‘Lemonade’ or Truth Serum? 5 Times Beyoncé’s New Visual Album Seemed Brutally True-to-Life
Is the singer’s newest music on love after infidelity painfully honest?
If art does in fact imitate life, then Beyoncé‘s newest work just did one heck of a good impression.
The singer set the internet ablaze on Saturday night with the debut of her new visual album Lemonade, an hour-long hybrid of music, visuals and spoken word, which debuted on HBO, immediately before she dropped the new album on Tidal.
But with real life footage from events throughout her life, along with ample references to her parents’ broken marriage and presumably the state of her own relationship with husband of eight years Jay Z, it’s the content of Beyonc ‘s latest foray that has the BeyHive and everyone else buzzing with questions.
Here are five of Queen Bey’s most stingingly poignant words and lyrics from Lemonade, and the painfully true life events to which they seem to coincide.
1. You remind me of my father, a magician…able to exist in two places at once. In the tradition of men in my blood, you come home at 3 a.m. and lie to me. What are you hiding?
Early in the visual album Beyoncé makes reference to a duplicitous father figure. In 2011, the singer’s own father Mathew Knowles, who makes a surprising appearance in Lemonade, split from her mother Tina (now happily remarried) after years of rumors that he’d been unfaithful. In this spoken line from the section titled Intuition, Beyonc likens a man she’s suspicious is cheating to the initial father figure. And as far as Twitter’s concerned, those two men represent her own father and husband Jay Z.
2. Let’s imagine for a moment that you never made a name for yourself/ Or mastered wealth, they had you labeled as a king/ Never made it out the cage, still out there movin’ in them streets/ Never had the baddest woman in the game up in your sheets/ Would they be down to ride?
In these lyrics from her up-tempo, down-hearted song “Hold Up,” about a woman scorned trying to reason with her man, Beyonc paints a male companion strikingly similar to Jay Z, who has often spoke of his early years spent selling drugs in and around Brooklyn, before moving on to become one the world’s most successful rappers and a major businessman. And yes, he also snagged arguably the baddest woman in the game.
3. So what are you going to say at my funeral now that you’ve killed me Here lies the mother of my children, both alive and dead. Rest in peace, my true love, who I took for granted.
In this heartbreaking spoken line from the section titled Apathy, Beyonc references a woman and mother whose man is left to live with regret after squandering her love. The woman in question, who’s also lost a child, strikes a painfully close comparison to the singer, who in her 2013 HBO documentary Life Is But A Dream, revealed she’d suffered a miscarriage before welcoming daughter Blue Ivy, now 4, in 2012.
4. He better call Becky with the good hair
In one fell swoop this lyric from the song “Sorry” left all women named Becky cringing, and everyone else wondering who the mystery mistress Beyonc seems to be referencing, could be. Following elevator-gate of 2014, when video surfaced of sister Solange shown attacking Jay Z as Beyonc stood watch, reports circulated that the incident was related to Jay Z having a mistress, though the alleged ‘Becky’ was never verified.
After the HBO special, some fans accused Rachel Roy, who reportedly “provoked” before Solange in that infamous incident, of being “Becky.” She responded by saying she respects “love, marriages, families and strength.”
5. But every diamond has imperfections/ But my love’s too pure to watch it chip away With every tear came my redemption/ And my torturer became a remedy
Though the new album is filled with messages of lies and deceit, the latter-most songs speak of a couple rekindling after the wreckage. The diamond reference made here correlates to the popular diamond symbol for Jay Z’s companies Roc-a-fella Records and Roc Nation. And following rumors of major strife in their relationship in 2014, the couple renewed their vows that same year as a source told PEOPLE, “they worked it out [for the sake of] their reputations and for Blue Ivy.”
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