the worlds of her songs. As an unmistakable, entirely singular vocal presence, Anohni can never appear on her tracks as ‘this-or-that type of voice’—she can never simply ‘fit’ into a genre or style, and therefore always retains her queerness within the space and time of the song—but this also means that her music is perfect for thinking about voices-as-such. On Hopelessness, Anohni’s voice appears and acts on each track in a different way, performing a variety of different ‘protest’ tactics, while simultaneously speaking to the value and limits of certain forms of queer/gendered knowledge, in relation to broader political imaginaries.