Dear Gossips,   

“It’s a lotta talking goin’ on”…

While she sings her song. 

 

About Beyoncé, of course. This was COWBOY CARTER release weekend, the album is a critical smash. And when the figures come out next week, it will also undoubtedly be a commercial smash. Because, obviously, the music, the musicianship, the all of it is Her Standard – or, should I say, Her New Standard. But, also, in spite of the algorithm. 

 

More and more, the algorithm is influencing song length. Artists are encouraged to keep their songs shorter to generate more streams: the longer the song, less the plays you can fit in within a certain time frame. But as she said back in 2022 about the making of RENAISSANCE:  

“A lot of the songs right now are two minutes long, they’re super short because of people’s attention spans and I’m not gonna just accept that people don’t have the attention span, it’s not true, you just have to challenge people. I think people wanna hear good music and bridges and they wanna hear vamps and they wanna hear arrangements and they wanna hear melody, especially when it’s not a lot of it. I usually have people that suggest - ‘Oh cut the song down, you know that part is really slow, that’s not predictable, it messes up the flow when you’re dancing.’ I am aware of things being challenging, that is not a coincidence. I don’t go out of my way to try to make things challenging but when I have an idea, I’m gonna do it and sometimes it works and sometimes it doesn’t but I don’t like to put those handcuffs on myself.”

This is why the first song on COWBOY CARTER, “Ameriican Requiem” (a straight up opus!) is over five minutes long. “Ya Ya”, another one of the album’s most powerful tracks, is four and a half. “Sweet*Honey*Buckiin’” is almost five. The songs are as long or as short as she has decided they need to be – because the Queen doesn’t engineer her music to fit the formula, she’s always made the formula bend to her. 

 

And guess what? It is. The songs are being streamed, heavily. I did a lot of streaming this weekend and I haven’t even made it to most of the lyric videos yet. Although obviously I’ve played the one for “II Most Wanted” like a clown looking for clues. That song, as I’m sure you know, is already a smash. And if she decides to give us a visual for it, it’ll be a nuclear event. 

Yours in gossip, 

Lainey