Should Beyoncé choose to settle in the world of Adult Contemporary one day, she’ll have most of the legwork already done. She’s spent the time since 4, an album that playfully extolled the virtues of marriage, crafting a role for herself in that sphere with the ambitious grace of a good politician. Imagine the fun she had requesting the big hair and bigger fur to help President Obama ring in his second term, or in gussying herself up like Marie Antoinette to promote an international arena tour called The Mrs. Carter Show. The hedge-betting deals with Pepsi and H&M, the (now-defunct) lifestyle blog/newsletter à la Gwyneth Paltrow's goop, the reunion with Destiny’s Child, the exquisitely dull autobiographical documentary—she's seemed entirely poised to join Jay Z on his cloud of moneyed middle-age.
In retrospect, the adult gloss feels like an elaborate foil to the trouble she’d been cooking up in private all along. Beyoncé, her fifth solo album, repositions the singer as the Houston-bred Yoncé, a woman lustier and surlier than B, more playful than Bey, fiercer than Sasha but softer and more natural than the lot. The album is brassy but elegant, its post-coital breath smelling faintly of cheap liquor sipped from a crystal flute. It finds Beyoncé shifting gears to pull off her most explicit and sonically experimental music to date, exploring sounds and ideas at the grittier margins of popular music.
It’s tempting to read Beyoncé’s hard edges as an attempt to ride the success of Rihanna or Miley Cyrus’ risqué agendas—but to do so would be to look past the album’s true provocations. Beyoncé pushes boundaries not because it sells sex at every turn, but because it treats a power-balanced marriage as a place where sexuality thrives. At a time when when young people are gripped by an ideological fear of monogamy’s advertised doldrums, Beyoncé boldly proposes the idea that a woman’s prime—personal, professional, and especially sexual—can occur within a stable romantic partnership. Monogamy has never sounded more seductive or less retrograde as when dictated on Beyoncé’s terms. The innuendo can be bawdy and overblown—“Can you lick my Skittles/That’s the sweetest in the middle” on “Blow”—but sincerely so. And who would allow Jay Z’s instantly infamous breasts/breakfast line anywhere near the stargazing boom of “Drunk in Love” but someone truly infatuated with him? What’s more is that the erotic themes don’t feel out-of-step with the album’s more decorous moments, like the stadium-filling “XO” or “Blue”, its requisite treatise on motherhood. In Beyoncé’s world, there are illicit doors to be unlocked in the halls of tradition and vice versa.
The record reverberates with the energy of a conservative pop star navigating trends without grasping for them. Its crew of 44 writers, producers, and directors skews heavily toward the hip-hop realm and incorporates niche talents, something Beyoncé tried on 4 when she teamed with artists like Switch and pulled visual ideas from little-known European choreographers discovered via YouTube. It’s the collective effort of an all-star team with a deep bench, with contributions from mainstays like Pharrell and The-Dream, to fresh faces like Chairlift’s Caroline Polachek, a creative director from streetwear brand Supreme, and a practically-unknown producer named Boots.
Beyoncé’s best songs often reject traditional pop structures in favor of atmosphere—she may have taken some cues from her sister Solange, who now leads a particular wave of collaborative, left-field R&B. The record, her darkest and lushest yet, has a tendency to echo, stop abruptly, or place two separate songs in the space of one. Its most bracing moments are also its toughest and weirdest, like “***Flawless,” a two-part growler that makes feminist TED Talk fodder sound legitimately menacing. Timbaland and Justin Timberlake join The-Dream on “Partition” in service of the mean-mugging Yoncé, who snarls and bares her teeth as though the most revered rapper of all time is nobody but her little husband. At the center lies Beyoncé’s practically unfair abilities as a performer—you get the sense that Lady Gaga or Ciara could no sooner pull off the scale or quality of Beyoncé than you or I could pull off a suitable rendition of any of its songs in a karaoke bar.
Beyoncé has loosened up her delivery, too, in a way that highlights her elasticity and shows her pop-cultural antennae tuned to the right channels. Who could’ve predicted that some of the most infectious snippets of pop music in 2013 would not arrive by way of anthemic chorus or assembly-line arrangement, but in Beyoncé’s ad-libbing? You already know the ones: Surfbort, she grunts on “Drunk in Love,” slinging a hashtag like it’s the name of a line of Ikea chairs, the single word serving as both shorthand for woman-on-top and a neat summation of an entire era of trends in rap cadence. You’d also be hard-pressed to find an internet-savvy person in America who hasn’t been possessed by the idea that he or she woke up like this, brain emblazoned with Beyoncé’s half-second I’m so flawless I gave myself a seizure dance. She's achieved the rare feat of validating meme culture by capturing its sneaky potency and delight rather than falling into its cheap, dehumanizing traps. This is a “visual album,” sure, but it’s also a package of modern codes and discreet campaigns, a field of meaningful virtual dioramas. In this sense Beyoncé has a newfound spiritual ally in Drake (Worst! YOLO!),—he shows up on Beyoncé on the bruised “Mine”— her only peer to successfully streamline an internet-rooted mindset into a large-scale pop arena and seek profundity in the process.
Which is all to say that Beyoncé has delivered on the promise she inadvertently made by dropping an album and its expansive visual counterpart late on a Thursday night in December on iTunes, free of traditional fanfare. Call it a coup or just another victory for her mammoth PR apparatus, but consider the alternatives: The strategy probably would have failed if the quality wasn’t there, and the album could not have achieved such an impact without its rogue—in spirit, at least—method of distribution. Beyoncé was unleashed upon the world in a way that could only succeed right now, with an aim to make the audience consume it the way it would have long ago. It’s a line that could be ripped straight from the mouth of an investment-drunk tech startup founder, but it’s true: Beyoncé seized the powers of a medium characterized by its short attention span to force the world to pay attention. Leave it to the posterchild of convention to brush convention aside and leave both sides feeling victorious.
