BEYONCE

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Beyoncé's Lemonade came out four years ago today. It's one of the best pieces of art ever made.

Beyoncé could have continued along the path she was on, creating hits and plotting sold-out world tours. Instead, she made a multimedia work of art that set a new standard for what an album could be—while paying tribute to all those who came before her, and creating a way to redemption for those who come after.

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MUSIC

The Top 10 Most Influential Albums of the 2010s

These albums not only shaped the past decade: they'll determine what music will be in the coming one.

Photo by: Kelvin Lutan / Unsplash

Music has never been extricable from culture, but in the 2010s, it became crystal clear that music has the ability to shatter norms and reshape the world.

Take a moment and think back to the albums that changed your life over the past decade. Most likely, they altered your worldview on a fundamental level, reshaping the way you saw yourself and your life. Some albums are capable of doing that on a massive scale, and that's what this list is intended to highlight: Albums that managed to shift the way people saw music, culture, and themselves, and that paved the way for what music might become.

10. Kendrick Lamar — To Pimp A Butterfly

Kendrick Lamar - Alrightwww.youtube.com

Poet and firebrand Kendrick Lamar creates music that's both timeless and entirely of its time. To Pimp A Butterfly was Kendrick at his most inspired and radioactive. It cut into the pain and rage and hope of an era and a community and a person, and collapsed time into a tangle of sound and memory that reviewers and listeners will be playing and attempting to understand for decades.

It made an indelible impact, becoming a juggernaut and an easy name-drop, but fortunately, To Pimp A Butterfly searingly addresses all the trappings of fame, shallow understanding, and commodification that follow it, retaining an indomitable inner life.

9. BTS — Map of the Soul: Persona

BTS (방탄소년단) MAP OF THE SOUL : PERSONA 'Persona' Comeback Trailerwww.youtube.com

The 2010s were the era that K-pop entered the global theatre, and nobody dominated more than BTS. Their album Map of the Soul: Persona may not have been critically lauded, but it was legendary in the hearts and minds of their fans.

Map of the Soul: Persona was glittery boy-band pop, pristine and starry-eyed. Rolling Stone described it as "harmless" and "impregnable," but BTS fans are not harmless, and neither is K-pop, but what this band is is unavoidable, pervasive, and larger-than-life. To ignore the impact of BTS would be to miss a massive portion of the 2010s and to remain blind to what the 2020s will hold, which is a far more globalized music industry that, no matter what, will always, always have its beloved boy bands.

8. Carly Rae Jepsen — E•MO•TION

Carly Rae Jepsen - Run Away With Mewww.youtube.com

Jepsen's seminal debut album gained her a cult of devoted fans and spread a wide-eyed sense of pop optimism across the 2010s. Just what about E•MO•TION was so singular, so moving, so unforgettable? As Jia Tolentino wrote, "Carly Rae Jepsen is a pop artist zeroed in on love's totipotency: the glance, the kaleidoscope-confetti-spinning instant, the first bit of nothing that contains it all." As one Twitter user insinuated, "Carly Rae Jepsen's E•MO•TION is for all the gays in a healthy relationship for the first time."

Electric Lit argued that with E•MO•TION, Jepsen ushered in a "queer renaissance," one that exists because her music occupies a familiar feeling: "the struggle to express a desire that isn't supposed to exist." From the raw ecstasy of "Run Away With Me" to the dreamy chaos of "LA Hallucinations," Jepsen's music is desperate to bridge the gap between the self and others, to leave behind loneliness, to cut straight to the feeling; and in that, it left an indelible impact for those who were there to experience its majesty.

7. Lana Del Rey — Born To Die

Lana Del Rey - Born To Die (Official Music Video)www.youtube.com

Lana Del Rey is, rightfully, credited with ushering in the wave of sad-girl pop that is still going strong, thanks to artists like Halsey, Billie Eilish, and of course, Del Rey herself. The artist formerly known as Lizzy Grant emerged onto the scene as a cyborgian, hyper-manufactured industry plant refracted through a vintage DIY filter, and now she's one of the voices of her generation, whispering platitudes on America and sex and sadness in the same breath.

Born To Die was Del Rey at her most manufactured, her most glittery, her must luxurious and opulent and depressed, and it's beautiful in its decay. Its kitschy Americana held no bars, and from its nihilistic title track to the sultry "Blue Jeans"to the weird glamour of "Off To the Races," it effectively spawned an entire generation of flower-crowned teens who are now sad Trump-hating adults.

6. Lady Gaga — Born This Way

Lady Gaga - Born This Waywww.youtube.com

Lady Gaga might not have the clout she did at the beginning of the 2010s, but back in the day, Gaga was a wild card and game-changer, crushing norms, changing fashion, and standing up for the LGBTQ+ community. She was proudly weird and always daring, and she created a whole space for weird pop stars after her. She blended drag, burlesque, and shock-factor performance with genuinely catchy pop, and created a new blueprint for stardom in the process.

Born This Way was arguably her crown jewel, the point where she blossomed into the true freak she'd been waiting to become. It had the ecstatic "You and I" and "Edge of Glory." It marked an era where pop music became inextricable from its visual component and political implications—not that it ever really was.

5. Lizzo — Cuz I Love You

Lizzo - Truth Hurts (Official Video)www.youtube.com

Most likely, Lizzo will be even bigger in the 2020s; after all, she only just released her major label debut album. But Lizzo has already changed the game, creating space for a type of beauty and confidence that pop stars before her have only played at or insinuated. From her refusal to tolerate inadequate men to her willingness to rock thongs at baseball games and her decision to pay tribute to the great women who paved the way for her, at this point, Lizzo might be our best hope for the future.

Cuz I Love You synthesized the hits Lizzo had been building up for years, twining them into a euphoric testament to self-love in spite of a world that teaches you to hate yourself. From the celebratory "Good As Hell" to the buoyant mic-drop that is "Truth Hurts," the album is a gift to us all.

4. Lil Nas X — 7 (EP)

Lil Nas X - Old Town Road (Official Movie) ft. Billy Ray Cyruswww.youtube.com

Lil Nas X's fantastic "Old Town Road" was the perfect conflagration of factors that hit at exactly the right time. It was also supremely, unbelievably catchy. Using memes, blurring genres, buying beats off SoundCloud, coming out on Twitter and being open about how he made "Old Town Road" while sleeping on his sister's couch, Lil Nas caught us all in our heartstrings and created a blueprint for music's undeniably post-genre and multimedia future.

X's EP, "7," wasn't a high-quality work so much as it was a cultural flashpoint, an inspiration that no doubt has marketing executives scrambling to replicate it.

3. Billie Eilish — when we all fall asleep, where do we go?

Billie Eilish - bad guywww.youtube.com

Billie Eilish is changing the game in terms of what pop music can sound like and how pop stars should act. Any producer who attempts to drag pop songs into clear-cut and old-fashioned forms involving high notes and beat drops will find themselves challenged by the innovative, glitchy, challenging tunes that Eilish creates with her brother in their childhood home. Her refusal to fit into gender norms and her insistence on standing up for things like climate make her emblematic of what a future of Gen-Z stars might look like.

when we all fall asleep, where do we go? is a peculiar album. A lot of its songs don't even try for radio play, and some are so sad they can take your breath away. Some are barely whispers, like the moody "when the party's over," while others are cracked and angry and challenging, like the smash hit "bad guy," but all of it's undeniably unforgettable and boundary-breaking.

2. Kanye West — My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy

Kanye West - Runaway (Full-length Film)www.youtube.com

Provocative, raw, and almost bloody with emotion, Kanye West's My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy continues to reverberate nearly 10 years after it was released. West's album is full of unexpected dips into guitar solos and alien sounds that draw it into new dimensions; it's peppered with cheesy lines, dirty jokes, and shockingly confessional lyrics; and no matter how far West has gone into Christianity, My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy is an enduring ode to the devils we all know.

Its best songs, "All Of the Lights," "Devil In A New Dress" and "Runaway," explore what West has always been working through—the ragged edge where sin meets faith, and where success meets corruption. MBDTF sinks its teeth into the rough, infected parts of the world and creates something great out of them. Though we might not see West exploring this territory again, his work sparked an entire generation of artists looking to dive into the world he created.

1. Beyoncé — Lemonade

Beyoncé - Formationwww.youtube.com

Beyoncé's brilliant Lemonade has yet to be surpassed, even as other artists try to mirror her surprise video-drop format. Lemonade mixed poetry, visuals, and beautiful, kaleidoscopic music to form a treatise on freedom, love, black women's power, and of course, Jay-Z. It made an indelible impact on all the music that came after it, setting the standard for what a truly creative release could look and sound like.

From the harmony-laden "Pray You Catch Me" to the gritty Jack White duet "Don't Hurt Yourself" to the triumphant, anthemic "Freedom," Lemonade changed everything. We can only hope we'll see more like it in the 2020s.

BTS at the American Music Awards

By Featureflash Photo Agency

Congratulations–you've survived 2019

We've been through haunting commercials, traumatically bad movies, and the fall of a favorite childhood author. But through it all, there's been Spotify, judging our music tastes like a disapproving boomer. And yet, we persisted. In alphabetical order, these are the top 50 musical lifelines of the 2010s. In the top 25 are the likes of BTS, Bon Iver, Kendrick Lamar, and Childish Gambino. Among the bottom 25 are FKA twigs, Tayor Swift, Julien Baker, and Charli XCX. Notably absent is anything by Ed Sheeran or Justin Bieber, because we don't believe bad listening habits should be encouraged. Happy listening in 2020!

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On Wednesday, October 23rd and Thursday the 24th, if you're in New York, you can go to church to worship at the altar of Beyoncé and all she represents.

Wednesday's service will happen at the First Presbyterian Church of Brooklyn at 7:00 PM, and Thursday's will be at Harlem's St. James Presbyterian Church at the same time.

The Beyoncé Mass began where most modern religions seem to begin, in California. It started as the project of Rev. Yolanda Nortan, a scholar of Hebrew theology who began her foray into Beyoncé-worship by teaching a class on Beyoncé and the Hebrew Bible at the San Francisco Theological Seminary. The first Mass was held as part of a three-part series at San Francisco's Nob Hill Church called "Speaking Truth: The Power of Story in Community," dedicated to uplifting the voices of people who have been historically marginalized by the church, specifically black women, immigrants, and the LGBTQ+ community.

The first mass drew nearly 1,000 people, and it has continued to gain traction since debuting in 2018. Services feature Bible readings interspersed with Beyoncé songs, and though they're dedicated to and led by Black women, they're open to everyone regardless of race or creed.

Rev. Norton is careful to emphasize that the mass isn't about worshiping Beyoncé at all, but instead about breaking open oppressive traditions. "I believe [Beyoncé] reminds us that you have to do your thing your way, you don't do it on demand, you don't do it for your oppressor, you don't sing when they want you to sing...you sing when God calls you to sing," she said.

The service itself is supposed to be a place where "Black women find their voice, represent the image of God, and create spaces for liberation," according to its website. The description adds that the mass is a "womanist worship service that uses the music and personal life of Beyoncé as a tool to foster an empowering conversation about black women." Womanism is a version of feminism dedicated to breaking down the white connotations of the term "feminism," which has historically been used to describe a fight for women's rights that was created by and for white women and that exclusively addresses gender issues and aims for women to achieve equality with white males.

Though the definition of feminism is pliable and different for everyone, many conventional interpretations of feminism have failed to address the unique forces of race and class that inevitably tangle with gender, instead remaining lodged in capitalist systems that rely on the subjugation of certain people.

On the other hand, womanism is a term that was coined by the Black feminist thinker Alice Walker, and it views sexism as inextricable from racism. It also emphasizes the beauty of Black womanhood and promotes solidarity with Black men. Overall, womanism highlights the fact that sexism and racism both rely on the same kind of hierarchical thought that has always benefited off a structure wherein some people thrive because others are kept down.

"The patriarchal/kyriarchal/hegemonic culture seeks to regulate and control the body—especially women's bodies, and especially black women's bodies—because women, especially black women, are constructed as the Other, the site of resistance to the kyriarchy," says writer Yvonne Aburrow in explanation of the term. "Because our existence provokes fear of the Other, fear of wildness, fear of sexuality, fear of letting go—our bodies and our hair (traditionally hair is a source of magical power) must be controlled, groomed, reduced, covered, suppressed."

This fear has long been codified in the Church, which swivels around an age-old terror of female power and its colonialist imperatives. Nowhere is the Church's tendency to suppress the voices of women (and particularly women of color) more apparent than in the evangelical church's "purity movement," which demonizes sexuality, often through a racist lens. Beyoncé, specifically, has been a target of evangelical racism; for example, the evangelical Mike Huckabee recently speculated that Jay-Z was a "pimp," sparking a firestorm of controversy.

She has also been uniquely outspoken in challenging and subverting Christian norms, perhaps most famously in her instantly iconic Virgin Mary-inspired pregnancy photoshoot. According to The Washington Post, Beyoncé's "re-appropriation of Virgin Mary iconography offers a biting critique of this supreme exemplar of feminine whiteness and the ideology that constructs and perpetuates it." She's deconstructed the Virgin Mary image before; in her 2017 Grammys performance, she blended Virgin Mary imagery with references to the Yoruba goddess Oshun, creating a tribute to the African diaspora and the common threads that connect Christianity and diasporic faiths.


Beyoncé live performance at the 2017 Grammys (Love Drought + Sandcastles)www.youtube.com

If Beyoncé's visual and thematic choices subvert oppressive Christian imagery, then the Beyoncé Mass does this for the entire structure of the Church. And it's needed: Black women are particularly active in the church, outnumbering men two to one. Still, in terms of church leadership, this number is reversed. As a service led by women of color and designed to invite people who perhaps wouldn't feel welcome or interested in the Church in the first place, the mass is a step in the right direction, perhaps a vital blueprint for future religious services that could help young people or people who feel excluded by religion find a home in the comforting, communal world of faith and music.

Beyoncé & Kendrick Lamar Freedom Live at MetLife Stadiumwww.youtube.com

BEYONCE

Photo by A.RICARDO (Shutterstock)

This was a year of change and tumult, but if anything has remained consistent through it all, it's been Beyoncé's greatness.

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MUSIC

Beyoncé Brings Afrobeats to Mainstream Audiences with "Lion King: The Gift"

"Lion King: The Gift" may be a Beyoncé album, but she's not the standout in her own collaborative production.

Beyoncé in all her glory.

Columbia Records

Beyoncé's Lion King: The Gift is in direct competition with the live-action remake's 2019 soundtrack.

It's difficult to imagine Disney allowing any other artist to challenge the success of their latest production, but Beyoncé has surpassed celebrity—she is a movement, an icon, and a spokesperson for a generation, and her name being associated with the movie can only mean good things for the company, even if her Lion King-inspired album is separate from the movie in which she stars. After all, Disney's remakes have received criticism from the get-go. What was the need for a live-action remake of a movie conceived by a bunch of white executives who referred to the project as "Bambi in Africa?"

Still, Beyoncé's involvement loaned the project credibility, and clearly the artist saw the potential to reclaim the Africa-set narrative to create what she calls "sonic cinema." She worked with "some of her favorite artists [and] the most talented and important African artists of the day to both pay tribute to the iconic film and bring the authentic sounds of African music to the world." Although how authentically and accurately the star's achieved this goal is up for debate, there's no question that Beyoncé was able to use her influence to shine a spotlight on the diverse range of artists, some who even outshine her.

The album begins with James Earl Jones, backed by a soft violin, repeating Mufasa's iconic lines to Simba: "Everything you see exists together in a delicate balance. You need to understand that balance and respect all the creatures. From the crawling ant to the leaping antelope. We're all connected in the great circle of life." This sentiment, that all African people are connected, is emphasized throughout the rest of the album. The interlude is followed by "BIGGER," Beyoncé's lyrical build up to the message,"If you feel insignificant, you better think again / Better wake up because you're apart of something way bigger." It's another reminder that every person is connected to each other and to the earth.

Columbia

Another poignant interlude spoken by James Earl Jones introduces "FIND YOUR WAY BACK," an R&B, Afrobeat version of Lemonade's "Daddy Issues." Unlike the original, "FIND YOUR WAY BACK" is a filler song with an infectious beat—it seems to exist just to add to the story of The Lion King. It has nothing on the songs that follow: Tekno, Yemi Alade, Mr Eazi, and Lord Afrixana's "DON'T JEALOUS ME" and Burna Boy's "JA ARA E." Both tracks are danceable but in distinctly different ways. The gritty and visceral "DON'T JEALOUS ME" produces a teeth-clenching, head-bouncing effect—it's captivating and mystifying, while "JA ARA E" is a hip-swinging, sexy summer anthem.

The Nigerian Afro-fusion artists highlight exactly what the Western world is missing out on, musically. The variety and simple good vibes could create a cultural moment for Afro-fusion in Western mainstream music, similar to what "Despacito" did or Latin Pop (minus Justin Bieber, thankfully).

Columbia

Next, "NILE" and "MOOD 4EVA" keep the album's soulful momentum going, despite the many interludes beginning to bog down the bops. Kendrick Lamar's classic rap delivery on "NILE" sets up another one of his iconic beat-drops. But, in the last thirty seconds of the track, Beyoncé's textured vocals end too quickly, making "NILE" feel incomplete. "MOOD 4EVA" captures all that was successful about The Carter's EVERYTHING IS LOVE album. Beyoncé's voracious performance and enchanting, oozing confidence outperform Jay-Z's. Beyoncé outdoes him with lyrics like, "Piña colada-in' / you stay Ramada Inn," and concluding with, "I be like soul food / I am a whole mood." Unfortunately, the song's low-point is Childish Gambino's feature, which only makes a minor contribution to the already electrifying mood.

At the album's halfway mark, the majority of the noteworthy tracks have already passed. "BROWN SKIN GIRL" and "MY POWER" are the only tracks left that stick in the mind of listeners. The sweet-natured, empowering "BROWN SKIN GIRL" begins with Blue Ivy Carter's first singing performance. Then Nigerian artist WizKid aids the celebratory track, which speaks directly to the brown skin girls of the world. The song separates itself from the rest of the album as an easier, mellower, lullaby-inspired song, while still positioning black people at the center of the celebration.

Columbia

Conversely, up-and-coming rapper, Tierra Whack, leads "MY POWER" with the declaration, "They'll never take my power / They feel a way, oh wow"—celebrating all black women and what they're capable of. On the track, South African artists—Moonchild Sanelly and Busiswe—gloriously sing African praises, injecting the song with an emboldened, unwavering verse.

The rest of the album has its individual, exceptional moments, like Beyoncé's almost holy vocals on "OTHERSIDE" and Jessie Reyez's ingenious verse on "SCAR." But, still, only six out of the fourteen main tracks succeed in creating something new, inspiring, and other-worldly. The other interludes strip Lion King: The Gift of cohesion and flow. But still, with The Lion King: The Gift, Beyoncé has cemented her legacy of celebrating black experiences and art by bringing African musical influences to Western, mainstream audiences. If there was any doubt left that Beyoncé is more than just an indomitable vocalist, surely it's been dispelled once and for all by this album. Lion King: The Gift demonstrates what is possible when collaboration occurs across borders to create cross-cultural, truly globalized music.

Columbia


The Lion King: The Gift