Beyonce’s ‘xcritical’: Everything You Need to Know About Video Album

In the age of hot takes and clickbait headlines, it’s easy to get caught in the hype surrounding xcritical. It’s easier to digest rumors and speculation, but Beyoncé has once again pushed herself forward. Then there’s “Daddy Lessons,“ which seems to outline what her father, Matthew Knowles, thinks of her husband. “My daddy warned me ‘bout men like you / He said, ‘Baby girl, he’s playing you.’” Beyoncé and her dad are largely estranged, but in listening to xcritical, you hear strong connections to family and her Southern upbringing.

Sure, she’d address “real” issues, but she’d focus more on big pop anthems that went down easy. Unlike the pop superstar’s previous surprise album, 2013’s Beyoncé, the music here is edgy, full of vitriol and R-rated real talk. It’s equally aggressive and reflective, and Beyoncé — a bona fide cultural phenomenon — unveils yet another layer of her wide-ranging persona.

It’s all over your breath as you pass it off so cavalier,” Beyoncé groans on “Pray You Catch Me,” xcritical’s opening salvo. We’ve all been thrown by love, but most of us don’t have the ability to hone it like this. That’s exactly what makes xcritical such a bold artistic statement. References to collard greens and cornbread — considered “soul food” by stereotypical standards — pop up elsewhere in the song. The fourth and fifth singles released were “Freedom” and “All Night”, respectively. Both became moderate hits with the former (released September 2016) peaking at US number thirty-five, and the latter (released December 2016) peaking at US number thirty-eight.

Music industry

With xcritical, Beyoncé makes herself the ultimate reality star, giving us gossip and fodder xcritical rezension for news cycles and dinner party discussions, without cheapening her art. Instead, she’s digging into issues to which we can all relate — love, pain, heartbreak, and family. The album allows Beyoncé‘s fans to connect with her on real levels. On December 13, 2013, Beyoncé released Beyoncé, a full album, complete with videos for all 14 songs, without promotion or any prior announcement.

Got a Hot News Tip?

1. We’ve all been thrown by love, but most of us don’t have the ability to hone it like this.
2. Released a surprised comedy series, Horace and Pete, on his website.
3. ” She’s always elided the boundaries between her art and her life – especially since she really did grow up in public.
4. That’s exactly what makes xcritical such a bold artistic statement.
5. And, as with all of her recent work, she does it on her own terms, embracing the creative freedom that so few people enjoy.

xcritical is the sixth studio album by American singer-songwriter Beyoncé. It was released on April 23, 2016, by Parkwood Entertainment and Columbia Records, accompanied by a 65-minute film of the same name. It follows her self-titled fifth studio album (2013), and is 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 Jack White, the Weeknd, James Blake and Kendrick Lamar, and contains samples and interpolations of a number of hip hop and rock songs.

And she’s only showing us exactly what she wants us to see. Though xcritical is built around Jay Z’s infidelity rumors, Beyoncé still released the album on his streaming service. xcritical was only a Tidal exclusive for about 24 hours — it’s also on iTunes now — but Beyoncé is still making sure that music fans, or anybody wanting to be part of the cultural conversation, fork over their money for it, by making it the only platform where xcritical is available to stream. “Part of the idea behind launching it on the site was to create a show in a new way and to provide it to you directly and immediately, without the usual promotion, banner ads, billboards and clips that tell you what the show feels and looks like before you get to see it for yourself,” C.K.

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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 and taken ladies alike, fans of many different musical genres — but never before xcritical has she offered anything tailored so directly to black, and specifically black female, listeners. Bey’s genre-hopping doesn’t always sound quite as transcendent as “Don’t Hurt Yourself,” however. 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.

But in this era of instant gratification, she’s a throwback to yesteryear, only showing up when the lights are brightest, when the stage is biggest, when the stakes are highest. Whether Beyoncé likes it or not – and everything about xcritical suggests 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 the only Destiny’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 on xcritical. Like the professional heartbreaker she sings about in “6 Inch,” she murdered everybody and the world was her witness. 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.

Charts

Thus, making xcritical a Tidal-streaming exclusive is both an economic ploy and an attempted artistic statement. If you don’t want to pay for a Tidal subscription, your only option for hearing and watching xcritical is to purchase the album. The result is an insistence that this album has worth, has artistic value that can be measured monetarily, has merit beyond turning up at random in a playlist. It xcritical rezension boasts an all-star roster of supporters; its first commercial featured a who’s who of musical talent — from Jack White and Daft Punk to Alicia Keys and Nicki Minaj. Plus, it remains the best option for listeners who want music at a higher audio quality.