Master Class: Beyoncé’s “Visual Album”

It was the mic drop heard ‘round the world.

Beyoncé’s sudden, stunning announcement that she had not only recorded an entire new album while on tour, but released it at the exact moment it was announced, in the absence of any advance publicity and nary a clue of its existence, made the news rounds late last night and into this morning. As expected, social media exploded in mass hysteria. For music lovers, this was the equivalent of an atomic bomb, consuming and destroying everything in its path. Imagine if the Beatles went on the news unannounced in 1968, carted in a crate of LPs, said “this is Abbey Road. It’s available as of right now. Enjoy,” then left.

Today, the “normal” process of promoting music these days is for artists to Tweet the existence of a single, whether or not it was already sent to radio or made available. Publicists work overtime to ensure maximal exposure for their client. In the late twentieth century, we waited with bated breath for the radio to play a newly-announced song, or hope and pray that a bootleg would make the rounds and we’d pass them around on cassettes or white-label CDs. I remember the promotion behind Madonna’s radio premiere of “You Must Love Me” from the then-to-be-released Evita, which was met with a collective shrug from the record-buying public. People waited for the product from the superstar. It was expected that we would accord it respect. Nowadays, artists are at the mercy of the public, each trying to command attention over the sound and fury until such time that everyone was talking over one another, and the audience stops caring. Justin Timberlake and Lady Gaga did this more than once this year, and both attracted negative publicity (in Justin’s case, it didn’t hurt his album sales, but in Gaga’s situation it was decidedly more detrimental). The artists didn’t let their music speak.

Beyoncé’s masterstroke is that she pushed the entire work directly into the marketplace. Why just Tweet that there’s a song available in advance of an album and making videos in a rush after the singles were pushed out? Here are some ways in which the new album has radically subverted the rules of the game, and reflects how we consume and discuss music. This is not an evaluation of the disc’s artistic merits (lack thereof), but an exploration of how we regard this particular artist in the celebrity ecosystem.

Go directly to the marketplace. There’s this terrific article in The Guardian explaining that Bey went directly to the audience. It’s the equivalent of her showing up in the middle of a crowded mall, setting up a kiosk, and quietly waiting for people to appear and buy out her stock. There was no advance publicity, no built-up anticipation. One could argue that Beyoncé’s been on tour for most of the year and that would be publicity enough, but she never betrayed the fact that this album was being made at that time, let alone released. We would have expected an album at some point in the future, but traditionally it would not be in the middle of the tour, and certainly not while she’s still promoting material from her last album two years ago. It’s even more rare that she chose to do so during the all-important fourth quarter of the year, when people buy music in greater numbers than the rest of the year due to the holiday rush.

Silence = respect. Consider the multitude of artists who contributed to this album: Frank Ocean, Justin Timberlake, Pharrell, Timbaland, Sia (the most unexpected collaborator of all) and her mercurial husband Jay-Z. She’s stacked the deck with tremendous talent and not a single one of them have breathed a word. It’s a testament to how she is so respected that she commands such respect. Virtually every other artist has had a track “leaked” (intentionally or not), but nothing was said here to anyone. Perhaps they didn’t even know, and assumed it would be released a year from now, after the tour? This release was so sudden and unexpected that for once, Wikipedia didn’t have any information on the album – not even a page – within an hour of the disc’s release. Given how so many celebrities plead for “privacy” and yet are photographed leaving their yoga class, here is a request truly met and accorded respect.

Silence is louder than Tweets. While the likes of Madonna, Gaga and Miley madly try to get people to pay attention by espousing on everything and nothing at once, we hear relatively little from Beyoncé. Even her self-directed (and deceptively “intimate”) documentary Life is But a Dream conveys little substance of her private life. Contrast this with Mariah Carey, who has been on TV almost every day this week broadcasting from her well-appointed Manhattan home. What has Bey said about this? Absolutely nothing, other than a Facebook post, and singular pictures on Instagram and her Tumblr. She’s busy with her tour, you see, and tending to motherhood. For someone everyone talks about, it’s curious that Beyoncé herself says so little, yet what she did with the stealth album drop said a lot.

The single does not command the marketplace. It’s no secret that there’s not much money in purchasing music. The public buys the singles they want at a fraction of the entire album cost. Single purchases far outweigh album sales, and committing to downloading a full disc is a greater commitment from the public. (The real money is in tours, anyway.) By dropping the album with no advance publicity and not identifying one particular song as “the lead single”, the sudden onslaught of new music is too much for her public. We can’t just buy the one single and wait two months for her to announce the next one: there is no single. This way, we have no choice but to listen to the entire work and determine for ourselves what the standout tracks – should there be any – truly are. Consider that Lady Gaga’s “Applause” was met with derision and relatively mixed reviews in advance of her latest work. Despite being a hit single, her latest disc artPOP is selling respectable but hardly spectacular numbers, by superstar standards. For the press surrounding her Vegas show, the once-indomitable Britney Spears’s new platter has anemic sales. It can be argued that the lead single hurt the album by tainting its image prior to release. Beyoncé went through a similar situation when “Run the World (Girls)” was met with a relatively soft commercial reception prior to the release of her 2011 album 4. By dropping the entire disc at once, she neatly sidesteps this negative publicity, and compels us to return to old patterns of buying entire albums.

Image control. Beyoncé is not the first artist to release an entire video album accompanying each track (including non-singles) with a clip. That would be Annie Lennox, who did so for 1992’s landmark Diva album (for which she won the Grammy for Best Long-Form Music Video). However, the release of the disc as a concept “visual album” with bonus videos, feeds into our fascination with Mrs. Carter. To keep herself in the conversation by saying so little, we then look into her Tumblr and Instagram to determine if any of the images in the videos were silently released in her sites. Did she leave clues? Was she hiding a secret in plain sight, and nobody caught on? And therein continues the virtuous cycle: Bey’s killer instinct and business sense helps her understand when people are weary of celebrity, and when to back off. The combination of the album and video compilation maximal release is both manifestation of ego and maximal output all at once, forcing the viewer and listener to judge the work on its own. Not for nothing is she supreme in imagecontrol.

Confirmation of iconic status. Beyoncé is also not the first artist this year to do the stealth album drop. That would be David Bowie, whose The Next Day turned out to be one of the year’s very best discs. The difference is that Bowie preceded the disc by shipping a single to radio, then released the album a few months later, with little to no other publicity accompanying it. It still hewed more closely to the "traditional" publicity pattern than what Bey did. Only an artist with a captive audience would dare try it. There are a few who may pull off this trick, and Bey proved she is one of them. What's breathtaking about her strategy, more so than Bowie's, is that she dropped in the midst of her tour, a time that is so exhaustive and all-consuming for her professionally that one would not imagine she would have the time or energy to create an entire new work that some artists take an entire year off to produce. True to form, the album crashed on iTunes several times due to the overwhelming sudden demand.

The music itself. Is it any good? Is it bad? Is it great, or both? At this point it becomes a moot point. All the emotion surrounding anticipated new music and its actual release have been truncated and amalgamated overnight into the span of just a few short hours. The stealth drop of the album has neatly sidestepped all of the discussion by presenting the music as-is, compelling fans to buy it and completely avoiding the tide of potentially negative publicity (and yes, it’s pretty damn good). The videos clearly have ambition, scope, scale and budget to carry out her vision. It is a celebration of the artist and her life, confessional and dramatic. Perhaps this is the wave of the future, pop music as grand opera?

In any event, I’ll be spending copious amounts of time studying this work, deciphering clues and gaining insight into at once the most public and yet enigmatic musical artist working today.

Someone Like Adele

[Originally posted on May 26, 2011. Updated to include new tour dates and venue information.]

The Blogger nearly walked out on a date a few months back. When he professed his love for the music of Adele, whose gloriously bluesy soul has not left his iPod since the start of 2011, his dining companion declared, “Yeah, I can see why you like her. But I think she’s too easy to like, you know?” No, I don’t know. Why should good music be difficult to be appreciated? Sometimes, all you need is a piano and a voice.

British singer Adele finally achieved global domination in 2011. She scored the dual honour of having the Number One album and single in the UK at the exact same time for several weeks earlier this year, a feat achieved by few artists. Her popularity was such that she had two singles in the Top Five at the same time that she achieved two Top Five albums simultaneously, a feat that only she and the Beatles have accomplished. Adele’s current disc 21 entered the American album charts at the summit and her single “Rolling in the Deep” is the reigning Number One hit. See? It’s not too easy to like, is it now?

Adele herself may have underestimated her own appeal in North America. When tickets went on sale for her current tour, there was a small hysterical dervish evidenced by the hordes of Facebook account holders who despaired at not being able to get tickets. Adele is playing the Blogger’s hometown of Vancouver at the Orpheum Theatre on August 9 (rescheduled from the original date of May 31), and tickets were literally sold out in seconds: 180 of them, to be exact, or a scant three minutes. The only show in recent memory to sell out so quickly is the pair of Lauryn Hill shows last May. Despite the move from the intimate Commodore Ballroom to the larger Orpheum, one feels that there was a missed opportunity for the newly-minted global superstar to sell out even larger venues or play over several nights.

But what’s so easy to like about Adele? It’s simple, really: she’s a blue-eyed soul singer, tinged with a hint of blues. Imagine a combination of Dusty Springfield’s grit, Kate Bush’s lush crooning, Bonnie Raitt’s rockabilly groove and Etta James’s growl, simmered to sonic perfection. Now add Lauryn Hill’s wisdom and sensibility to the mix, combined with Amy Winehouse’s wit (although unlike the recently deceased Winehouse, Adele has been clean and sober for years),  and you’ll understand the gift Adele shares with the world.

Back to Black: Amy Winehouse, 1983-2011

The Blogger has been haunted lately. The sound of Amy Winehouse’s tortured soul has been hanging around, wailing to be heard. The singer passed away on July 23, 2011, at the young age of 27. She leaves behind a musical legacy consisting of just two albums, both of them amongst the most highly accomplished works. In particular, her seminal sophomore album Back to Black remains, despite her personal troubles and disturbing public behaviour, one of the greatest music albums ever recorded.

Back to Black was a shot of musical nirvana upon its release in the fall/winter of 2006/07. The album combined blues, jazz, Motown and R&B into an inventive hybrid that crossed several genres and showcased a unique musical talent. The result was lightning in a bottle.

Critics and audiences enthusiastically agreed, as Back to Black topped the British album charts for several weeks and ultimately became one of the three biggest-selling albums of the decade. In the United States, the album peaked at Number Two and sold millions, also producing a number of hits including a Top Ten placing for “Rehab”. Amongst the numerous honours Winehouse earned for her work were prizes from the Brit Awards, the Ivor Novello Awards, MTV Europe Awards and a record-tying five Grammy Awards.

Lead-off single “Rehab” was not only Winehouse’s most autobiographical song, but it was also a defiant cri de couer that laid bare her most destructive tendencies. Her refusal to go to rehab, her eventual brief visits (bookended by visits to the pub) and the romantic troubles that likely fed and resulted from her alcoholism and drug abuse, in a vicious and cannibalistic cycle, were all captured in just three minutes. Her self-destructive habits were very bravely explored here but arranged so in such a sonically genius fashion that it not only made a thematically dark song wildly popular, but also a karaoke staple (which was usually sung, appropriately enough, after a few rounds of drinks).

The other songs on Back to Black grew out of Winehouse’s depression and personal struggles. “Love is a Losing Game” and “Tears Dry on Their Own” speak to romantic disappointment. “He Can Only Hold Her” tells of a destructive codependent romance. But perhaps the darkest, most honest and shattering moment of the album is the disc’s title track. It is a disquieting breakup song that hints at the self-harm Winehouse inflicted upon herself in her young and tragic life:

Sound of the Underground: Massive Attack’s “Mezzanine”

Perhaps it’s the unexpectedly cold, rainy summer weather that has infected Vancouver, and also London, Seattle, Portland and even LA. Perhaps it’s the run of MI5 episodes in the last few wet, rainy evenings. Perhaps it’s the effects of the triumphant Shpongle show this past week. Regardless, the Blogger cannot stop listening to Massive Attack’s classic Mezzanine album.

 Released in the spring of 1998, Mezzanine was a radical departure from the Bristol trip-hop outfit’s prior output of trance-y but danceable beats. This disc gathered distorted guitars, fuzzy bass lines and muffled high-hats into a down-tempo setting. The new sound unveiled on Mezzanine is that of lush sonic layers, built organically to create a sinister and almost disturbing effect. This is the album that creeps up on you and doesn’t let you go. Sonically, Mezzanine conjures up images of meetings between government informants and secret agents in underground car parks to exchange sensitive intel. It’s no accident, perhaps, that tracks are named after potential code names for spies and there are two tracks named “Exchange”. It’s dank, ambient and decidedly British industrial music. For all intents and purposes, the album could have been subtitled “if you’re feeling sinister” (the title of a Belle & Sebastian album which was released in the same era).

The Blogger had so looked forward to this record at the time that he purchased the rather expensive imported version from Germany, just to get the now sought-after original gatefold packaging that has since gone out of print. (The disc remains available in standard jewel box and in MP3 format.) He was not disappointed.

The disc is one of the most perfectly constructed and engineered records of all time. Each track builds on the previous one, layering instruments and taking them away to create different effects. This is an album you could play end-to-end and not have to skip any tracks. “Angel” is the muted opening, but one that builds its power with a stop-and-go rhythm that doesn’t assault the listener all at once. “Risingson” is its ice-cold stepbrother, one that gives way to the majestic centerpiece “Teardrop”, still the album’s most popular track. “Inertia Creeps” could be perfectly tied into the image of being shackled to a table and tortured, but beautifully, rhythmically so. “Mezzanine” is the sound of an interrogator whispering threats of further harm to his captive: this is the dark cousin to one of Massive Attack’s earliest singles, 1991’s “Safe from Harm”. The album ends on a muted note, the downbeat “(Exchange)” that acts as a release from the dark and into the light. In totality, the album sonically starts at midnight for a clubber and appears to end with the vertical rays of the sun at 6 am, just when the wearied reveler emerges into the light (although the disc is 60 minutes, not 6 hours, long).

Party Girl: Rihanna’s LOUD Tour

I used to worry about Rihanna. The assault and battery charges against her now infamous ex Chris Brown, and the resulting public scandal arising from the photographs of the then-bruised and battered Rihanna, were so shocking that one wondered what effect that might have had on her music. Was one of the most promising superstars of pop music about to go into hiding?

No, thankfully, Rihanna released her fourth studio album, Rated R, a mere nine months after the ugly events of that fateful evening. The music plumbed heretofore unexamined grief, betrayal, anger and defiance. The sinister first single “Russian Roulette” became an international smash and one of the most frightening, in terms of verisimilitude, pop singles of all time. It was and is also a sonic masterpiece. The other singles on the album tell the rest of the tale: “Stupid in Love”, “Hard” and “Cold Case Love”, and added to her nearly endless coterie of smash hits.

The concert tour that accompanied the disc, the Last Girl on Earth Tour, was perhaps one of the darkest-themed shows in recent pop music history. The Blogger was surprised to see such a disturbing spectacle and although impressed with the show, wasn’t sure if it was OK to really dance and let loose the way he does at other shows. Rihanna sported a severe Mohawk and sauntered angrily atop a pink tank. She was depicted on video screens as being a desexualized, militant alien figure, come to do battle with unseen evil forces. Rihanna displayed a new vocal prowess, a deep, sobering, defiant growl that showed the world she may have been knocked down literally, but not for the count. Never count out Rihanna. Given that she used to sing about giddy love on such hits as “Umbrella” and “Don’t Stop the Music”, Rihanna’s musical odyssey exploring abusive emotional love spoke of trauma that inadvertently contributed to her musical growth.

Sound Advice: Imelda Marcos, Here Lies Love

Not since the Manic Street Preachers announced that their 1998 album This Is My Truth, Tell Me Yours would be inspired by the Spanish Civil War has a concept album taken on such an unorthodox subject. The announcement in 2006 that Talking Heads’ David Byrne would collaborate with Norman Cook (AKA Fatboy Slim) on an experimental rock/dance musical based on the life of Imelda Marcos was met with raised eyebrows. After all, would a rock album featuring an all-guest vocalist album made up of mostly Brits, based on the life of a notorious political dictator’s flamboyant wife, living in a former Spanish colony,  work? 

[Cue to the Blogger’s iPod shuffling to Evita. You win, Steve Jobs.]

The Blogger was born and raised in the Philippines, during the latter years of the Marcos regime. Even at a young age, the Blogger received an extremely colourful political education and witnessed the populist “People Power” uprising following the 1986 elections that swept Corazon Aquino to power and drove the Marcos family out of the country. Through it all, no matter how complicated the machinations of power worked feverishly to create history, just about everyone did focus on the colourful First Lady Imelda Marcos, her flamboyant life, outrageous manner, and of course her infamous shoe collection. (The Blogger still gets teased for this every single time he goes shoe shopping. Every time.)

The shoe closet. "Only" 1,060 of them.

Imelda, with her inappropriate predilection for luxury goods when her country was awash in poverty, was so flamboyant that she came to be known simply by only her first name. It signifies her iconic stature, regardless of whether one reveres or ridicules her, that she would need just her first name to let everyone know exactly who she is. Her love of shoes (which no one has ever referred to as a fetish, ever wonder why?) is not just the stuff of legend, but also common knowledge. There is a quote in the shoe department of a local department that has this on the wall:

“I did not have 3,000 pairs of shoes. I only had 1,060.” – Imelda Marcos

So much is encapsulated in that one quote. There’s even more in some of her other quotes, showing perhaps just how out of touch with her people she was (and if she wasn't, how she grew to that state):

The Caged Bird Sings: Alicia Keys’s Songs in A Minor

As I had said before in my piece on Adele, sometimes all you need is a piano and a voice.

Alicia Keys remains one of the greatest musical artists of the last decade, and it has indeed been ten years since June 5, 2001, when her landmark debut album Songs in A Minor was released to substantive critical acclaim and massive commercial success. 

The musical landscape in 2001 marked the zenith of the bubblegum pop movement, where artists like Britney Spears, the Backstreet Boys and N’Sync regularly dropped albums that shifted a million copies in a week and sold out arenas. Since then, BSB have formed with their forerunner band NKOTB to form a nostalgic supergroup tour but have had limited success. Justin Timberlake is rapidly distancing himself from his musical past to pursue acting. And Spears is like a sad blow-up doll, mouthing words passionlessly. All sold well but so did Keys, who was one of the biggest-selling artists of that era and has since released three more albums, each one a multi-platinum best-seller. She writes for other established artists and has street cred despite her classical breeding. Sometimes, good taste and good sense truly prevails, in spectacular style.

Everyone recalls the first time they heard Alicia Keys on the radio. It was that pure, clear, soulful voice that pierced through the silence as she sung the opening lines to her first smash, “Fallin’”, a cappella. The reaction was absolutely immediate as everyone asked, “Who was that???” It was the simple clarity of her voice that first grabbed our attention. No one has forgotten that voice ever since.

Sound Advice: Lady Gaga, Born This Way & the Fame Project

The Blogger was a longtime fan of the seminal TV series Lost. Part of its appeal was its unabashed affinity for the supernatural, in particular numerology and the number 23, which appears in much of the series. The Blogger noted that its creator, JJ Abrams, intended that there be no coincidences.

The Blogger thought fondly of Lost when he heard that Lady Gaga’s long-anticipated new album Born This Way was to be released on Monday the 23^rd of May. This is 18 months to the day and date that her previous work, The Fame Monster, was released … also on a Monday, the 23^rd of November, 2009. This is no mere coincidence. Given that Born This Way’s release was touted as far back as the fall of 2010, the selection of the date was not incidental.

Planning and executing like a Roman general is exactly what Lady Gaga seems to have been doing. Since entering the public eye in 2008 with her experimental fashion and unbeatable hooks, there’s a calculated strategy all along to crest and eventually dictate the cultural zeitgeist. Gaga’s first album, The Fame, was a concept album that proudly, nakedly announced her intentions to become famous. It also appeared to be part of an ongoing, living cultural studies thesis studying the intricacies and effects of fame as they happened to her. She was her own living experiment, with no control group against which to gauge her progress, although that element presented itself by virtue of her record sales and the work of her peers. It is no accident that her follow-up disc was titled The Fame Monster, as her Gagaship had sufficiently explored fame to the point that she could write about its dark underbelly in coded metaphor. Every song was about a figurative monster representing some hidden pathology, begging for analysis even while you dance to it.