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Lemonade makes SPIN's 50 Best Albums of 2016 List!

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6. Beyoncé
Lemonade

Be suspicious of those who claim Lemonade and its predecessor were the points where Beyoncé suddenly developed artistic merit. This album breaks ground, but it’s the same ground Beyoncé‘s been staking out her entire career. Like her self-titled behemoth, Lemonade is a heavily stylized “visual album,” but so, with comparatively little ado, was 4. It’s full of unexpected, playful interpolations, but that goes back to Destiny’s Child. Per the title, Bey makes lemonade—Jay’s grammy’s recipe—out of the messy, semi-planned churn of the gossipsphere. But like any pop star worth her zillions, she’s done that for years. After all, she dreamed and planned for this ever since that Star Search stint, since that camera-ready tiara shot of “Bow Down.”

It’s a testament to Beyoncé‘s vision that Lemonade is both more scattershot than its predecessor, yet still a coherent statement, with beginning, middle, and end. She curates collaborators with the best, but aside from a typically impassioned Kendrick Lamar, she treats the men and women differently. She starts a blues firestorm with Jack White on “Don’t Hurt Yourself,” but rearranges the pecking order: She samples Led Zeppelin’s “When the Levee Breaks,” a song with a debt to blues (and specifically black female blues artists), but the sheer force of her presence upstages both the sample and White, who might as well be a session musician. Later, looking for new love or at least a little excitement, Bey casts herself in one of the Weeknd’s strip-club noirs. That story, too, needs some alterations: She excises all of the contempt (for that, see Starboy), leaving a woman to either admire, pursue, or identify with—maybe all three. She gives James Blake an interlude’s worth of space; she enlists Ezra Koenig for a tweet and Diplo for an airhorn. She teases a guy in “Formation” that maybe, just maybe, she might like him enough to get his song played on the radio station. (Yet another power move; radio hasn’t known what to do with Beyoncé for years now, yet her star rises unaffected.) 

Elsewhere she decides, quite reasonably, that a Houston artist might want to make a country song, and she puts together one better than half the tailgate swill coming out of Nashville. For good measure, she tosses in a half-trolling-half-deadly earnest line about the red states’ favorite amendment, and gives the unjustly disgraced Dixie Chicks—first on the remix, then triumphantly at the CMAs—their best platform in over a decade. Other boosts are granted to songwriters like Diana (formerly Wynter) Gordon and childhood neighbor Ingrid, and to Somali poet Warsan Shire, who lends the album’s visual component the proper gravitas. The whole thing arcs toward reconciliation, so the album doesn’t end with the crowd-pleasing scorching of earth and ex—there are probably too many business and contractual entanglements for even Beyoncé to consider that. But—crucially—Lemonade never comes off as anything but a story told on Beyoncé‘s own terms.

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