Lemonade.

In the year 2016, Beyonce released what I believe to be her best album, titled Lemonade. She would then Go on to perform the Song ‘Formation‘ at the super bowl halftime show, drawing immense hate from various sources.

Beyonce in 2016

Fun fact about Lemonade, It is one of the three Vinyls I own, as for how much it cost, best not to discuss that.

This album is widely agreed to be among her best and definitely worthy of a grammy, that it did not receive. Both the Song Formation and the album Lemonade were nominated for several grammys, and while Lemonade did receive the grammy for Best Urban Contemporary Album , It did not win Album of the year, that award went to Adele for ’25’. This is widely considered among pop culture enthusiasts to be the biggest snub of her career. Song of the year went to ‘7 years’ by Lukas Graham instead of Formation, and while I personally may object because I like Formation better, I can’t argue this is a snub. While Beyonce would finally win an album of the year for Cowboy Carter in 2024, I would argue It did not deserve it, though she did deserve to win an AOTY. I would argue that in 2024, there was no better album than that of ‘Brat’ By Charli XCX.

Let’s talk about the cultural impact of Lemonade, the pretense to this album is that Beyonce’s husband, Jay-Z, is alleged to and later, after lemonade, admitted to cheating on her, it is widely speculated that his mistress was Rihanna, but that was never confirmed. In many songs on the album she references her frustrations and pain she feels towards her husband, in songs such as ‘Hold up‘, she says “How did it come down to this? Scrolling through your call list, I don’t wanna lose my pride, but I’ma fuck me up a bitch.” and “Can’t you see there’s no other man above you? What a wicked way to treat the girl that loves you.” and finally, “Let’s imagine for a moment that you never made a name for yourself, or mastered wealth, they had you labeled as a king, Never made it out the cage, still out there movin’ in them streets, Never had the baddest woman in the game up in your sheets.” She clearly takes shots at Jay-Z here and this was while the cheating rumors are being spread amongst fans, but would not be confirmed by Jay-Z until the year after the release of lemonade, 2017.

The other Impact of Lemonade was that of the song Freedom. The Song Freedom was widely used by Kamala Harris during her campaign in 2024, but I would argue the song much deeper than that of wanting freedom or independence. it is her message of hope to anyone who is also struggling with infidelity. The core of the album explores her dealing with the discovery, grief, hope, and forgiveness of infidelity.

Formation also had a significant tie to the black lives matter movement and the protests going on in Louisiana at the time, and how they were allegedly affecting the black and black queer community disproportionally ,as well as a callback to Hurricane Katrina. The video caused mass stir with police around the country, many of them threatening to protest beyonce concerts i.e not secure them. It also caused some stir among the non-black communities and she faced immense pushback for this.

Lemonde was a very controversial album when it came out, many hated on her, many police said they would stop guarding her concerts and even accused her of glorifying violence, and to that she had one performance to shut them all up, which was what I opened this blog post with this, ‘Formation.‘ at Super Bowl L.