[Medusa]

I know some people groan when they hear Beyonce's name but hear me out on this one...

I've been listening to Beyonce's album "Lemonade" pretty much on repeat for over a year now and I gotta say, it's fucking iconic. The woman is a goddamned genius.

If you are not familiar with the concept, she basically made this album after finding out that JayZ cheated on her and the album takes you through her grief process. It is, by far, one of the most magical, epic, soul-pounding albums I've heard in years (and I have music going pretty much 24/7).

There are videos to go along with songs but even more powerful than that, are the intertwined spoken word parts where Beyonce's own voice is a whisper above the song or just as a stand-alone.

The very first song on the album is "Pray You Catch Me" and it is where she is suspecting that something is going on and at the very end of the song she whispers "What are you doing, my love?" and you can just hear in her voice that she already knows.

Later in the album, as she goes through her own stages of grief with denial, anger, apathy, emptiness, accountability, loss, reformation, forgiveness, resurrection, and hope...each song has it's own powerful expression of what that stage meant to her...and by default, just about everyone who has ever been through something so shitty with their lover, either by cheating or drug abuse or alcoholism or depression.

One of the most beautiful passages on the album:

"I tried to change. Closed my mouth more, tried to be softer, prettier, less awake. Fasted for 60 days, wore white, abstained from mirrors, abstained from sex, slowly did not speak another word. In that time, my hair, I grew past my ankles. I slept on a mat on the floor. I swallowed a sword. I levitated. Went to the basement, confessed my sins, and was baptized in a river. I got on my knees and said 'amen' and said 'I mean.'

I whipped my own back and asked for dominion at your feet. I threw myself into a volcano. I drank the blood and drank the wine. I sat alone and begged and bent at the waist for God. I crossed myself and thought I saw the devil. I grew thickened skin on my feet, I bathed in bleach, and plugged my menses with pages from the holy book, but still inside me, coiled deep, was the need to know ... Are you cheating on me?

Cheating? Are you cheating on me?"


And every woman in the world is nodding her head right now.