Nobody likes being played

Continuing my trip back through the 2006 album charts.

10/09/06 : B'day - Beyoncé

This is my 4.5th visit with Queen B, with the .5 being a Destiny's Child album - and I'm expecting this to be more DC than her later somewhat more experimental efforts.  I can't quite decide whether I'm expecting to like it or not - it's not really my sort of thing, but I rarely hate it either.

Yeah, it's definitely more DC than Lemonade or Renaissance - the songs general warble by acceptably (although there are some more "unusual" sections) but I can't say any of them particularly stand out for me.  There were bits I recognised ("To the left, to the left") but I couldn't have told you what song it came from ("Irreplaceable").  The album also features way more Jay Z than I feel the need for - and boy is that strong woman amazingly doormattish at times concerning him.  Just show him the door, sista!  There's no doubt she can sing, but this wasn't the album to turn me into a superfan - I'm also very unconvinced by her beehive on the album cover.

We're at #3 with a new entry this week on the start of a 26 week run, mostly spent in the 20s and 30s - she was certainly putting in the hard yards in preparation for her days of megastardom.  The rest of the top five are Snow Patrol, Kasabian, The Feeling (it would have been nice to catch up with that album again, even if it's completely inessential) and Bob Dylan and we have two more new entries in the top ten - the best of Freddie Mercury solo (#6 - which feels like it wouldn't need to be a particularly long album) and Missy Elliott (#7).

Wikipedia has a mahoosive entry - 667 milliPeppers, which is the longest we've seen in quite some time.  And no, I didn't bother reading most of it.  The critics were a bit "well, it's fine I guess" without obviously having anything particular to say about it.  Funnily enough, the public didn't care and lapped it up - #1 in the US, selling over 5 million copies over there.

But wait - there's a controversies section!  And it's surprisingly full of controversies about absolutely nothing - there was a petition against the video for "Déjà Vu" because it was terrible (it's not great, but not especially terrible imho), complaints that "Ring The Alarm" was dissing Rihanna (for sleeping with her husband, so that seems reasonable enough to me), complaints about her taping an alligator's mouth shut (I'm not making this up!) and her holding a cigarette holder and a contract dispute about a Des'ree cover on one of the album versions (and that sounds this least plausible of the lot).

"Customers also listened to" Destiny's Child (who knew?), Alicia Keys, Christina Aguilera and Jennifer Lopez - I strongly suggest not messing with any of these ladies.  But there's a good reason why Beyoncé is known as Queen B - although I can't say this album particularly shows off her talents.

03/09/06 - Revisiting an old friend
17/09/06 - A pleasantly nostalgic album

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

I saw your mum - she forgot that I existed

Image
Continuing my trip forward in time through the album charts 22/12/23 :  Stick Season - Noah Kahan Well, this week surprises us on a couple of fronts.  Firstly, and probably the least expected, this is possibly the album I've heard most this year - because obviously I'm a massive Noah fan. Well, it might not surprise you to hear it's not me but my delightful daughter - but you might be surprised to hear just how much my youngest absolutely LOVES Noah, particularly given his folkiness.  She's got tickets to see him next year and (excluding festivals) they're the most expensive gig tickets I've ever bought.  But despite having heard the album loads, I've never actually listened to it, so I'm interested to see what I make of it on a one-on-one basis. You know what - the headline is that, having actually listened to it I can report that, at least in places, I liked this way more than I previously did.  I listened to it over headphones for the first time and t
Read more

She's got a wicked way of acting like St. Anthony

Image
I've done The Guardian's list of the top 50 albums of the year for the last three years and (mostly) enjoyed it, so here we go again with this year's list .  Last year I'd previously met ten of the list - it will be interesting to see whether that is repeated this year.   #50 : Crazymad, For Me - CMAT Coming off halfway between Jenny Lewis and Self Esteem, Dublin’s CMAT sets life’s greatest embarrassments to ritzy country showstoppers – the musical equivalent of piling your beehive high to distract from your tear-reddened eyes. On her second album, she tots up the price she has paid for her bad boyfriends, self-subjugation and knowing avoidance of less-than-romantic realities, always with mordant humour rather than self-pity: “I’m just some stewardess who feeds your pets / And does your dishes and pays your rent,” she sings on the delicate, harmony-heavy Such a Miranda. For all that she has lost in these songs – pride, love, literal cash – her perspective remains a firm
Read more

Croopied in the reames, shepherd gurrel weaves

Image
Continuing my trip down The Guardian's   top 50 albums of 2023 #30 : The Age Of Pleasure - Janelle Monáe Monáe’s last album, 2018’s Dirty Computer, saw the high-concept pop star returning to earth after several albums of space-age fantasia, showing a softer, fallible side for the rest time. Its songs were still divided into three categories – Reckoning, Celebration and Reclamation – indicating an artist who hadn’t quite let go of the structural safety rails. But on The Age of Pleasure, Monáe is resolutely grounded in pursuit of a new kind of body high. To the decadently rendered diasporic sounds of reggae, dancehall and Afrobeats, she hymns pleasure and desire, connecting (as did Jessie Ware also did this year) sex as self-empowerment and celebrating the kaleidoscopic nature of identity. Or, as she puts it on Phenomenal: “I’m lookin’ at a thousand versions of myself / And we’re all fine as fuck.” I have experienced a couple of Janelle albums and I found them somewhat inaccessible -
Read more