Popcorn Culture
Ruminations on TV Shows, Comics, And Music
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I'm white, I'm in my forties, and I grew up listening to a lot of Motown as a kid, and none of that has made me have similar opinions to other white people in their forties. I've heard people I have similar music tastes to absolutely rail against Beyonce. Many of them told me how they "didn't get" her album, Lemonade, as though it were it a college essay assignment and not an intricately woven pop and r&b album deconstructing a troubling time in her relationship and how she recovered from it. I mean, they were right, they didn't get it but I feel that's on par with singing along to pop songs without taking the time to listen and understand the lyrics, something that I still sometimes do to this day. But we're not at the complex art phase of Beyonce's career yet. This first album is pretty much The Pre-Lemonade Greatest Hits. Songs that caught my attention at times I wasn't even counsciously listening to pop. Beyonce was simply unescapable almost from the moment Destiny's Child hit the pop scene. Beyonce's Motown-inspired girl group project, Destiny's Child, was the evolution of En Vogue, TLC, SWV, and the Spice Girls, all of whose roots go back at least as far as Motown. Their work was often inspirational, catchy as Herpes, and deliberately crafted, even if it was basic language repeated ad nauseum, its form never seemed accidental. Her early solo work was also inspirational, catchy R&B pop but you could hear her maturing as a vocalist and a writer (she began c0-writing most of Destiny's child starting with their second album, The Writing's On The Wall). This is not necessarily my take on her journey there. It's not at all chronological. It's just pre-Lemonade. The songs that found their way to my ears and buried themselves in my brain. If i've missed out on some of her Greatest Hits or your favorite track, I'm sorry. For me, this album is less about Her Important Work and more about what brought me joy when I first saw it on TV, heard it at work, or, in the case of "Irreplacable", when I spent an entire day hearing it on repeat because a terrible roommate put it on repeat before going to work and locked her bedroom door so I couldn't go in and turn it off.  1. The late 1990s/early 2000s pop, house, and reggae scenes loved airhorns and civil defense sirens as instruments in ways that no decades before or, fingers crossed, after, ever will. Ring The Alarm is my favorite use of siren as hook. I even prefer it to Pink Floyd's use of mid-twentieth century European ringtones as percussion. Beyonce's intro lyrics as delivered through a megaphone also draw me right into the song before the girl group harmonies kick in. The beat to this song is a military drumline that demands movement from the listener. I'm sure somewhere there are people who hear this song and don't want to dance. If you're one of those people, don't tell me. I don't want to know. I'm not much of a dancer but this song offers its hand to every Poindexter leaning against the walls of a high school dance and refusing to bust a move. This song is also a great warning track to the unfaithful fuckbois and sleazy Jolenes who Beyonce will target for her entire career. She's not going to let you get away with it. She tells you several different ways. 2. 2. In the mid-00s, I spent a ton of time in a particular Internet cafe in Allston, Massachusetts. I can't imagine it's still there. They sold boba tea and Asian-influenced ice cream. I would also swear on the lives of everyone I loved that for five years they played the same hour-long playlist on repeat, and Soldier was one of the songs. You'd think I would have the lyrics completely memorized but, apart from the chorus, the lyrics never penetrated my subcouscious. But the beat? And that chorus. It invaded almost every silence I experienced until 2010. WHERE THEY AT? WHERE THEY AT? "Where is who at?" I would ask my own brain. "I wasn't paying attention to the rest of the lyrics!" This was the first Destiny's Child song where I really noticed the other Destiny's Child vocalists besides Beyonce. 3. There's a project I've imagined for about twenty years but I haven't tried to actually write since one of my computers broke around 2007. It's the biography of a musician whose roughly my age. He lives in a similar world to ours but he wrote a ton of incredibly famous songs that, in our universe, came from dozens of different writers from various racial, gender, and class backgrounds. In addition to the albums, there are moments in his career that I can see during particular songs. One of them is an MTV awards show in 1998, where at age twenty, the recently outed-as-queer musician appears in a spotlight and performs Beyonce's If I Were A Boy (which, in this universe he wrote a decade before it was written in the real world). He starts off in sweats and a baseball cap staring straight ahead and slowly removing clothing until, at the end of the song, he's in full glorious drag. During the If you thought I'd back down from you/you thought wrong until the end, he makes dagger-eyes at P Diddy, who had, weeks before the event, released a diss track talking about he wouldn't listen to the singer until he started "singing like a man." Obviously, the song is much different in a queer, white, cis-male mouth than it is in Beyonce's. But that's how I hear it every time. 4. After the synth opening, Survivor feels like a thousand other inspirational songs. It's not especially tight writing. It doesn't have a memorable beat. It happens to be ust the right level of catchy to build a bomb shelter in the ears of everyone who hears it. It really should be from a musical movie. But, like Clue, there should be several different versions of the movie released in different theaters so that some people hear Destiny's Child's "Survivor", some people hear Christina Aguilera's "Fighter", some people hear Katy Perry's "Firework", some hear Gloria Gaynor's "I Will Survive", some hear Tom Petty's "I Won't Back Down", some hear Chumbawumba's "Tubthumping". They all have roughly the same experiencce. Yea, it doesn't tread any new territory but it is to inspirational music what The Police's "Every Breath You Take", George Michael's "Father Figure", James Blunt's"You're Beautiful", and Adele's "Hello" are to creepy stalker songs. 5. The "Edge Of Seventeen" riff in Bootylicious is an oppressive prison housing an otherwise great song. I love the song in spite of it but Dear God that riff overstays its welcome. I don't think I can handle it. It doesn't help that when I first heard the song via MTV, I thought I was being told that I wasn't ready for Beyonce's spaghetti. Once I realized they were saying jelly I understood how the lyric related to the title of the song. 6 & 7. I definitely heard Wyclef announcing This is the remix on No No No Part 2 before I ever heard No No No Part 1. Neither have ever been my favorite Destiny's Child songs. Not even close. I do prefer part 1, a breezy 90s ballad that is the Beyonce track most bereft of her personality. This could totally be SWV or latter-day TLC. The b-side to "Red Light Special", probably. It's perfectly acceptable background music but I can't imagine intensely singing this in my car when I'm sad or getting some cleaning done and lip syncing with a feather duster for a 90s rom-com scene. It's the most-fillery song I think I've put on a reimagined album. It fits perfectly on this album but I would never skip another track to get to either version of this one. At least the remix is peppier? It's still as spicy as vanilla ice cream dusted with flour. 8. If you're going to hit me with a song whose title is the same three syllable word repeated three times, the obvious choice is Bills, Bills, Bills. This is a primer for early angry Beyonce. She ended up with a scrub like you who has left her holding the financial debt in the relationship. I hope for her sake that this guy is either fictional, or else the same guy from "Irreplaceable" because I have an amazing amount of ampathy for anyone who gets stuck with multiple versions of this song's antagonist. As much as the lyrics are the big pull for me, the weird latin-esque/popping bubble percussion is a fascinating capsule of turn-of-the-millenium r&b pop. Rarely do I like a pop song that's almost completely trapped in a particular year or so, but this barely pre-Y2K bop lives forever rent free in my head whenever it's time for me to pay my utilities. 9. I know you've been waiting for Jay-Z to show up. How have there been eight Beyonce-forward songs with no Hova? I don't have a solid answer but he's here and hype for Crazy In Love. Honestly, the Jay-Z hype and Beyonce's Uh-oh/uh-oh are my favorite part of this somewhat generic r&b groove with easily the most g-rated, radio friendly Jay-Z verse of all time. As a love song, it's so bland that you'd have to imagine it was either written by teenagers or written about someone the lyricist didn't have any actual feelings for but was compelled to write about. 10. I am completely unsure why I decided to put Signs on this album when I made it. If I made this in the 2010s, it's entirely possible this was my sarcastic response to a trend in poetry where every poet who had something interesting they should have been writing about were instead telling everyone their Zodiac sign and explaining how it represented their personality. This is a perfectly good song to listen to. It's arguably better, if not as famous as Crazy In Love" or either of the "No, No,No" parts. It doesn't feel quite like a Beyonce/Destiny's Child song to me, so I did just enough research to discover Missy Elliot wrote this. (She also appears briefly on the track.) It doesn't fully feel like a Missy song. It's unique moment in both their discographies, and I appreciate that. The backwards masking is a nice touch. 11. Starting in late 2009, I spent a few years listening to somewhere between hundreds to thousands of mashups. I was disenchanted with pop. Not because of lyrics or artist perceptions or the inevitable Getting Older. During the rise of autotune, I started hating the sound of the production of most pop. I was working in restaurants and coffeehouses and all the pop stations started to blend together despite the variety of artists making music. Eventually, of course, pop would evolve into another era of sound that I enjoyed. But during the period that didn't connect with me, I started listening to artists like DJ Earworm, who was mainly highlighting the similarities by making megamixes of similar sounding songs into new pop masterpieces, and Party Ben and members of the Mashstix community who were using a variety of styles to mix vocals from modern songs with music from classic pop, rock, and rap songs, or mixing modern music with classic vocals. This turned me into a ton of pop artists at the time that I might not have otherwise bothered to explore: Lady Gaga, Sia, Adele being just a very few. "Telephone" was one of the songs I probably would have missed out on. Not because of Beyonce, who I already liked but because Lady Gaga was on my radar but not in a positive way. It didn't make my Beyonce discography because it pops up on a Lady Gaga Reimagined album. But...but...hearing this track made me seek out I Am Sasha Fierce, which I obviously knew songs from but hadn't examined as an album. It's a banger and not just because of the superhits: "If I Were A Boy" and "Single Ladies". Amongst the other great songs on the album is Radio. This is a timeless pop anthem. I much prefer it to "Halo", which made single status when this song didn't. I understand why. This is just catchy fluff you can blast out of your car for fun while "Halo" is a song that has widows rushing to Youtube to post about how the song reminds them of their husbands who died of cancer and are now angels. It's an important emotional song for people. Sometimes, that emotional hook will get me. In this particular instance, I much prefer listening to Beyonce sing about having a good time listening to music. 12. Beyonce put out 43 solo singles before Lemonade, which is the next album in my discography. I feel like you can make cases for about twenty of them being essential Beyonce songs, even though I only picked about ten of them. The one you absolutely Must Include if you're talking about the decade plus where Beyonce was merely a pop force and not A Revered Artist: All The Single Ladies. This song was absolutely everywhere. And with great reasons. This song has a great, if not particularly memorable beat. It has the glitchy 8-bit pop noise in the background. It has Beyonce going from smooth verse to diva pop chorus. It's masterfully put together. It had a simple but artistically resonant video. It's a perfect pop song. 13. Flipping back to the Destiny's Child era. Say My Name is a total 90s En Vogue bop. In an era where there was a major uptick in songs about how You'd Better Start Respecting Your Girlfriend, this was a clear winner. If you're so trash that you can't even remember your partner's name, yea, you'd Best get to the proverbial stepping. There's a version of this song where a music producer thought that the narrative was Too Feminist, so it includes a verse by basketball legend and nobody's favorite rapper, Kobe Bryant, clapping back with a verse about how maybe if Beyonce wasn't always hanging out with her friends, she'd know that he was a standup guy who only called her pet names so he didn't accidentally call her his ex-wife, who he goes lingerie shopping with,'s name. (This song was released about a year and half after Kobe faced sexual assault allegations.) I don't recommend seeking that version out. As a musician and a boyfriend, he was a very talented basketball player. 14. Confessions has a weird bang/drip intro where it's almost hard but...isn't. Another song with Missy Elliot, this song is a weird precursor to Usher's Confessions album. It's not just the title of the song that's the same, it's a very similar structure and they're both about how the vocalist cheated on their partner. Usher doesn't explain why he hooked up with another woman and got her pregnant. Beyonce starts the song by saying The day you pissed me off, I told Mike to pick me up I told him you was buggin', and I don't like to fuss He said he would look out for me if I needed a friend He took me to his house and then he invited me in (Say what?) Then we sat on the couch, he put his arms around my waist Knowin' I need lovin', then he gently grabbed my face He kissed me like a guy could never kiss a girl before So you know what happened, baby, I need to say no more She could have stopped there. She really didn't need to say no more. But she does say that there was at leaset one other time she cheated on him, and, oh yea, she stole a bunch of his money, too. This is the only song I can think of where Beyonce is the perpetrator of unacceptable behavior and not the victim of it. It's a fascinating blip in her discography. 15. In 2005, I lived with an absolute garbage fire. This person put a false name on our lease, staged a break-in where our front door was removed but the thief bypassed our computers, televisions, furniture, her jewelry, our stereo systems and portable music players and only stole the cash I had given her for that month's rent. When I called her to let her know that the house had been broken into, she immediately asked about the shopping bag she had supposedly thrown the money into. You know, rather than putting it in her wallet or purse. Garbage fire.
One weekend, Garbage Fire packed a bunch of her belongings and supposedly went to Disney World for the week. Unfortunately, she claimed when I texted her about the problem, she got distracted as she was leaving and accidentally left her CD player on, where it looped a horrendous remix of Irreplaceable. I have been unable to find this remix since. Essentially, it takes the very narrative, very well constructed lyrics, strips them from the song and just adds a reggaeton beat behind Beyonce singing to the lef to the left over and over and over and over and over and over until the listener must decide between fleeing the building where it's playing or else commiting self-harm. She had, of course, locked her bedroom door, and there was nothing that could be done about it. Well, except unscrewing the door, going into the room, and turning off the CD player, which is what I did. And when she complained about how me removing her door to turn off the music was an invasion of privacy, I reminded her that I replaced the door as soon as it was off, and that I'd barely noticed the dozens of disturbingly sized, unwashed vibrators strewn around the floor. My personal vendetta against the song ended the first time I heard the actual radio version, which has since become one of my favorite pop songs from that era. Sometimes, though, there is a glitch in the matrix, and I just start jerking my head to the side and saying to the left to the left, to the left to the left, to the left to the left, to the left to the left....
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