BY: Denver Sean
Published 9 years ago
Did you miss Beyoncé’s ‘Lemonade’ HBO special? After a week of teasing, the full visual album premiered last night
via the NYT:
It’s a quick-cutting music video that intersperses the songs, and broadens them, with compelling poetry from the Somali-British writer Warsan Shire, poems that often extend women’s physicality toward the archetypal.
The video is filled with images of female solidarity, family and Southern and African roots; often, Beyoncé is joined by African-American women in white clothes who seem to be enacting mysterious ceremonies.
Beyoncé, in multiple hairstyles and fashions, is shown both alluring and unglamorous: hard-faced, unhappy, sweaty, harshly lit. For the last few songs she often appears in a puffy-sleeved antebellum-style dress remade with fabric patterns derived from African textiles, a rich twist.
The album title comes from a family gathering that’s shown in the video and heard on a track: the 90th birthday of Hattie White, Jay Z’s grandmother, who says, “I was served lemons but I made lemonade.”
If you didn’t catch it, click play below and get into it!
