Starmade cannon1/7/2024 To be clear: Beyoncé was already extremely famous before Beyoncé.īy the time Beyoncé dropped her self-titled album in 2013, she had already released four solo albums. Here’s how Beyoncé turned herself into Beyoncé. The transformation of Beyoncé from well-liked pop star to cultural icon came in three phases, punctuated by the self-titled Beyoncé album of 2013, 2016’s Lemonade, and 2018’s Homecoming concert at Coachella. It happened, as everything else in Beyoncé’s life seems to have happened, as the result of incredibly hard work and a highly controlled plan from the woman herself. How did she do it? How did Beyoncé go from “no Ashanti” in 2003 to being declared by Rolling Stone “the world’s greatest living entertainer” in 2022? How did her greatness become an apparent fact of the universe, to the point that the Grammys’ refusal to give her an Album of the Year award after nominating her three times is widely discussed as proof of something terribly wrong inside the Grammys?īeyoncé poses with the Grammy trophies she was awarded for Best Music Video for “Formation,” and Best Urban Contemporary Album for Lemonade, in Los Angeles, California, in February 2017. It became slightly controversial to say that her music wasn’t to your taste. She turned her headliner Coachella gig into a legend of a night, and then a Netflix special. She redefined the textbook strategy for an album release. She became a critical consensus pick for one of the greatest artists of her generation. A star, certainly, but a star with peers.īut over the past decade, Beyoncé pulled herself out of that group. The New York Times offered up a headline that would, nearly two decades later, be endlessly memed: “The Solo Beyoncé: She’s No Ashanti.”Īt the beginning of her solo career, Beyoncé was one among any number of pop stars, famous and admired the same way a lot of musicians are: her music beloved by some and uncontroversially ignored or disliked by others. ![]() Lo and Mariah Carey, pop progeny with Lopez’s attitude and Carey’s pipes. While Rolling Stone allowed that she “oozes charisma and has a fine voice,” it felt that she “isn’t in a class with the likes of Whitney Houston or Mariah Carey as a singer.” Slant Magazine, in a largely positive review, described her as a cross between J. ![]() When Beyoncé dropped her first solo album, Dangerously in Love, in 2003, she did not get the sort of plaudits she receives today. It made Beyoncé one of the most important cultural figures of this decade, catapulting her to rarified air in 10 carefully calculated years. ![]() Beyoncé’s singing, wrote Wesley Morris in the New York Times, comes “in waves of rhapsodically long, Olympic-level emissions” and “seems to emanate from somewhere way beyond a human throat: The ocean?” Renaissance, Rolling Stone argued, proved Beyoncé to be “the only sovereign of pop to have truly evolved artistically while also expanding an enormous commercial empire.”īeyoncé’s artistic, commercial, and cultural evolution is one of the most important pop culture stories of the past decade. The new album “succeeds exquisitely,” said Vulture. Beyoncé’s latest solo album, Renaissance, released at the end of July, was greeted with the kind of critical rapture that is now the standard for her work.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply.AuthorWrite something about yourself. No need to be fancy, just an overview. ArchivesCategories |