Beyoncé: HOMECOMING: THE ALBUM LIVE Album review



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Six solo albums in, six years after the surprise release of his eponymous album, three years after the beginning of the work. Lemonade, a year after the rap album she delivered with her husband, we start getting it. We begin to understand Beyoncé Knowles-Carter as a musician with unparalleled reach, depth and power: she recognizes her rapping skills, her breathtaking musical ambition, her ear to synthesis and his constant love for black culture. With the release of Homecoming: The live album, The companion of 40 titles from her latest issue of Coachella, a documentary film with Netflix, allows us to see the artist at work at its peak – voice, physical and self-confidence – by reinventing and remixing her own. catalog, decanting a light on its influences and its foundations.

#Beychella redefined what was possible for a music festival. On stage, more than 200 bodies waved in unison but miraculously, each body moved in its own way. They filled a set of pyramid risers, built to resemble the bleachers of a football stadium in a black university or university. The structure was filled by an orchestra including a line of percussion and a complete fanfare that presented itself with the constant chorus of Do Do Wchacha Wanna of the Rebirth Brass Band. , the background singers formed a choir of unified sounds and movements, bending their bodies into Beyoncé's extremely aggressive choreography.

It was an old magazine, a cacophony of talent. It was a provocative celebration of complex darkness, diasporic darkness. In Beyoncé's performance, there was a genealogy that appealed to the Clark Sisters, Big Freedia, Nina Simone, Fela Kuti and James Weldon Johnson. I was at home on the couch when I saw a gritty broadcast of the first weekend show, dazzled, speechless, proud: Beyoncé practiced black studies in front of a large audience, delving into the long and lively archive of black ephemera. The movie Netflix gives you the representations that Beyoncé wanted to see, with close-ups of dazzled costumes and their pastel colors worn by bodies of all sizes. You see the sweat of rehearsals and Beyoncé's demanding physical regime to get back in shape after the birth of her twins in 2017. You see the underlying ethics that guide her work in the form of quotations and music quoted by poets, writers and artists like Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison, who evoked worlds that demanded and centered a prolific and abundant darkness.

Back home is an important document of these performances, with careful mixing and engineering that makes each track with amazing lucidity. We hear, for example, Kelly Rowland's feathered soprano in the sequel to three Destiny's Child hits; this allows us to linger for a moment on the group's legendary chemistry and three-part harmonies. Back home does not constitute an album experience separate from the film. It's probably not necessary. Beyoncé and her sister Solange rely more and more on visual elements to paint an entirely incarnated and populated vision comprises the music. Back home, the accompaniment of a concert film, has the impression that it is not supposed to be lived in isolation. Nevertheless, this could be one of Beyoncé's most important versions for how she illuminates her past and future.

Beyoncé's basic musical vocabulary is the rhythm and rebound of a melody. It is a classic that believes in the structure of a song: choruses, bridges, meticulous worms, extended vamps, essential changes. Her "uptempo" songs such as "Crazy in Love", "Countdown" and "Love on Top" are some of the most inventive and skilful songs of pop and R & B of the last two decades. For almost every 110 minutes, she isolated these adrenaline charged clippings, boosting their kinetic energy with scrolling tape arrangements. The extended version of B'DayThe 2006 single "Get Me Bodied" is a highlight here, as is the 2005 "Check on It" title. "Both are supercharged loot, over ten years old, and have recently hit the world of Back home: trumpet trumpet blows and whoomps sousaphones, the trampling of the risers and the "ayys" off the microphone of the dancers who are strewn. The arrangements amplify the relationship of Beyoncé's music with the intrinsically percussive body.

Nevertheless, Beyoncé is a singer first and it is exciting to hear it so clearly. She still has the opportunity to play in the heights, but the musicality at the bottom of it, where it sets the first notes of the rare ballad of this collection, "I Care", is stunning. She grunts through lemonade cuts like "Sorry" and "Do not hurt yourself", but also whispers and whispers in the first notes of "Partition".

Saved versions of Back homeInterludes and transitions illustrate the history of black pop music that Beyoncé cites and interpolates. "SpottieOttieDopaliscious" and "Swag Surfin" are important moments, just like those where she uses TRU's "Something Good", "Something Good", from the Southern Black regional classics. She duplicates her archival work and her project to interpret black music, Houston and Louisiana blacks. (The only new piece of music on Back home is a bonus studio cover of Frankie Beverly's "Before I Let Go," a pre-eminent black-and-white jammy jam that includes all-generation black-and-white jam. center deliberately. The film captures this phenomenon of mutual and sharp look with its frequent close-ups of black spectators, who were few and distant at the shows. Her relationship with the crowd is vague, filled with "I see you" who remained in the recording and who indicate that Beyoncé was hoping to make a specific statement to a specific group of people.

The album has a common sound, like a waking meeting in a small sweaty tent that leaves you elevated and fortified. This is as much for Beyoncé as for the people who made it and for those who support it. While I was listening, my neighbors on the upper floor, two young black women, were also listening at full volume. My friend in Miami e-mailed me, while my sister, who had been attending the show the second weekend, tweeted about the fact that the whites of the public just did not seem to get it. Every Beyoncé event is a gospel that you want to tell someone about, but this one doubles on that feeling of communion. She sings songs you already know and links them to other songs you remember. It builds on its past, looks back, but also looks down on us.

Black women and rock pioneers like Memphis Minnie, Sister Rosetta Tharpe and Etta James, and contemporary queens of rhythmic music such as Janet Jackson and Missy Elliott have not received enough credit for their innovations. Beyoncé, famous, was the first black star of this nearly 20-year-old festival. In a space where she was obviously not welcome, she left a lasting impression. A house. Then she did something else herself. She brought a whole line in the room.

A few months apart, the two Knowles Sisters published projects that reimagined their home as a deep, dark utopia, anchored in the best of her teeming past, but stranger, more holistic, more self-aware, embodied and feminist. Back home is a wonderful and captivating collage that reveals how Beyoncé has made a career of playing, dipping and diving in the "big pool of black genius": the genius of his ancestors, his contemporaries and his own. Throughout her life, she brought him the mainstream. Where will we all go next?

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