Yeah, I got the Beyoncé album

And I do think there's something behind the hype. I've never heard Beyoncé sing in any way that felt personal before, and it's arresting on multiple levels. Even on 'Survivor', arguably the best breakup-defiance song ever written, the song is so much about her ability to maintain strength and be a consummate grownup and professional that it doesn't seem to get behind her persona so much as celebrate it.

The new album feels intimate. And not just because of how sexy it is. It is steamy, but it feels that way largely because the sexy stuff seems personal, rather than generic. Whether or not its true, Beyoncé delivers these songs in a way that convinces you she is singing about her own actual sex life. And when she talks about getting on her knees in the back of the limo and getting 'Monica Lewinsky'd all down her gown', in 'Partition' she gives you the sense that she's talking about something that actually happened. (The passage I referenced starts at about 2:12.) 

I think people are freaking out (in a nice way) about how some of these songs are making their figurative ears burn because it seems like we're getting access to something maybe we shouldn't. I can't think of another recent pop or hiphop album that delivers sex in so personal a way that, instead of wondering jadedly when underwear became the standard clothing for women (a la Miley Cyrus), you feel that you are seeing something genuinely private. Only a pop star who has been as professionally perfect and personally opaque as Beyoncé even has that distance to cross. And it feels simultaneously wrong, hot and astonishing.

I could say a lot as well about the way the album feels in the ears. It has this rich, wall-of-sound quality that I'm itching to try to pin down. But I'll end instead by saying that, unlike most other girl-power nonsense we've had pedalled to us since the late 1990s--some of which Beyoncé was at the forefront of--the feminism in this album feels personal as well. The in-your-face submission of 'Partition' is defended, I kid you not, with what seems to be a French translation of Julianne Moore's defence of sexual pleasure as a feminist goal in the Big Lebowski! And then there is the critique of the beauty myth and beauty industry in 'Pretty Hurts'. People are already arguing that the song is hypocritical when Beyoncé makes her money in part off of being beautiful, which seems to me to restate the point of the song while missing it entirely. For the time being at least, you can watch the full video here, and it's worth it for its small touches.

And although there's (of course, it being pop music and capitalism etc etc) lots to critique in the album's messages, I can't think of any other pop song like Flawless that actually includes the word feminism, much less a sensible definition of it, much less one by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, a black woman novelist from the third world! The Guardian has a fairly good account of the song, but the part of her talk Beyoncé excerpted is this: 

We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller

We say to girls: “You can have ambition, but not too much

You should aim to be successful, but not too successful

Otherwise, you will threaten the man.”

Because I am female, I am expected to aspire to marriage

I am expected to make my life choices always keeping in mind that marriage is most important

Now, marriage can be a source of joy and low and mutual support

But why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage and we don’t teach boys the same?

We raise girls to see each other as competitors

Not for jobs or for accomplishments, which I think can be a good thing

But for the attention of men

We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way boys are

Feminist: a person who believes in the social,
Political, and economic equality of the sexes

Maybe having Beyoncé remind people, via Adiche, what feminism actually means and why it's important will have zero positive effects. But I really don't hate that an album with this speech in it is No.1 around the world.