The XO video is amazing! It's so feelgood and matches the song COMPLETELY.

She's always released video anthologies though, just usually once all the tracks have been hits! "XO" is probably my highlight song and video of the album (although "Grown Woman" is up there, such a shame that's not on the audio album :().

It's obvious that she's even used body doubles in a few of them as she didn't have time to film them all!

She's been filming all the videos for months, she definitely had time. What videos do you think she used body doubles in?

She's been filming all the videos for months, she definitely had time. What videos do you think she used body doubles in?

Definitely "Superpower", I can't remember the others at the moment though.

Definitely "Superpower", I can't remember the others at the moment though.

What part would require a body double?! :unsure:

Blow. is. incredible.

Just watching this for the first time and god it's flawless.

Chart Watch: Beyoncé Takes Female Record

 

Beyoncé's Beyoncé sold 991K copies in its first 10 days of release. In so doing, it has become the best-selling album by a female artist in 2013. The old record was held by P!nk's The Truth About Love, which has sold 920K copies in 2013 (on top of 945K copies it sold in 2012). Beyoncé sold 374K copies in its second week, which was its first full week of release. It sold 617K copies last week, even though it was available for only three days in that tracking week.

 

Beyoncé's album ranks #1 on The Billboard 200 for the second week. Beyoncé's previous album, 4, also spent its first two weeks at #1, but its sales tally after two weeks was a much more modest 426K.

 

Beyoncé sold 235K digital copies this week, which puts it at #1 on the Top Digital Albums chart for the second week.

 

Beyoncé is a cinch to top the 1 million mark in U.S. sales next week. It will become Beyoncé's first album to sell 1 million copies in just three weeks. Her previous fastest album to reach 1M was I Am... Sasha Fierce, which took four weeks. Here's the number of weeks her other previous solo albums took to reach the 1 million mark: Dangerously in Love (seven), B'Day (eight) and 4 (an uncharacteristically slow 26).

 

If Beyoncé sells about 100K copies in the coming week, it will wind up as one of the top 10 albums of 2013. (Next week's chart, for the tracking week ending Sunday Dec. 29, will be the final one of the year. FYI, the album that is currently #10 for the year-to-date, Mumford & Sons' Babel, has sold 1,083,000 copies in 2013.)

 

Beyoncé is vying to become the first album to wind up in the year-end top 10 based on just three weeks of sales availability since Nielsen SoundScan began tracking music sales in 1991. The current record-holder as the album that wound up in the year-end top 10 based on the fewest number of weeks in the marketplace is Garth Brooks' Sevens, which ranked among the top 10 albums of 1997 even though it was available for just the last five weeks of that year.

 

Moreover, if Beyoncé winds up in the year-end top 10, this will be the sixth year that Beyoncé has achieved that feat (counting her work with Destiny's Child). This would put her in a tie with Garth Brooks, Mariah Carey and Eminem as the only artists to have made the year-end top 10 in six different years since 1991, when Nielsen SoundScan began tracking music sales.

 

Beyoncé is the singer's fifth studio album. It's rather unusual for an artist to release an eponymous album this deep into a career. There are only five other cases where an artist has reached #1 with an eponymous album this far along. Fleetwood Mac's Fleetwood Mac (1976) was that band's 10th studio album (but its first with the line-up that brought it to superstardom). The Beatles' The Beatles (1968, often called The White Album) was the Fab Four's ninth studio album in the U.S. (excluding soundtracks and compilations). Heart's hit-studded Heart (1985) was that group's eighth studio album. Metallica's Metallica (1991) was that band's fifth studio album. Janet Jackson's janet. (1993) was her fifth studio album.

I just realised - this surely has a good chance of becoming the best-selling digital album of all time in the US?

'Partition' is quite the track. You could write an easy 2000 words with all that's going on there.

 

9/10

Genuinely cannot remember the last time I was so infatuated with an album. And it's Beyonce.

 

http://media.giphy.com/media/KuzN7sdQLjabm/giphy.gif

This, for me, is her only album that I can just have playing the whole way through, without skipping a track. And then play it all over again right after. It's a really solid record.

Genuinely cannot remember the last time I was so infatuated with an album. And it's Beyonce.

 

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She melted that icy heart of yours awww~

this is one of those rare records by any artist that i can play all the way through

So apparently, she recorded about EIGHTY songs for this album!

 

Talking mainly about "Partition". :wub:

I ordered this CD. I never thought I would ever buy a Beyoncé CD!!

 

Love how she just slayed all the other pop ladies who released their albums last year with only just three weeks left. And deservedly so.

Edited January 1, 201411 yr by Atonement

8.8! :D

 

Should Beyoncé choose to settle in the world of Adult Contemporary one day, she'll have most of the legwork already done. She's spent the time since 4, an album that playfully extolled the virtues of marriage, crafting a role for herself in that sphere with the ambitious grace of a good politician. Imagine the fun she had requesting the big hair and bigger fur to help President Obama ring in his second term, or in gussying herself up like Marie Antoinette to promote an international arena tour called The Mrs. Carter Show. The hedge-betting deals with Pepsi and H&M, the (now-defunct) lifestyle blog/newsletter à la Gwyneth Paltrow's goop, the reunion with Destiny's Child, the exquisitely dull autobiographical documentary—she's seemed entirely poised to join Jay Z on his cloud of moneyed middle-age.

In retrospect, the adult gloss feels like an elaborate foil to the trouble she’d been cooking up in private all along. Beyoncé, her fifth solo album, repositions the singer as the Houston-bred Yoncé, a woman lustier and surlier than B, more playful than Bey, fiercer than Sasha but softer and more natural than the lot. The album is brassy but elegant, its post-coital breath smelling faintly of cheap liquor sipped from a crystal flute. It finds Beyoncé shifting gears to pull off her most explicit and sonically experimental music to date, exploring sounds and ideas at the grittier margins of popular music.

It’s tempting to read Beyoncé’s hard edges as an attempt to ride the success of Rihanna or Miley Cyrus’ risqué agendas—but to do so would be to look past the album’s true provocations. Beyoncé pushes boundaries not because it sells sex at every turn, but because it treats a power-balanced marriage as a place where sexuality thrives. At a time when when young people are gripped by an ideological fear of monogamy’s advertised doldrums, Beyoncé boldly proposes the idea that a woman’s prime—personal, professional, and especially sexual—can occur within a stable romantic partnership. Monogamy has never sounded more seductive or less retrograde as when dictated on Beyoncé's terms. The innuendo can be bawdy and overblown—"Can you lick my Skittles/ That's the sweetest in the middle" on "Blow"—but sincerely so. And who would allow Jay Z’s instantly infamous breasts/breakfast line anywhere near the stargazing boom of “Drunk in Love” but someone truly infatuated with him? What’s more is that the erotic themes don’t feel out-of-step with the album’s more decorous moments, like the stadium-filling “XO” or “Blue”, its requisite treatise on motherhood. In Beyoncé’s world, there are illicit doors to be unlocked in the halls of tradition and vice versa.

The record reverberates with the energy of a conservative pop star navigating trends without grasping for them. Its crew of 44 writers, producers, and directors skews heavily toward the hip-hop realm and incorporates niche talents, something Beyoncé tried on 4 when she teamed with artists like Switch and pulled visual ideas from little-known European choreographers discovered via YouTube. It's the collective effort of an all-star team with a deep bench, with contributions from mainstays like Pharrell and The-Dream, to fresh faces like Chairlift's Caroline Polachek, a creative director from streetwear brand Supreme, and a practically-unknown producer named Boots.

Beyoncé’s best songs often reject traditional pop structures in favor of atmosphere—she may have taken some cues from her sister Solange, who now leads a particular wave of collaborative, left-field R&B. The record, her darkest and lushest yet, has a tendency to echo, stop abruptly, or place two separate songs in the space of one. Its most bracing moments are also its toughest and weirdest, like "***Flawless", a two-part growler that makes feminist TED Talk fodder sound legitimately menacing. Timbaland and Justin Timberlake join The-Dream on "Partition" in service of the mean-mugging Yoncé, who snarls and bares her teeth as though the most revered rapper of all time is nobody but her little husband. At the center lies Beyoncé’s practically unfair abilities as a performer—you get the sense that Lady Gaga or Ciara could no sooner pull off the scale or quality of Beyoncé than you or I could pull off a suitable rendition of any of its songs in a karaoke bar.

Beyoncé has loosened up her delivery, too, in a way that highlights her elasticity and shows her pop-cultural antennae tuned to the right channels. Who could’ve predicted that some of the most infectious snippets of pop music in 2013 would not arrive by way of anthemic chorus or assembly-line arrangement, but in Beyoncé’s ad-libbing? You already know the ones: Surfbort, she grunts on “Drunk in Love”, slinging a hashtag like it’s the name of a line of Ikea chairs, the single word serving as both shorthand for woman-on-top and a neat summation of an entire era of trends in rap cadence. You’d also be hard-pressed to find an internet-savvy person in America who hasn’t been possessed by the idea that he or she woke up like this, brain emblazoned with Beyoncé’s half-second I’m so flawless I gave myself a seizure dance. She's achieved the rare feat of validating meme culture by capturing its sneaky potency and delight rather than falling into its cheap, dehumanizing traps. This is a “visual album,” sure, but it’s also a package of modern codes and discreet campaigns, a field of meaningful virtual dioramas. In this sense Beyoncé has a newfound spiritual ally in Drake (Worst! YOLO!),—he shows up on Beyoncé on the bruised "Mine"— her only peer to successfully streamline an internet-rooted mindset into a large-scale pop arena and seek profundity in the process.

Which is all to say that Beyoncé has delivered on the promise she inadvertently made by dropping an album and and its expansive visual counterpart late on a Thursday night in December on iTunes, free of traditional fanfare. Call it a coup or just another victory for her mammoth PR apparatus, but consider the alternatives: The strategy probably would have failed if the quality wasn't there, and the album could not have achieved such an impact without its rogue—in spirit, at least—method of distribution. Beyoncé was unleashed upon the world in a way that could only succeed right now, with an aim to make the audience consume it the way it would have long ago. It’s a line that could be ripped straight from the mouth of an investment-drunk tech startup founder, but it’s true: Beyoncé seized the powers of a medium characterized by its short attention span to force the world to pay attention. Leave it to the posterchild of convention to brush convention aside and leave both sides feeling victorious.

As if they would've given it any less!

 

Up to #3 in the UK this week. Amazing consistency. Esp since Radio 1 are snubbing Drunk in Love. She's such a pop culture superstar that it doesn't seem to matter.