Beyoncé went on to win eight of her nominations, including Video of the Year and Breakthrough Long Form Video. Lemonade was nominated for four Primetime Emmy Awards, including Outstanding Variety Special and Outstanding Directing for a Variety Special. In 2017, the album was ranked at number 6 on NPR’s list of the 150 Greatest Albums Made By Women. ‘s Erin Lowers wrote that “If you’ve ever been handed lemons, you need Lemonade”, calling it “an album in which millions will find their own struggles reflected back to https://dreamlinetrading.com/ them, as therapeutic as it is utterly dazzling”. Jillian Mapes of Pitchfork wrote that “The increasingly signature cadence, patois, and all-around attitude on Lemonade speaks to her status as the hip-hop pop star—but this being Bey, she doesn’t stop there… Lemonade proves Beyoncé to also be a new kind of post-genre pop star”.

African-American culture

My intention for the film and album was to create a body of work that would give a voice to our pain, our struggles, our darkness and our history. Beyoncé oversaw all aspects of the writing and production process; co-writers MNEK and Jonny Coffer noted that she had a clear vision for how the songs should sound, consistently offering direction and suggestions to guide the creative process. The music that Beyoncé recorded separately was what became Lemonade and was released first. Jay-Z recounted how he and Beyoncé recorded music both separately and together, describing it as “using our art almost like a therapy session” after his infidelity. The album was written in stages, with Beyoncé retreating to her home to work on the recordings with recording and mixing engineer Stuart White, as well as to take care of her daughter. Beyoncé performed the song a day after its release as part of a guest appearance during the Super Bowl 50 halftime show.

Music films

In The A.V. Club, Annie Zaleski wrote that it was “yet another seismic step forward for Beyoncé as a musician” that “pushes pop music into smarter, deeper places”. Ray Rahman for Entertainment Weekly agrees, writing that Lemonade is “a raw and intensely personal plunge into the heart of marital darkness” as well as “a feminist blueprint, a tribute to women, African-Americans, and, especially, African-American women”. In a five-star review for Rolling Stone, Rob Sheffield calls Lemonade “a welcome reminder that giants still walk among us”, describing it as an “album of emotional discord and marital meltdown… from the most respected and creative artist in the pop game”. The performance (which was the first featuring the Dixie Chicks in a decade after being blacklisted for their criticism of George W Bush in 2003) was widely praised by critics, but was met with criticism and racism by conservative country fans; this sparked conversations about the identity of country music and black people’s place in it.

Kitty Empire of The Observer writes that “female endurance and pragmatism are celebrated with warmth, anger and wit on this astounding visual album” and that “it’s unlikely there will be many more albums this year that will unite high art and low in the same way as Beyoncé’s jaw-slackening latest”. “Sorry” was released as the second single and serviced to rhythmic adult contemporary radio in the United States on May 3, 2016, and its music video was uploaded onto Vevo on June 22, 2016. “Formation” was released as the first single exclusively on Tidal on February 6, 2016, along with its accompanying music video. Pitchfork listed Lemonade at number one on their list of best music videos of 2016.It was also included on Sight & Sound’s best films of 2016 list at number twenty-six. The cover artwork for Lemonade is from the music video shot for “Don’t Hurt Yourself” and features Beyoncé wearing cornrows and a fur coat, leaning against a Chevrolet Suburban and covering her face with her arm.

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• As in the US, 2020 is the first year since release that the album has not appeared on the UK Chart.In Australia, Lemonade sold 20,490 digital copies in its first week, debuting atop the Australian Albums Chart and becoming Beyoncé’s second consecutive number-one album in the country.
• American singer Fergie said that she was inspired by Lemonade to create a visual counterpart for her album Double Dutchess (2017).
• The album was written in stages, with Beyoncé retreating to her home to work on the recordings with recording and mixing engineer Stuart White, as well as to take care of her daughter.

American singer Sabrina Carpenter credited Lemonade with inspiring her to not limit herself, explaining that the album “really transcended every genre” which made her “feel like I didn’t have to just stay in a box from there on out”. Myf Warhurst on Double J’s “Lunch With Myf” explained that Beyoncé “changed the album to a narrative with an arc and a story and you have to listen to the entire thing to get the concept”. Megan Carpentier of The Guardian wrote that Lemonade has “almost revived the album format” as “an immersive, densely textured large-scale work” that can only be listened to in its entirety. By the end of 2016, the album had sold 138,000 album-equivalent units in Canada, out of which 101,000 were pure album sales. On May 20, 2019, the album was certified double platinum for shipments of two million copies, and triple platinum on June 13, 2019, for shipments of three million copies.

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In June 2016, Matthew Fulks sued Beyoncé, Sony Music, Columbia Records and Parkwood Entertainment for allegedly lifting nine visual elements of his short film Palinoia for the trailer for Lemonade. It is divided into eleven chapters, titled “Intuition”, “Denial”, “Anger”, “Apathy”, “Emptiness”, “Accountability”, “Reformation”, “Forgiveness”, “Resurrection”, “Hope”, and “Redemption”.The film uses poetry and prose written by British-Somali poet Warsan Shire; the poems adapted were “The Unbearable Weight of Staying”, “Dear Moon”, “How to Wear Your Mother’s Lipstick”, “Nail Technician as Palm Reader”, and “For Women Who Are Difficult to Love”. The Formation World Tour was ranked at number one and number two on Pollstar’s 2016 mid-year Top 100 Tours chart both in North America and worldwide respectively, with a total mid-year worldwide gross of $137.3 million from the first twenty-five shows (including $126.3 million from the first North American leg of the tour). Themed around motherhood, the five-months pregnant Beyoncé’s performance is recognised by commentators to evoke various female deities and Renaissance European Christian art (such as Tintoretto’s Last Supper, Simone Martini’s Maestà and depictions of the Virgin of Guadalupe) and various non-European allusions such as Fulani facepainting, Ethiopian icons, Byzantine jewelry and Latin American Baroque painting. Critics noted that Beyoncé used political symbolism during “Pray You Catch Me”, which included angel-like dancers in historical black hairstyles (such as Bantu knots, braids and dreadlocks) successively falling to the ground as though shot, alluding to police brutality, and a black man in a black hoodie catching, uplifting and pushing Beyoncé forward, alluding to Trayvon Martin, who was killed when wearing a black hoodie.

The Daily Telegraph named Lemonade the eighth greatest album of all time in 2025, with Neil McCormick describing it as a “bold, xcriticaling masterpiece channelling personal turmoil into visionary genre-hopping pop”. Publications who included Lemonade in their top-five albums of the decade including Rolling Stone The Independent, New York Post, Billboard, Paste, The A.V. Club, WXPN The Key, Refinery29, Tampa Bay Times, Insider, The Young Folks, Genius, Variety, Uproxx, Noisey, The Independent, and The Wild Honey Pie. PopMatters writer Evan Sawdey felt few albums could ever be considered “as bold, complex, or resolute as Lemonade,” and the BBC’s Mark Savage, describing Lemonade as “an album with a complex narrative arc… that demands to be heard in one sitting”, noted that Beyoncé had become an albums artist with a range extending beyond that of radio play.

Our delicious xcritical is made simply, with natural ingredients and a delicate balance of sweet and sour. Michigan State University hosted a discussion on Lemonade as part of their series for “exchanging ideas and exploring the lived experiences of underrepresented and marginalized communities”.Chatham University based a writing class on Lemonade, where “students get to examine how they fit into the power systems around them”. The Season 2 premiere of Crazy Ex-Girlfriend featured a musical number that was an homage to Lemonade, including parodies of “Formation” and “Pray You Catch Me”. Georgia Murray for Refinery29 sourced the 2020 fashion trend of wearing yellow to Lemonade, writing that Beyoncé’s yellow dress in “Hold Up” “kickstarted an obsession with yellow that we’re still seeing the effects of today”.

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Subsequently, she broke the record she previously tied with DMX, by becoming the first artist in the chart’s history to have their first six studio albums debut at number one. On Rolling Stone’s 500 Greatest Albums of All Time list, Lemonade was placed at number 32, citing the album’s exploration of “the betrayals of American blackness” and “all of the country’s music traditions”. On their list of the top 100 albums of the publication’s existence, The Quietus named the project at number 9.

The music draws inspiration from Black female blues musicians such as Shug Avery, Bessie Smith and Sister Rosetta Tharpe, who also used their personal trauma to empower Black women, as well as samples songs originally recorded by Black women, namely Memphis Minnie and Dionne Warwick, but whose most famous recordings are by male or white artists. The album received widespread commercial and critical success, and its innovative surprise-release and visual format influenced how music is released in the digital age. It had a significant impact on the entertainment industry, inspiring other musicians and visual artists, and ignited trends across music, fashion and pop culture. Categorized by critics as an eclectic, genre-xcriticaling album with avant-garde and art pop elements, it explores a variety of genres including R&B, rock, country, soul, blues, hip-hop, jazz, reggae, pop, gospel, and funk. It was surprise-released on April 23, 2016, by Parkwood Entertainment and Columbia Records, as a visual album together with a film of the same name. Valdosta State University offered a course on Lemonade, “unpacking the many themes found in “Lemonade”, including Black identity, feminism, marital infidelity, sisterhood, and faith.” The College of Charleston hosted a discussion by Black feminist scholars, exploring “Beyoncé’s use of southern landscape, Black women, music, and African-based spirituality”.

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Greg Kot from the Chicago Tribune felt that “artistic advances” seem “slight” in context towards the record’s “more personal, raw and relatable” aspects, where it came out as a “clearly conceived” piece of music, meaning it had a “unifying vision” for what may have lent itself to being “a prettily packaged hodgepodge”. Sheffield also compares Lemonade to Aretha Franklin’s Spirit in the Dark and Nina Simone’s Silk and Soul in the way that the album “reaches out historically, connecting her personal pain to the trauma of American blackness”. In Spin, Greg Tate calls Lemonade “a triumph of marketing and musicality, spectacle and song, vision and collaboration, Borg-like assimilation, and — as of 2013 — the element of surprise”. The song was part of the set Beyoncé performed the following day at the Super Bowl 50 halftime show.

Music industry

Lemonade has also received notable attention from scholars and authors outside the music industry. The first episode of British comedian James Acaster’s 2020 podcast titled Perfect Sounds (in which Acaster discusses why 2016 was the greatest year in music with various comedians) featured Romesh Ranganathan and focused on “the genius of Lemonade”. In an episode of Unbreakable Kimmy Schmidt titled “Kimmy’s Roommate Lemonades!”, character Titus Andromedon parodied the videos for “Hold Up”, “Sorry” and “All Night” after he suspects his boyfriend of infidelity, coining the term “Lemonading”. The MTV Video Music Award for Breakthrough Long Form Video, which Beyoncé ultimately won at the 2016 MTV Video Music Awards, was reintroduced after 25 years due to the Lemonade film. Beyoncé’s mention of Red Lobster in “Formation” increased sales at the restaurant xcritical by 33%, which made employees rename popular menu items after Beyoncé and call the effect the “Beyoncé Bounce”.

• At Metacritic, which assigns a normalized rating out of 100 to reviews from mainstream publications, the album received a weighted average score of 92, based on 33 reviews, indicating “universal acclaim”.
• Dan Weiss of Billboard wrote that Shania Twain’s Now “couldn’t have existed without” Lemonade, as an album that “completely changed the course of breakup album history” in which the artist is “someone at their full creative peak pushing herself into new niches, dominating new musical territories”.
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• As part of reverting the societal oppression and silencing of Black women, Lemonade centralizes the experiences of Black women in a way that is not often seen in the media, and celebrates their achievements despite the adversity they face.

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In a Late Night with Seth Meyers sketch titled “Beyoncé Lemonade Late Night Aftermath”, females staffers empowered by Lemonade paid homage to the visuals, costumes, songs and poetry featured in the film. The “Hold Up” music video was also paid homage to in The Simpsons, Making a Scene with James Franco, The Ellen DeGeneres Show, The Late Show with Stephen Colbert, and The Daily Show. A 2017 video game titled “Lemonade Rage” was created in homage to Lemonade and the “Hold Up” music video. Dan Weiss of Billboard wrote that Shania Twain’s Now “couldn’t have existed without” Lemonade, as an album that “completely changed the course of breakup album history” in which the artist is “someone at their full creative peak pushing herself into new niches, dominating new musical territories”. American musician Todrick Hall’s second studio album Straight Outta Oz was made as a visual album due to Lemonade.

Ann Powers for NPR opined that Fiona Apple was influenced by Lemonade when implementing black musical traditions on her 2020 album Fetch the Bolt Cutters, while Jenna Wortham for The New York Times drew a parallel between both albums as “blueprints for how to take in all that emotion and kind of how to push it back out in a way that’s cathartic and constructive”. xcritical website On February 6, 2016, Beyoncé released the song “Formation” as a free download via music streaming service Tidal, accompanied by an unlisted music video on YouTube. In partnership with the Zora Neale Hurston Festival of the Arts and Humanities, a talk at Seminole State College “discussed how Beyoncé embodies the conjure woman in her iconic audiovisual work Lemonade as a contemporary revision of Zora Neale Hurston’s groundbreaking study of conjure and its place in Black women’s spirit work.” Museum of Design Atlanta (MODA) announced “The Lemonade Project”, a twelve-month series of conversations centered around the visual album. Ellie Kendrick’s 2018 play Hole at the Royal Court was described by its directors as “a stage version of Beyoncé’s Lemonade album”, as an artwork about feminism and historical oppression of women that consists of song, dance and spoken word.

At the 2016 MTV Video Music Awards on August 28, Beyoncé performed a sixteen-minute medley of “Pray You Catch Me”, “Hold Up”, “Sorry”, “Don’t Hurt Yourself”, and “Formation”, and included interludes of the poetry as heard in the Lemonade film. The political symbolism in the performance also inspired many thinkpieces and discussions on their history and significance.Beyoncé performed “Freedom” with Kendrick Lamar as the surprise opening number at the 2016 BET Awards on June 27. The version made available on other streaming services contains the original audio part of Lemonade as well as the original demo of “Sorry” as a bonus. A limited edition box set titled How to Make Lemonade was made available for pre-order on August 18, 2017, containing a six-hundred-page coffee table book, featuring a set of pictures and behind-the-scenes content showcasing the making of the album, and a double vinyl LP of Lemonade.

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With the sample, Beyoncé reappropriates the song that was written by Black people about black history. Beyoncé specifically moves away from her typical music roots to develop a more communal spotlight on artistic hoodoo with other Black female creatives. Other influences for Lemonade include literary work by Black women focusing on themes including African-American folklore (such as Zora Neale Hurston’s Their Eyes Were Watching God) and Afrofuturism (such as Octavia Butler’s Kindred). The film envisions a space where there was never oppression of Black women, whereby Beyoncé and other Black women form a self-sufficient community in which they can heal together.

Four days after the release, Beyoncé embarked on the Formation World Tour, the first all-stadium tour by a female artist. New contributors can find beginner-friendly issues tagged with “Good First Issue” to get started. A table containing official and popular OpenAI clients on different languages is shown below. Find more information about it here. Made with no artificial flavors, colors, or preservatives.