Both the album and its visual companion are deeply tied to Beyoncé’s identity and narrative (her womanhood, her blackness, her husband’s infidelity) and make for Beyoncé's most outwardly revealing work to date.
The speech-made by her husband JAY-Z’s grandmother Hattie White on her 90th birthday in 2015-reportedly inspired the concept behind this radical project, which arrived with an accompanying film as well as words by Somali-British poet Warsan Shire. “I was served lemons, but I made lemonade.” An elderly woman’s voice cuts in: 'I had my ups and downs, but I always find the inner strength to pull myself up,” she says. There’s one moment critical to understanding the emotional and cultural heft of Lemonade-Beyoncé’s genre-obliterating blockbuster sixth album-and it arrives at the end of “Freedom,” a storming empowerment anthem that samples a civil-rights-era prison song and features Kendrick Lamar.
