The pop phenomenon called Beyoncé

Rare is the artiste who can sustain multiple visions and repeatedly regenerate. A throwback at her discography

Much is made of pop star ‘eras’ these days, but the term is deployed as a tool of marketing, not meaning. Rare is the artist who can sustain multiple visions and repeatedly regenerate. Different cultural and social moments have demanded different Beyoncés, and she has consistently delivered. Though her latest album Renaissance has courted controversy for an ableist lyric, critics think it is her definitive album so far.

A throwback at her journey.

Before Beyoncé’s I Am … Sasha Fierce (2008), she was a girl-group standout. She was a master of the cadences where early 2000s R&B met hip-hop. But on I Am … Sasha Fierce. she became something more significant: a character.

Sasha Fierce was the name of an alter ego Beyoncé created over the years “whenever I have to perform,” she told Oprah Winfrey. Gender dynamics dominated the album’s most interesting tracks, including If I Were a Boy, where Beyoncé imagined the freedom she’d enjoy if she’d been entitled to the casual power of manhood, and Diva, where she redefined a feminine archetype as a masculine, streetwise pose.

Even Beyoncé had to pull back and re-center before exploding outward again. In between the complementary bombast of I Am … Sasha Fierce and Beyoncé (2013), following a split with her manager-father and something of a creative hiatus, came the relatively subdued 4 (2011).

That Beyoncé chose, in this moment of renewal and self-determination, to wrap herself in the warmth of traditional soul and R&B was telling, and it paid off in the strength of her vocal performances, which rank among her best even on the album’s inconsistent array of ballads.

When a musician’s fifth album is self-titled, it can be a sign of empty gimmickry or a lack of ideas. But Beyoncé (2013) marked her transformation into the star we have known ever since: an artist whose true medium is fame, who cannot be limited to any format, who bends the world to her will. Songs like Flawless and Pretty Hurts position her as a paradox, both perfect and imperfect.

On Lemonade (2016), Beyoncé mustered lavish musical and filmic resources to expand an individual story — the fury of a betrayed wife — toward a recognition of how many kinds of injustice, personal and historical, that women have endured, particularly Black women.

Homecoming: The Live Album (2019) makes the case for her discography not as a disparate collection of eras and aesthetics but a vast continuum containing some of the century’s most forward-thinking pop music.