Lemonade itself reveals that the “hot sauce in my bag” from Formation is actually a baseball bat. Hot sauce in my bag swag /NOEowJkvno- roxane gay April 24, 2016 The exception to that is the last track, Formation, the video for which Beyoncé surprise-released in February and which, in retrospect, almost functions as a trailer for Lemonade even as it exists outside the narrative arc of the film (it was played over the credits on the HBO special). Lemonade the album is more like a soundtrack for Lemonade the film – or, if not the film, Lemonade, the universe of Beyoncé’s creation. Lemonade is Beyoncé’s second visual album but, as Miriam Bale wrote in Billboard, her first was more of a collection of music videos. Beyoncé learns from the best and then pushes it further her timing has just, perhaps, been better.
Though Beyoncé has already been heralded as a pioneer, it’s worth noting that Prince also actively worked to release his later albums off-label, exclusive on the internet and then in stores and promoted them through carefully curated engagement with the media, as Ann Powers noted in 2009. This is an album to be consumed from start to finish, not piecemeal in playlists. In an increasingly fragmented music industry, in which listeners have become accustomed to buying one or two songs off a given album (guilty!), and especially a music industry in which many artists don’t release a full album’s worth of songs you’d want to own (the guilty know who they are), Beyoncé has set about making an immersive, densely textured large-scale work and marketing it outside of the one-song, hear-it-on-the-radio system – like artists did in the classic rock and soul eras. Then the album was available first on Tidal, which had it exclusively for the first 24 hours, then iTunes and Amazon – but listeners could only buy it in its entirety. First the hour-long video version screened. With Lemonade, Beyoncé has almost revived the album format, making it hard to listen to as anything other than a whole.