He better call Becky with the good hair." And that woman is addressed in "Sorry," the fourth song on the album, as "Becky with the good hair."īey sings: "He only want me when I'm not on there. In the tradition of men in my blood," Bey recites during the "Intuition" video vignette.Īt the center of the maelstrom is the other woman, the mistress, the side chick. "You remind me of my father, a magician, able to exist in two places at once. The narrative is that the love of Bey's life - the implicit message is that it's Jay Z, but more on this in a bit - cheated on her and lied to her, and she found out. The album's first four songs and videos depict a howling, scalding rage, setting the bones for everything that follows. (Beyoncé/HBO)īecky and her good hair are integral to Lemonade. What did Becky with the good hair do to Beyoncé? The lyric in question. Initially, it seemed that Becky and her good hair would be one of those amorphous ghosts - a placeholder for the wrath of Beyoncé's fans' ire, a cipher whose sole purpose is to be a lightning rod of anger, a universal punching bag.īut, just as Saturday night was starting to bleed into Sunday morning, something funny happened.īecky might have revealed herself.
But those songs, like many other pop songs, have always stopped short of identifying the foolish or confirming if those people even existed. It’s also the broadest class of Beyonce music, from booming empowerment anthems to operatic ballads and of course, the dance floor-filling smashes.On Saturday night, following the HBO premiere of Beyoncé's second visual album, Lemonade, the world went to bed not knowing if they would ever learn the true identity of "Becky with the good hair."Īccording to a verse on Lemonade, Becky was the other woman who the love of Beyoncé's life was cheating with.ĭuring both her solo career and her years as a member of Destiny's Child, Beyoncé's music has often referenced the trifling, perhaps fictional, humans who have wronged her - from the man who would would max out a young Bey's card, give her bad credit, and buy her gifts with her own ends to the hater who said she couldn't breathe without him to the man who showed his ass and became the best thing Beyoncé never had. This is where much of Beyonce’s most well-known material lands, by virtue of being both popular and harder to fit into other categories.
While “pop” music as it stands today sounds much like an offshoot of R&B with hip-hop elements, many of Beyonce’s pop songs combine multiple elements of varied genres, with big, catchy choruses and sweeping, David Foster-esque flourishes. She’s a big fan of stadium-filling anthems, triumphant brass, and heavy synth punctuated by booming percussion. She doesn’t belong in a box as an artist, but here are the songs that best highlight her ability to both fit in and stand out - sticking to her solo output, naturally, or we’d be here all week.īy far, the majority of Beyonce’s music falls into the hazily defined category of pop music. The point isn’t to make square pegs fit into round holes, though - it’s to highlight Beyonce’s gift as blowing up the very concept that music should fit into neat little boxes in the first place. Whether she is snapping off intense assertive bars as on “Flawless” or kicking and screaming on “Don’t Hurt Yourself,” Beyonce has shown throughout her catalog that she’s a stylistic chameleon who can execute both pitch-perfect riffs on any genre she tries on for size, or craft hits that defy attempts at categorizing them at just one thing.īut that’s what we’re going to try to do here: Figure out just which songs belong under which umbrella. Queen Bey could deliver a throwback R&B jam as easily as she could fire off a proto-country ballad or a New Orleans bounce bop, yet you’ll always know it’s her - and could only ever be her.Įach body of Beyonce’s work is an eclectic artistic statement that traverses such a broad range of styles that each individual track could easily fall into two or three genres on its own.
As one of the biggest stars on the planet, Beyonce could easily be considered a pop star, but she’s also one of music’s most distinctive artists, with a singular sound easily identifiable as her own despite its massive diversity. Classifying Beyonce as an artist is one of the most impossible tasks any music fan could ever undertake.
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