NPR Music
Beyoncé's 'Black Is King' Is A Sumptuous Search For Divine Identity
Knowles' longing for an explanatory myth resonates deeply in Black Is King. Her own mother, Miss Tina the Matriarch has become a personified recurring theme in her work, as has her invocation of lineage. Always, Beyoncé takes pains to reach back before moving forward. But after two or three generations, who is there for her to reach back to? Who can she draw on? Whose ancestral memory can she reference? Black Is King marries the mundane and the divine in an effort to reconnect to the forgotten ancestry of all the Black peoples across the diaspora who have been ripped from their history by the violence of slavery and colonialism.
Chloe x Halle Have Taken Beyoncé's Most Important Lesson To Heart
On Ungodly Hour, the pair explores themes of friendship, infidelity and all things grownish in a way that telegraphs their maturation, but also their relative youth. Now in their early twenties, they have more freedom to explore adult themes. It's a refrain that echoes Miss Third Ward herself: During the release of her self-titled album, Beyoncé discussed feeling constrained with regard to the subject matter of her music, because she felt a sense of obligation to her young fans. She talked at length about finally feeling able to express every side of her personality in her music, now that she was in her 30s and her fans had also aged up with her. The same is true for the Baileys.
Is This The End For 'Urban' Music?
Coined in 1974 by legendary radio DJ and radio program director Frankie Crocker, "urban contemporary" was originally meant to describe the broad mix — of R&B, hip-hop, disco, rap, and everything "from James Brown to Dinah Shore" — that Crocker was playing at the newly created WBLS station in New York. Despite being one of the most popular radio formats of the era, Black music stations couldn't attract the lucrative ad sales that would help them thrive.