The
latest reports from inside Camp Beyoncé say the singer has scrapped the
50 tracks in consideration for her fifth studio album and decided to
start over. Ne-Yo, one of the artists whose songs were reportedly
shelved, said Beyoncé was “still trying to figure out” a direction for
the album in June, according to the
Hollywood Reporter.
Who knows how much truth there is to these reports, because Beyoncé and
her record label, Columbia Records, haven’t commented. But something’s
clearly amiss.
Last February Beyoncé headlined the Super Bowl
halftime and launched a major arena tour this summer. Micro-managed pop
stars usually commit to that kind of schedule only when there’s new
product to push. Multi-million-dollar marketing campaigns for big albums
are the cultural equivalent of the D-Day Invasion – plotted months in
advance to saturate media and heighten public awareness. And yet there’s
still no sign of the follow-up to Beyoncé’s 2011 release, 4.
It
wouldn’t be the first time a major artist has run into roadblocks while
readying a highly anticipated album, and usually the longer the wait,
the more disappointing the results.
Axl Rose and an army of hired
guns laboured for 17 years to make the bloated Guns N’ Roses album
Chinese Democracy. The follow-up to the twin releases, Use Your Illusion
I and II, it finally came out in 2008 to a resounding sigh of
indifference. Rose spread 14 tracks across 77 minutes – that’s about 4.5
minutes of music a year. Peter Gabriel was recording at about the same
pace when he finally released Up in 2002, 10 years after his previous
studio album. It stiffed commercially and, since then, Gabriel still
hasn’t released an album of original songs.
He’s got company.
R&B star D’Angelo, who released landmark neo-soul albums in 1995
(Brown Sugar) and 2000 (Voodoo), has been silent ever since, finally
emerging to play a few concerts last year. (The singer was recently
hospitalised for an undisclosed illness and had to cancel a series of
shows). Lauryn Hill, currently serving three months in prison for tax
evasion, has managed to release only one live album since her 1998
breakthrough, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill. With each year, the
prospect of D’Angelo and Hill regaining their form, let alone their
standing as cultural game-changers, becomes increasingly unfathomable,
despite their fans’ fondest wishes.
You snooze, you lose
Even
Trent Reznor of Nine Inch Nails paid the price for toiling a mere five
years over The Fragile, the double-album follow-up to his 1994
blockbuster, The Downward Spiral. The ambitious album sold about a
quarter as much as its quadruple-platinum predecessor, despite
justifiably laudatory reviews. Jimmy Iovine, the overlord of Reznor’s
label, Interscope, called it “the right album at the wrong time.” The
implication was that Reznor had procrastinated, and his moment had
passed.
The music industry isn’t a friend to artists who wait. In
the ‘60s and ‘70s, artists typically recorded an album – and sometimes
two or even three – a year, and toured relentlessly. Now, with trends
arriving and disappearing in record time, bands that don’t keep the
pipeline flooded with their genius are quickly forgotten.
Beyoncé
is unlikely to be forgotten by anyone anytime soon – she’s a true
multimedia celebrity in addition to being a recording artist. But the
longer she’s away, the more likely she’ll look like she’s chasing trends
rather than shaping them.
‘Deadline’ is a dirty word in the music
world, but sometimes the by-products of having one are urgency and
focus. Artists who dither and tinker endlessly because they have the
time and budgets to do so can second-guess themselves into inertia.
Gabriel said he had 130 songs in play for the Up album. "I guess I just
enjoy the business of making music better than selling it,” he said at
the time. “I didn't have a producer on board whipping me into shape, and
so deadlines become things you pass through on the way to finishing."
The rulebreakers
But
there’s another potential storyline, one that has little to do with
commercial expectation. One senses that Gabriel really didn’t care all
that much about fashioning another Sledgehammer-style hit when he made
Up, just as Reznor wasn’t all that bothered about distancing himself
from the mainstream with The Fragile. Some of the most self-contained
and longest-lasting artists give the impression that they just exist in
their own space and time, oblivious to the industry and the whims of
marketing. They develop a loyal fan base precisely because they don’t
play by everyone else’s rules. Every decade or so, Kate Bush gets around
to releasing another album and it’s usually worth the wait. Portishead
chilled out for 11 years after their second album, then dropped the
terrific Third in 2008.
It can be done. Beyoncé has the clout to
make a radical, perception-shifting album if she chose. She hinted that
she might do so on 4, referencing everyone from Fela Kuti to Frank
Ocean, but ended up backing off and settling for a more straightforward
mix of pop and ballads. Maybe she’s clearing the decks not because she’s
stuck, but because she’s focused on something a little beyond what’s
expected of her.
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