Since the year 2000, more and more Black women have been nominees for album of the year: India.Arie, Missy Elliott, Alicia Keys, Mariah Carey, Rihanna, Janelle Monáe, Cardi B, H.E.R., Lizzo, Doja Cat, SZA and Mary J. Blige. But it’s Beyoncé’s appearances in this category — beginning with “I Am … Sasha Fierce” (2010) — that have garnered the most headlines. The tension between the evolving, colossal ambition and innovation of her nominated releases, their critical acclaim and their global popularity, set against the Grammy voters’ repeated unwillingness to reward these efforts, has amounted to the greatest ongoing Grammy drama: “Will she or won’t she win this year?”
Beyoncé’s self-titled album was a cultural sensation, replete with unexpected forays into alternative R&B. Its out-of-nowhere arrival inaugurated the era of the “surprise” album drop. It was released with videos for each song, introducing the modern visual album. And it included the sampled speech of a feminist intellectual, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, expounding on gender equality. At the 2013 Grammys, it lost to “Morning Phase,” a moody album from the alt-rock shape-shifter Beck.
The defeat did nothing to lessen her experimental boundary pushing. The 2016 magnum opus “Lemonade,” Beyoncé’s second visual album, turned a personal tale of domestic strife and wounded intimacies into a reckoning with slavery’s legacies, the fracturing of families and communities, the lingering effects of Black grief and mourning and the specifically acute ordeals facing Black women in American culture. It encompassed spoken-word poetry, archival voices, provocative samples and a visual vocabulary that yoked together allusions to iconic Black feminist art — the cinema of Dash, the photography of Weems — as well as scenes shot on former plantation sites and visions of post-Katrina New Orleans.
“Lemonade” took the idea of the concept album and stretched it to its multi-formalistic limits, absorbing the tradition of Black women’s epics and becoming a sonic “vehicle,” as Griffin said in an interview, for “Black women’s epics” from multiple genres, “not just music but literary and visual ones as well.” The album was such a phenomenon that it spawned scholarly articles as well as a critical anthology, and it remains a staple on Black cultural studies syllabuses. Grammy voters were less bowled over, awarding album of the year to a visibly shocked Adele.
