http://leisureblogs.chica...-beyo.html

Originally posted: November 13, 2008
2 sides of Beyonce on 'Sasha Fierce,' but only one of them works



Beyonce Knowles is one of the most commercially potent entertainers in the world, but you wouldn’t necessarily know it listening to her albums.

She may be one of the biggest-selling artists of the last decade with Destiny’s Child and as a solo star. She may be 24-7 tabloid fodder thanks to her marriage to hip-hop mogul Jay-Z. But the Houston native doesn’t go on any power trips when she makes music.

Instead, she presents life not as a celebrity circus, but as a private hell of romantic travail. On her third solo album, the double-disc “I Am … Sasha Fierce” (Sony), out Tuesday, she splits her artistic persona in half to address her favorite subject: Men, and the mess they make of women’s lives.

The first disc focuses on ballads that hint at introspection. The second adopts an alter ego --- “Sasha Fierce” – to dish out dancefloor dirt. The production sticks to form, clearing out things for Beyonce’s thin, pretty voice to deliver thin, pretty hooks galore. But the gimmicky concept falls flat.

In the album’s first half, Beyonce adopts a familiar (if dispiriting) guise: Doormat. “If I Were a Boy” offers a promising premise, the kind of illuminating gender-bender Prince might’ve written, but instead portrays the narrator as a needy victim. It’s more of the same role that Beyonce also played on her previous album, the 2006 release “B-Day.” Her softer songs inevitably portray men as unfaithful curs, but she still can’t live without them.

Emotional fragility suits her airy voice. Songs such as “Disappear” and “Ave Marie” (which, besides referencing the hymn, offers a rare moment of comfort) come off as delicate as her emotions.

She flips the always-second-best script on the second disc. She’s on a post-breakup bender, but still feels the need to explain herself: “Cried my tears for three good years/Ya can’t be mad at me.”

The disc contains more attitude than we’re used to hearing from Beyonce, who usually errs on the side of heart-break and generic declarations of female solidarity. She’d rather make love to the sounds pouring from her “Radio” or perform for a “Video Phone” than commit to another long-term relationship. Her prescription for getting over what’s-his-name is to behave just as irresponsibly: “A diva is a female version of a hustler.”

The latter song’s menacing rhythm and chanted vocals mark the album’s biggest departure. But Beyonce doesn’t make a very convincing vixen. “Sasha Fierce” sounds more like a pose than a credible alter-ego.

greg@gregkot.com

http://www.guardian.co.uk...sha-fierce

Pop review: Beyoncé, I Am ... Sasha Fierce
(RCA)
3 out of 5

* Alexis Petridis
*
o Alexis Petridis
o guardian.co.uk, Friday November 14 2008 00.01 GMT
o The Guardian, Friday November 14 2008
o Article history

Beyonce I Am Sasha Fierce

Double trouble ... Beyoncé Knowles aka Sasha Fierce. Photograph: PR

Beyoncé Knowles' third solo album has a pretty enticing pitch. Short enough to fit on one CD, it's nevertheless split over two. The second, ... Sasha Fierce, contains the usual pop-R&B, but the first is being sold as offering a rare insight into Knowles' real psyche: "I Am ... is about who I am underneath all the makeup, underneath the lights, underneath all the exciting star drama." It sounds intriguing. In interviews, Knowles is guarded to the point of banality. Were she any nicer, she'd have to dole out Gaviscon during interviews to stop journalists bringing up their lunch. Just occasionally, however, her music has given a glimpse of something rather more torrid, tough and interesting lurking behind the public image - not least Survivor, a good-riddance message to departed Destiny's Child members LaTavia Roberson and LeToya Luckett so livid that it occasioned a lawsuit from the duo.


Alas, there is nothing remotely like it on I Am ... Its currency is strictly self-help slowies that could have sprung from the dread pen of Linda Perry, purveyor of platitudinal power ballads to Pink. Everything here resembles something you might hear in the background when rejected X Factor contestants sob on Dermot O'Leary's shoulder, which seems appropriate, because as the realisation dawns that it's all going to sound like that, you feel ready to have a little cry yourself.

It's not just that the music on I Am ... is boring - although, aside from the growling guitars and tumbling drums of That's Why You're Beautiful, it is. It's that there is something underwhelming about the whole project. Last time around, on the sanitaryware-themed concept album B'Day, Knowles set Rodney Jerkins, Rich Harrison and Kasseem "Swizz Beatz" Dean to work in adjacent studios, effectively pitting three of the world's biggest urban producers against each other. Here, she seems to have picked collaborators on the basis of their startling names rather than their CVs. (In fairness, who wouldn't want to work with people called E Kidd Bogart, Hugo Chakrabongse and James Fauntleroy II?) The I Am ... team's past form includes songs for Leona Lewis, Natasha Bedingfield, James Blunt and Shayne Ward. One of them co-wrote Ian Brown's Dolphins Were Monkeys; another was the guitarist in EMF. It's hard not to wonder who she's going to team up with next. The bassist from the Seahorses? Dermo out of Northside?

You have to be impressed by the ruthlessness with which If I Were a Boy homes in on its target market: it does everything to get the recently chucked member of the girls'-night-out party standing on the pub table and singing tearfully along, short of spiking her Bacardi Breezer. Elsewhere, though, they've come up with stuff such as Halo, a pallid rewrite of Rihanna's Umbrella - same icy synths, same drivetime rock dynamic, same repetitive chorus - which certainly raises some questions: is this any way for the queen of R&B to be carrying on? Making do with a lesser artist's sloppy seconds? And is this really what lurks behind Beyoncé's flawless carapace - a burning desire to add to the global oversupply of MOR rock? A load of guff about how you can't live if you don't change and love can pass you by if you're busy making plans? Surely not.

Either way, when the carapace is reinstated on disc two, things get better. The handclap-assisted playground chant of opener Put a Ring On It is lent an improbable sense of threat by the doomy minor chords amassing behind it. It's really exciting, as is Hello, a ballad denied a place on I Am ... presumably on grounds of being insufficiently dreary. The 80s synthpop mode of Radio may be less suited to Knowles than the old soul samples that powered Crazy in Love and B'Day's Suga Mama, and underlined the link between her vocal style and the visceral female singers of the 60s, but there's no denying it's an irresistible pop song.

Not everything on ... Sasha Fierce works. The sonic trickery on the most experimental track, Diva, isn't interesting enough to distract you from the absence of a tune. Almost equally weird, but much better, is Video Phone, which introduces us to the unlikely figure of Beyoncé Knowles, amateur pornographer: "You want me naked? If you like this position you can tape it." She doesn't make for the world's most believable Reader's Wife, but it doesn't matter, because the spare, eerie backdrop of groans and echoing electronics is so thrilling. There's a lesson in there you wish she had heeded while making the ostensibly soul-baring I Am ...: in pop, honesty isn't always the best policy.

11/13/08 - I admit it. Despite the undeniable super-star, A-list status, despite the number one hits, the ubiquitous presence in our pop culture, the marriage to the most important figure in hip-hop music, and despite the killer looks and above-average voice, I have serious trouble taking Beyonce Knowles seriously.

Case in point: I Am…Sasha Fierce, the double album released Tuesday. The album, Beyonce's third solo release, is spread between two discs for no reason, as all 11 of the songs put together come out to about 42 minutes worth of music.

While it almost made sense when Rachael Yamagata did it, all Beyonce's done here is to take a regular hip-hop / R&B album and separate the fast tracks from the slow ones.

Ms. Knowles could argue until she's blue in the face about her artistic reasons for doing so, but the fact is that neither disc contains much in the way of artistic statements.

The first disc, I Am, consists entirely of down-tempo love (or out-of-love) ballads, while the second disc Sasha Fierce is all about clubby dance tracks.

I Am starts off with the single "If I Were a Boy," where Beyonce considers just that premise.

Other highlights from the first disc include "Ave Maria," a clever urban-pop takeoff on the classic Catholic hymn, where Beyonce delivers a great vocal free-from complete with over-singing and superfluous runs. The lyrics are ho-hum, ("you are my heaven, my earth / you are my hunger, my thirst") but this sort of understated emotion is a pleasant surprise from her.

Another standout from the first disc is the closer "Satellites," an ethereal song featuring soft acoustic guitars and strings. Here again, Beyonce chooses to keep it subtle, and the results are gorgeous.

The second disc, Sasha Fierce, is anything but subtle. The album is named for a sort of alter ego that Beyonce has assumed, but the name doesn't come up at all in the album, so it's pretty irrelevant.

The first track is the hit "Single Ladies (Put a Ring On It)" in which a swagger-filled Beyonce tells her man "if you liked it then you should have put a ring on it." It's not a bad song by any means, but it's funny to consider the fact that Beyonce dated Jay-Z for six years before they ever tied the knot.
Continued...

Another amusing track on the second part is "Diva" where Beyonce informs us that, "a diva is a female version of a hustler" and declares "since 15 in my stilettos, I struttin' in this game / 'what's your age?' was the question they ask when I hit the stage."

The sound is cocky, self-assured, and infectious - to the point that even the overly repetitive hook isn't much of an annoyance.

Nothing can top the closer, "Video Phone" in ridiculousness however. It expresses flirtation in the form of a fetish for recording, culminating in the unforgettable lines "shorty on a mission / what yo name is? / what, you want me naked? / if you liking this position you can tape it."

In conclusion, I Am…Sasha Fierce is a bumpy ride, but the highs are higher than the lows are low, and even the worst tracks have a sort of likeable, guilty pleasure quality to them. Beyonce, Miss Fierce, whoever you are, I'm no closer to understanding you for listening to this, but I'm having a hell of a good time trying.