Beyoncé’s Lemonade— a look back

Lemonade, the United States’ third-best-selling album of 2016 and the year’s best-selling album worldwide, should not be forgotten. From track to track, lyric to lyric, Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter seamlessly transitioned between different layers of reflection. At surface level, the album chronicled the experience of a woman scorned, walking the listener from denial to self-blame to anger—and ultimately to reconciliation—as the singer dealt with the infidelity of her husband, Jay Z. That story alone made for a complex narrative, but the artist didn’t stop there: She crafted her story into a tightly woven tapestry involving themes of family and feminism, the black body, and the African-American experience. (Potential listeners should be aware that explicit lyrics and provocative dances also thread the songs and music videos.)

The album’s first single, “Formation,” marked a shift for the “Crazy in Love” singer. Filmed in New Orleans, the song’s accompanying video included a scene where Beyoncé straddles a submerged police cruiser. Other images included “Stop Shooting Us” graffiti and a young black child dancing in front of police in riot gear. The song received both praise and criticism for its perceived political undertones. Saturday Night Live later parodied it, with white characters freaking out as they realized for the first time that Beyoncé is black.

But in an interview with Elle, Beyoncé addressed how her message had been misunderstood: “Anyone who perceives my message as anti-police is completely mistaken.” She expressed her admiration and respect for police while insisting, “I am against police brutality and injustice. Those are two separate things.”

At the 2017 Grammy Awards ceremony, Adele’s 25 beat Lemonade in five categories, including record of the year and song of the year—but when accepting one of her awards, Adele praised Lemonade for being “so well thought out, and so beautiful and soul-baring.” The visual album showed Beyoncé and other black women placed in the garb and plantation settings of 19th-century Southern aristocracy, taking places they were historically denied.

Covenant College art history professor Elissa Yukiko Weichbrodt says Lemonade broke down the one-dimensional representation of black women in visual representation: “When we see a black woman on the news portrayed in a neat stereotype, well now we might have a little more imagination to say, ‘[No,] she’s a fully embodied human being with a story.’”

Lemonade celebrated those stories, using Beyoncé’s own story of betrayal to reclaim both female and black American narratives from the historical margins. The video for one of the songs, “Freedom,” drove this message home: It cut from Beyoncé singing in the center stage of an outdoor theater to images of the mothers of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown holding portraits of their late sons, who were shot and killed by a neighborhood watch volunteer and a police officer, respectively. The song wove a personal narrative of freedom from the chains of anger and pain (“I’m telling these tears, ‘Go and fall away’”) with a call to societal freedom. It ended with a message of hope from the pop star’s grandmother: “I was served lemons, but I made lemonade.”

—Hannah Phillips is a graduate of the World Journalism Institute mid-career course