ABSTRACT
It was quite fortuitous that Lemonade premiered in the same news cycle as the sudden passing one of the late twentieth century’s biggest musical icons: Prince. In the wake of the world grappling with the loss of his enigmatic musical genius, a younger icon in the making—one who was three years old when “Let’s Go Crazy” made its debut—released what may now be considered the “masterwork” of her career. However, unlike the rave reviews and lightning bolt acclaim that occurred when Prince burst onto the mainstream pop scene to join the highest ranks of 1980s’ musical giants, Beyoncé’s Lemonade and the mixed receptions of it exposed a generational bitter pill that Black women in popular music in America have been forced to swallow time and time again. Just as the blues mothers of the 1920s and the mothers of rock and roll of the 1940s indelibly changed American music, only to have their contributions overlooked and their legacies lauded far too late, some of us observed how the magnitude of Lemonade as an artistic tribute to the lives of Black women and girls was being thwarted in the first days of its release. This essay will compare how some of the early reactions to Lemonade mirror biased responses to other iconic works by Black female artists, and examine how these biases reflect the slanted and even discordant readings of Black women’s artistic achievements in popular culture in ways not typically applied to male and white female artists.
