LEMONADES' EXODUS
LEMONADES’ EXODUS
2020 has shown us a lot thus far, from COVID-19 to uprisings in the street. And of course, there’s a little election that’s looming in November. 2020 has also shown us major milestones for two of the biggest artists of all time: one living, breathing, prospering and at the height of her artistic powers, the other long gone from this physical world, but whose music and message still influences and inspires generation upon generation of musicians, creatives, thinkers and activists.
Both Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter and the Hon. Robert Nesta Marley, O.M. are legends in their own right. And in 2020, both artists have had a resurgence to their legacies. For Beyoncé, it’s been her visual reimagining of the live action version of Disney’s The Lion King in the form of Black is King, a stunning visual feast and explosion of a film bursting with elements of Afrofuturism, opulent fashions and black positivity and imagined African royalty. Simultaneously, February 6, 2020 marked what would have been the 75th birthday of one Bob Marley. And to commemorate, there has been a year-long celebration of Marley’s music, even resulting in a multi-episode YouTube documentary about the reggae singer and the re-release of the documentary Marley on digital platforms.
Personally, these two facts made me think of a podcast I’ve been listening to lately called Dissect. Hosted by Cole Cushna and Titi Shodiya, Dissect takes one piece of contemporary art, usually a popular album, and examines, chops up and analyzes it song by song, note by note. And lo and behold, Season 6 focused on Beyoncé’s 2016 album, Lemonade. The more I listened to the hosts talk further and further about Lemonade and its cultural significance and impact, but more importantly its origins, I soon made a connection that I didn’t think I would. A connection between Queen Bey and the Tuff Gong, between the polished, pristine yet still adventurous modern R&B of the current day and the progressive yet shunned black music of yesteryear in the form of roots reggae. And that connection is this:
Lemonade is to Beyoncé as Exodus is to Bob Marley and The Wailers.
Many will look at this statement and be thoroughly confused. Others might just dismiss it as think piece drivel. Others still will think it stupid and asinine. But just hear me out on this one. Let’s take a look at the facts.
Lemonade is a visual album that tells a story centered on the themes of infidelity, loss, betrayal, growth, learning and embracing personal and communal history, confronting the past, confronting demons, anger, loneliness, and eventual redemption and reconciliation that leads to the rebuilding of a relationship, a marriage, a family, and a community. There are layers upon layers of history contained within Lemonade: it’s a culmination of the ambitiousness of an artist that is stepping outside of her boundaries to incorporate various musical styles, instead of relying only on traditional R&B. That’s because Lemonade is a mashup of styles: hip hop, rock, funk, gospel, bluegrass, blues, country, trap and bounce music, among others. It’s also an album that relies heavily on sampling, interpolations, and paying homage to the music of the past. With Lemonade, Beyoncé is confronting several things all at once, including the infidelity of her husband and their personal and family history that contributed to it. Beyoncé also uses Lemonade to shine a light on the plight, struggle and strength of black women throughout history.
Most importantly, however, Lemonade is said to have been birthed out of a massive sense of stress, duress, scrutiny, rumors, and transition. As detailed in Dissect by Season 6 hosts Cole and Titi, Lemonade came on the heels of years of speculation and rumors that Jay Z’s infidelity, tabloid scrutiny, the watchful eye of the court of public opinion, and of course, the infamous elevator incident in which Solange Knowles, Beyoncé’s sister, physically attacks Jay Z, the rumor being that she knew about Jay’s cheating and was standing up for her sister. Ultimately, Lemonade is a way for Beyoncé to reclaim her own existence, agency and narrative. It’s also her way of rallying a community after she confronts and conquers her own past, her own hidden secrets, her own failures, her own familial history, and her own loss of innocence.
Similarly, Bob Marley and the Wailers’ Exodus is a story in and of itself. While Lemonade exists as a visual album that is told in 11 songs that exist as chapters, Exodus is 10 songs divided into two sides: the first side is very fire and brimstone, very Old Testament. Side one begins with the slow simmering roil of “Natural Mystic” and culminates with the seven-minute epic title track. On side two, Marley and the Wailers get much smoother and more sensual with tracks like “Waiting In Vain”, “Three Little Birds” and “Jamming”. While Lemonade is the product of an established R&B artist who is both confronting demons and delving into new musical territory, Exodus is the result of another established artist who had also found massive success at the time of his popularity and was coping with newfound celebrity and popularity, but decided to also take more risks and delve more into combining reggae music with blues, soul, funk, jazz and British rock.
And where Lemonade came out of a time when Beyoncé’s private life was fully on public display, was being criticized and scrutinized endlessly by any and every major media outlet, as was under as much duress as a person in the limelight can take, Exodus was also birthed out of just as much, if not more, stress, duress, scrutiny, rumors, and transition for Marley. In December of 1976, against a backdrop of increasing political violence and intrigue, Marley agreed to headline the Smile Jamaica Concert to help cool tensions between rival gangs and political parties. But on December 3, two days before the concert, three gunmen entered Marley’s home at 56 Hope Road and shot him, his wife Rita, and his manager, Don Taylor. Marley eventually recovered and performed a 90-minute set at the Smile Jamaica Concert, but shortly after left Jamaica, first for Nassau, Bahamas, then London, England, where he and the Wailers began recording Exodus. So, in a few ways, Lemonade and Exodus share very similar paths in both their creation and their eventual culmination.
Lemonade starts out with the slow burn of “Pray You Catch Me” as Beyoncé questions her partners’ infidelity and eventually going through the stages of intuition, denial, anger, apathy, emptiness, accountability, reformation, forgiveness, resurrection, hope and redemption. We start with Beyoncé’s intuition, leading to her righteous anger and dismissiveness through “Hold Up”, “Don’t Hurt Yourself”, “Sorry” and “6 Inch”, but eventually hear and witness a sweet coming together with the songs “Sandcastles”, “Forward”, “Freedom”, and “All Night”, ending with the Beyoncé both reconciling with her partner and then calling black women and the black community to arms with “Formation’.
Similarly, Exodus begins with the slow burn of “Natural Mystic”, as Bob sings cryptically, yet soulfully, about many having to suffer, and many having to die, and him possibly not knowing the reason. Eventually, we get Bob putting his critics on blast with “So Much Things to Say”. He, the Wailers and the I-Threes eventually move through their own stages of righteous judgement cast upon nonbelievers via “The Heathen”, with Side one of the album culminating in the classic passion, righteous yet focused anger, powerful movement, uncompromising strength and call-and response energy that is “Exodus”. But soon enough, when with move on to Side two, we’re greeted with the sweet melodies of “Jamming”, the mature and longing love of “Waiting In Vain”, and the unapologetic sexuality of “Turn Your Lights down Low”. And eventually, Exodus closes with its own call-to-arms in the form of “One Love”.
But beyond the music and the art, both Lemonade and Exodus are exercises in embracing blackness, just in their own respective ways. Bob Marley had long been known for his embrace and practice of Rastafari, a religious and social movement focused on Black Nationalism that originated in Jamaica in the 1930s. And this permeated throughout the music, style and presence of the Wailers since the days right before and during the release of Catch a Fire, the first album to break Marley, Peter Tosh, Bunny Wailer and the rest of the band in the United Kingdom in the early 1970s. And while previous Wailers albums had already put this on full display, Exodus, especially the title track, made clear that Marley and his band were interested in the liberation, empowerment and repatriation of Rastas, and black people the world over. True, Bob Marley and the Wailers albums following Exodus such as Survival and Uprising would be even more radical and more unapologetically black. But Exodus would set the stage by being simultaneously overtly black, overtly Biblical, and yet more palatable and pop-music oriented for wider Western audiences to consume.
In the case of Lemonade, Beyoncé used the first single and video for “Formation” to embrace and flaunt her own blackness and encourage her fans to do the same, with references to soul food, baby hair, the black church in the South, and more. In the case of the video, things grow even more unapologetically, beautifully black. Beyoncé standing on top of a police car that’s submerged under water to show solidarity with the victims of Hurricane Katrina. Visuals of what appears to be first Sunday at a black Baptist church and a New Orleans second line. Beyoncé surrounded by regally-dressed black men all decked out in all black, as she defiantly throws up her middle fingers. And then, of course, is the way Beyoncé strategically used her part in the Super Bowl 50 Halftime performance to highlight the song, with her and her dancers decked out in Black Panther-inspired garb. It all serves the purpose to create a vision of a coming together of a community that will no longer be identified as broken or blighted.
Both Lemonade and Exodus, for their respective time periods, point to a new way forward for black music. In the late 1970s, Bob Marley and the Wailers used Exodus as a tool of ambassadorship to bring reggae music to an even wider audience by incorporating funk, blues, and new technology in music to make reggae more accessible. Not only that, Exodus as an album helped to further popularize the use of overt Biblical themes in pop music, something that would be used by major artists in the future. Beyoncé, too, uses Lemonade as a master class in black musical experimentation AND in Biblical references peppered throughout the visual album, even though they at times are more subtle. She fuses modern R&B with Caribbean influences, bluegrass, electronica, New Orleans bounce, and more. Both Exodus and Lemonade contribute to a sense of both artists unapologetically looking to the past to help determine the future of black music.
Ultimately, both Lemonade and Exodus are albums on a mission. Both Beyoncé and Bob Marley are fueled by their own sense of personal and communal redemption, emancipation and liberation. Both, in their own way, use art as activism and music as a weapon to galvanize and organize black people and to build a renewed sense of strength and self-awareness within their community. And both Beyoncé and Marley created uncompromisingly, unapologetically black masterpieces that transcend time, history and genre, stay true to their roots, embrace and celebrate a smorgasbord of black music styles, and tell universal, timeless human stories that people the world over have embraced as their own.
Additional Reading, Research and Resources:
Dissect Podcast- Lemonade http://dissectpodcast.com/lemonade-visual-guides/
Close to Home: A Conversation about Beyoncé’s Lemonade https://www.npr.org/sections/therecord/2016/04/26/475629479/close-to-home-a-conversation-about-beyonc-s-lemonade
Article: “Bob Marley’s Exodus Turns 40” on Billboard https://www.billboard.com/articles/news/7817549/bob-marley-exodus-anniversary-album
Article: “Behind the Bob Marley Classic that Still Inspires Movements https://www.udiscovermusic.com/artist/bob-marley-exodus/
The Book of Exodus: The Making & Meaning of Bob Marley &the Wailers’ Album of the Century by Vivien Goldman. Copyright 2006, Three Rivers Press