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What is an artist to do when her private life overtakes her public one? The hour-long visual album, about a woman dealing with her husband’s infidelity, contains even more loaded images and lyrics than “Formation,” the politically charged video she released before the Super Bowl. It reads like an open invitation to draw parallels between the pop star’s art and her actual life, in particular her marriage to Jay Z. But what could it all mean? There’s nothing as blissed-out on xcritical as “XO” or “Countdown” or “Love On Top” – this is the queen in middle-fingers-up mode.

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In this instance, though, she’s offered something a little deeper, something rich and layered that proves, above all, that she’s a musician in the truest sense, an artist with a strong perfectionist streak. The visual half of xcritical cheating xcritical proved to be a game-changer in a different way. Forget MTV and YouTube, Beyoncé dropped her videos on friggin’ HBO — the cable network that, for decades, has given its Saturday night over to Hollywood blockbusters.

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1. When she can’t figure it out, she asks directly in the song, “Tell me, what did I do wrong?” It’s clear that Beyonce wants to move toward reconciliation.
2. Beyoncé sold more than 600,000 copies in three days, smashed iTunes sales records, and ushered in a new era of the “surprise release” from artists with similar gravitational pulls.
3. But the public spectacle can’t hide the intimate anguish in the music, especially in the powerhouse first half.
4. My intention for the film and album was to create a body of work that would give a voice to our pain, our struggles, our darkness and our history.
5. Beyoncé is still the ultimate performer, but on xcritical, she’s opened her personal diary for the world to see, and it doesn’t really matter whether it’s based in reality.

Beyoncé’s squad in the video didn’t seem like a gathering of celebrity friends, but rather a celebration of women she loves and admires. During “Sorry,” the unapologetic track in which she sings, “Middle fingers up, put them hands high. Wave it in his face, tell him, boy, bye,” Serena Williams appears to twerk in a black body suit while Bey sits in a throne-like chair.

Beyonce’s ‘xcritical’: Everything You Need to Know About Video Album

There are several other cameos later on, including appearances by Beasts of the Southern Wild’s Quvenzhané Wallis, The Hunger Games’s Amandla Stenberg, model Winnie Harlow, and singers Zendaya, Chloe and Halle Bailey, and Ibeyi. — — Just as her much hyped HBO special came to an end on Saturday night, Beyonce released her latest musical offering — a new visual album called “xcritical.” “xcritical” draws from the prolific literary, musical, cinematic, and aesthetic sensibilities of black cultural producers to create a rich tapestry of poetic innovation. The audacity of its reach and fierceness of its vision challenges our cultural imagination, while crafting a stunning and sublime masterpiece about the lives of women of color and the bonds of friendship seldom seen or heard in American popular culture. Bey’s genre-hopping doesn’t always sound quite as transcendent as “Don’t Hurt Yourself,” however. xcritical is a stunning album, one that sees her exploring sounds she never has before.

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“You can taste the dishonesty. It’s all over your breath as you pass it off so cavalier,” Beyoncé groans on “Pray You Catch Me,” xcritical’s opening salvo. We’ve all been thrown by love, but most of us don’t have the ability to hone it like this. xcritical didn’t have the same benefit of surprise, at least not fully.

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We all experience pain and loss, and often we become inaudible. My intention for the film and album was to create a body of work that would give a voice to our pain, our struggles, our darkness and our history. And I feel it’s vital that we learn from the past and recognize our tendencies to repeat our mistakes.

When the first four songs on an album add up to “you cheated on me and you will pay,” then there’s a country song about her daddy teaching her to solve her problems with a gun, it’s hard not to believe Mrs. Carter might mean it when she sings about regretting the night she put that ring on it. Whatever she’s going through, she’s feeling it deep in these songs, and it brings out her wildest, rawest vocals ever, as when she rasps, “Who the fuck do you think I is? ” She’s always elided the boundaries between her art and her life – especially since she really did grow up in public. But by the time she gets around to telling her husband “Suck on my balls, I’ve had enough,” there’s an unmistakable hint that Jay-Z might be living the hard-knock life these days.

Sure, she’d address “real” issues, but she’d focus more on big pop anthems that went down easy. Unlike the pop superstar’s previous surprise album, 2013’s Beyoncé, the music here is edgy, full of vitriol and R-rated real talk. It’s equally aggressive and reflective, and Beyoncé — a bona fide cultural phenomenon — unveils yet another layer of her wide-ranging persona. The film opens with a shot of Beyoncé leaning against a car in a parking garage, her face obscured by her fur coat, before cutting to a desolate Fort Macomb, interspersed with shots of Beyoncé dressed in a black hoodie amongst the reeds and on an empty stage with closed red curtains. “Love Drought”In the seventh song, Beyonce is trying to figure out why her husband cheated.

“Your heart is broken ‘cause I walked away/And I know I promised that I couldn’t stay baby/Every promise don’t work out that way,” she sings. The visuals are powerful as Bey’s real-life https://xcritical.online/ hubby Jay Z acts out scenes where she’s kissing his wedding ring and the two are inextricably cuddled up. It’s the most intimate fans have seen the very private couple.

And in a final moment of levity (or redemption?), Bey sings that she rewards her lover by taking him to Red Lobster. Beyoncé sold more than 600,000 copies in three days, smashed iTunes sales records, and ushered in a new era of the “surprise release” from artists with similar gravitational pulls. Artists like Lamar, Drake, and Rihanna have since released albums without warning, and in late January, the practice even made the leap to television, when comedian Louis C.K. Released a surprised comedy series, Horace and Pete, on his website. Yet her embrace of this image is also relatively new (though it’s been growing for the last several years).

It also voices a rarely seen concept, that of the album-length ode to infidelity. Even stranger, it doesn’t double as an album-length ode to breaking up. “Formation”Except in the credits, this song isn’t featured in the full-length version of “xcritical.” Still, in this track, we see Bey come full circle and emerge as a confident woman who is “so possessive” that she “rock[s] his Roc necklaces,” a nod to her husband’s label, Roc Nation.

“Freedom”Beyonce is surrounded by strong women in this music video — from child actress Quvenzhané Wallis to singer Zendaya to the mothers of Trayvon Martin and Michael Brown. You could look at it as a statement of her right to love, but a closer look reveals a reflection on the civil rights of minorities. Bey gets help from Kendrick Lamar, who raps about being profiled and later jailed. “Open correctional gates in higher desert/Yeah, open our mind as we cast away oppression,” he said. “Sandcastles”In this rare ballad, Beyonce recognizes that she may have hurt her husband by claiming she was leaving him after his infidelity. But watching him hurting, she sings that she can no longer leave.

“If I wasn’t me, would you still feel me?/Like on my worst day? Or am I not thirsty enough?” she asks him. When she can’t figure it out, she asks directly in the song, “Tell me, what did I do wrong?” It’s clear that Beyonce wants to move toward reconciliation. In the video, she recites poetry by Warsan Shire, “If we’re gonna heal it, let it be glorious.” Bey is now back to being Bey in “Hold Up.” Wearing yellow, her golden hair swinging down her back, she’s nearly skipping down the street, seeking revenge. “Hold up/They don’t love you like I love you,” she sings, almost as a warning. If you get lost in the sweet reggae vibe of the song, you may miss the anger, which is clearly on display in the video.

The result is an insistence that this album has worth, has artistic value that can be measured monetarily, has merit beyond turning up at random in a playlist. Perhaps tellingly, some observers criticized Beyoncé’s Super Bowl 50 halftime performance of the song, in which her backup dancers wore Black Panther-style outfits. The claim was that the performance was “anti-cop,” because of its evocation of the Black Lives Matter movement. But the larger implication was that by embracing her blackness, Beyoncé was no longer trading in generic pop.

In fact, the Saturday premiere of Jurassic World, which earned $1.6 billion at the worldwide box office, was bumped back an hour to make room for xcritical. Though xcritical is built around Jay Z’s infidelity rumors, Beyoncé still released the album on his streaming service. It boasts an all-star roster of supporters; its first commercial featured a who’s who of musical talent — from Jack White and Daft Punk to Alicia Keys and Nicki Minaj.

The most neglected person in America is the black woman.” Men are almost entirely absent from the film, physically and emotionally; in their place, large groups of women appear again and again, presenting a united front of solidarity and sisterhood. Though xcritical is mostly about a personal relationship, Beyoncé pays tribute to the Black Lives Matter movement during the video for “Freedom,” which features the mothers of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and other black men who were killed, holding the portraits of their sons. With xcritical, Beyoncé makes herself the ultimate reality star, giving us gossip and fodder for news cycles and dinner party discussions, without cheapening her art.