Beyonce's sixth solo album, Lemonade, has critics and fans intrigued.
Described as "every woman's journey of self-knowledge and healing", it premiered on HBO and is now available on iTunes and the music streaming site Tidal. The "visual album" features songs accompanied by a one-hour film, rather than individual videos, and includes performances by Kendrick Lamar, The Weeknd, James Blake and Jack White.
Its title is said to be inspired by Beyonce's grandmother, Agnez Dereon, and her husband Jay Z's grandmother, Hattie White, who features on the track Freedom. "I had my ups and downs, but I always found the inner strength to pull myself up. I was served lemons, but I made lemonade," she says, in a recording from her 90th birthday speech.
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Critics have been universal in their praise.
It is "by far Beyonce's strongest album" and her most "profane, political and personal album to date", says Jonathan Bernstein in the Daily Telegraph, who also calls it an "hour of rage and recriminations".
Alexis Petridis in The Guardian agrees, praising Beyonce for Formation, a song about race, and "lyrical references to slavery, rioting and Malcolm X". In an era when pop doesn't tend to say a great deal, he writes, "there's obviously something hugely cheering about an artist of Beyonce's stature doing this".
Nevertheless, adds Petridis, Lemonade is an album less about politics than the state of her marriage, in particular the alleged infidelity of husband Jay Z. Beyonce is "not a woman to be messed with".
His Guardian colleague, Ijeoma Oluo, however, argues that while the early headlines suggest Lemonade is all about Beyonce and Jay Z and that infamous elevator fight, it is about "so much more than one relationship". It is about the suffering of black women "when our love and commitment and struggle is met with disregard and disloyalty".
But it's the references to infidelity that have got fans talking, amid intense speculation about the meaning of the lyric: "He better call Becky with the good hair," notes the Daily Mail.
Hours after the album was first released, Rachel Roy, the ex-wife of Jay Z's former business partner, made a reference to her "good hair" on Twitter, prompting Beyonce's devoted legion of followers to accuse her of having an affair of Jay Z.
Music experts, however, have suggested the lyric is actually a reference to Sir Mix-a-lot's hit Baby Got Back, in which he mentions a woman of the same name.
