Lemonade Theme

Beyoncé is a singer known for her fantastic voice, rejuvenating dance moves, and most importantly her empowering throughout her songs. These skills are no different in her song “Pretty Hurts.” Released on June 10, 2014, from her self-titled album Beyoncé, the song written by Sia, Joshua “Ammo” Coleman, and Beyoncé herself resonates its empowering message with people of all different genders, body types, and races. This song, in particular, is targeted towards women, especially young women who are still developing. Beyoncé gained popularity when she started off in an all-female group named Destiny’s Child back in 1997, and once she broke off from the group, she only continued to grow as an artist and person. In all six of Beyoncé’s solo studio albums, there are songs with galvanizing messages of female power and all of them reached number 1 on the charts. In Beyoncé’s song “Pretty Hurts,” she uses social issues, rhetorical appeals such as pathos, literary devices, metaphors, and vivid imagery to further the theme of female empowerment.

Beyoncé Knowles’s Lemonade video album brings the words of Beyoncé into a visual media and shows the viewer a deeper meaning behind the album. After this video came out many articles came forward analyzing Lemonade. One article, in particular, that was intriguing is Bell Hooks “Moving Beyond Pain.” Hooks starts her article saying that the Lemonade video was created as a money-making, business strategy, but as the text continues the reader can conclude that “Moving Beyond Pain” is actually about African American women, and women in general, standing up for themselves.

This exercise gives you the opportunity to examine the audio industry in-depth with a look at the making and release of Beyoncé’s fifth and sixth albums, Beyoncé, in 2013, and Lemonade in 2016.

Beyoncé Knowles, a well-known singer, songwriter uses two of her songs: “Freedom” and “Formation” to tell the story of herself. “Freedom” is the beginning of her story where she is searching for freedom and equality showing that there is still much inequality and injustice for African Americans in America today. The song slowly transitions to a more positive tone when she seems to have made something beneficial out of her difficult situation. “Formation,” however, has a completely different tone. While she does address negative situations from the past at the beginning of the song, she quickly transitions to a more positive tone full of pride in where she came from, who she has become, and what she has overcome. Together, the two songs

One of the most prominent visuals in Lemonade is the setting of New Orleans, Louisiana. In current times, New Orleans is most closely associated with the Hurricane Katrina disaster of 2004, in which a strong hurricane devastated the city and left many killed, injured, or homeless. There was national criticism of the government’s handling of Katrina, stating that the government took too long to respond to the crisis due to the city being mostly populated by blacks. However, this is not the only aspect of New Orleans that is central to Lemonade’s narrative. The video also shows staples of the old American South during the time of slavery, such as plantation homes and slave quarters. In this setting, Beyoncé indulges a fantasy of an all-black utopia dominated by women, who dress up, take photographs, and

When it comes to what she did right, Beyoncé’s LEMONADE is purely visual and it has allowed the world to take a deeper glance into the day to day life that she lives and includes titles such as "Intuition," "Denial," "Apathy," "Emptiness" and, eventually, "Resurrection", allowing us to see the chapters of her life broken down into separate sections. She touches about sexuality, police brutality, infidelity—that both she and her mother experienced,

Over the past few years tragic events seem to be surrounding our society. An array of killings, social protests, police brutality and racism have startled the nation. Lately celebrities have been addressing these issues more and more on TV, in interviews and in the public eye. One incredible artist just used her talent to address all of these issues and more in her new music video "Formation". Beyoncé is an iconic figure in our culture, spreading her talent, feminist views and activism worldwide. This video is one of a kind. It is not centered on her but on Black America. There have been many critics disagreeing with Beyoncé 's video. They felt that she spread negative messages of police throughout her video. Others, however, loved her video. They felt she used her platform to reach out and address issues. Supporters and critics of the video have expressed their opinions in many different ways. In this paper I will analyze this video that has been shared worldwide. The question I ask is: "How does Beyoncé depict the complexity of Black Americans?" In order to answer this question, I will apply Pentadic criticism to analyze this discourse.

In 1982, Michael Jackson released one of the most iconic songs/music videos the world has ever seen. “Thriller” is a Halloween classic, and has been a hit since the day it was released. The Thriller Music video is roughly 13 minutes long, and is classified as a “short film”. 34 years later, the iconic Beyoncé released her album “Lemonade.” Lemonade is made up of 12 songs, and each song has its own separate video, but all the videos somehow connect and the videos were turned into an hour-long film. For this blog, I will compare/contrast the two videos.

Beyonce is an African American female artist making incorporating empowering messages for women around the world. She is creating work that speaks to an audience that might not receive authentic mainstream. Beyonce ultimate goal is to visually and sonically entice wisdom through her music. Recently in a shocking video release, Beyonce debuted a new song “Formation” as well as a politically charged music video. This song was an uproar in the music industry worldwide. Millions of people around the world negatively viewed this song as a controversy. The music video and song caused many people to debate and cause a worldwide conflict.

Released in 2016 Lemonade is the sixth album recorded by American singer and songwriter Beyoncé Knowles. The famous artist was born in Houston, Texas to parents of African-American and Louisiana Creole descent. This has shaped a lot of her music in today’s industry, especially in this most recent album. Beyoncé is known as one of the most influential voices of popular culture since her rise to fame as a part of former R&B girl-group Destiny’s Child in the 1990s. The album covers countless of today’s world issues, but most importantly racial discrimination against African American women. The artist speaks up about this prejudice and attempts to empower listeners of the same background through her lyrics as well as her music videos.

She uses the identity politics of recognition to uplift black womanhood. Beyoncé’s sixth studio album, Lemonade, released April 23, 2016, is a “56-minute narrative movie mixing music, documentary and experimental elements” (Bale, 2016) incorporated into a visual album. In Lemonade, Beyoncé uses her artistry to acknowledge the duality of how Black womanhood is positioned between the oppression of race and gender. Beyoncé’s Lemonade album showcases the racism, sexism, and socio-cultural politics that black women experience. Throughout the whole visual album, black women appear representing the past, present, and future.

Beyonce uses pathos, the first of the three appeals in her song by using very descriptive phrases. When she states, “I’d listen to her, `cause I know how it hurts,” Beyonce is telling her audience that she understands what it is like to be hurt, and that if she were a boy, she would treat her women better because she could understand where she was coming from. This tugs at the listener’s heart because you can see that she has been emotionally hurt from a past relationship. Also, many people can relate to what she is disclosing. It is human nature for people to get emotionally damaged in a relationship and therefore her feelings are empathized. She also uses syntax by the way she orders her words by telling a story. If the song was not in story form, it would not produce the great impact that it does.

Over the weekend, Beyonce’s “Lemonade” visual album was released and fans were treated to an hour-long portrayal of the singer’s journey to forgiveness after betrayal in her marriage to rapper Jay Z. The album is replete with scenes of prayer, fasting, baptism, God, and the devil, and what The Christian Post (CP) says is a rather skewed interpretation of Christianity.

The author of the album LEMONADE is R&B singer Beyoncé Knowles-Carter. Her background sort of does create bias, because she is mostly known for writing love/breakup songs. The authority that I can attribute to her is power. She is a very well known in music and entertainment. I believe the purpose of this album was to tell a story of how you can take all of your obstacles in life and turn them into something great. The title and message says when life gives you lemons, make lemonade. It also has other messages that coincide with each song along with the visuals. Current and past events most definitely could have inspired this work. Such as, her marriage, her parent’s marriage and life in general. The intended audience is obviously her fans but it can also be for people who has had similar dilemmas. She displays her tone by the melody of the music along with the lyrics. The visuals also send the tone of the message.

While on her previous albums, Beyoncé was trying to empower all women, on Lemonade, Beyoncé speaks directly to black women. “As Jacqui Germain astutely noted on feministing.com, ‘Beyonce using the specific cultural marker of ‘Becky,’ [a social trope for white womanhood] in Lemonade is less a question of who’s excluding whom and why, and more so just us watching Beyonce be the ... multi-layered Black woman’” (Thompson, C., 2016). It was through this album that Beyoncé changed how the public thought of her. She was no longer afraid to not fully share what she wanted to say about current culture, and finally talked straight to black women to raise them up. It was also through this album that Beyoncé changed her image. Before her sixth album, Beyoncé definitely had feminist songs, but with Lemonade, she used rage to share her message, a message telling women that even after getting married, a man may not always be right for