There are 3,105 words that constitute the credits for Beyoncé's surprise sixth album Lemonade, which debuted as an audio-visual film this past weekend accompanied by a Tidal-exclusive stream of the LP. As always, it took a village to build the pop juggernaut's latest, with songwriters, producers, and features including Diplo, James Blake, The Weeknd, Kendrick Lamar, Jack White, and MNEK patching in contributions to a project that very publicly excoriates her husband Jay Z for alleged infidelity, inevitably working through the water-log of contradictory emotions—rage, revenge, acceptance, and reconciliation—through its duration.
It also dives deep into a bank of samples and mixed-media inspiration points that span the obscure to the highly relevant. Lemonade places poet Warsan Shire, Civil Rights activist Malcolm X, and Alan Lomax field recordings right next to quoted lyrics from the Yeah Yeah Yeahs, Animal Collective, and Soulja Boy, and a slew of classic '70s samples. The choices are wide and perplexing, yet stilt a project that bombastically captures the path toward righteousness in the wake of personal grief, filtered through a sharp artistic lens.
With Lemonade's recent arrival, Pitchfork breaks down the samples and references that punctuate the album.
One of the most tense, anthemic love ballads of the early aughts, the Yeah Yeah Yeahs' "Maps" gets a gorgeous treatment on "Hold Up," where Beyoncé quotes the key lyric "they don't love you like I love you" on the chorus. "Maps," threaded together by Nick Zinner's tremulous guitar picking and Karen O's exasperated topline, comes from the trio's gutter-rock, Adderall-snorting 2003 debut Fever to Tell, and has been sampled for Black Eyed Peas' "Meet Me Halfway," Girl Talk's "LC and Lo" (which also interpolates 16 other songs), and Adventure Club's "Wait."
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Vampire Weekend frontman Ezra Koenig is also included as a songwriter on "Hold Up," and among his contributions sits this five-year-old tweet that tweaks the choral refrain from "Maps." That reference allegedly inspired the name of the song, and Koenig referenced it the afternoon following Lemonade's release, responding to the tweet, "slow down...they don't love u like i love u." That said, Koenig added that his connection to "Hold Up" goes deeper than the tweet, as one can clearly tell given his production credit on the song; a request for clarification regarding his songwriting involvement has not been returned as of press time. Update (4/25, 2:30 p.m. EST): Koenig has clarified that he and Diplo wrote the foundation of the song together in 2014, as inspired by his tweet.
A lyrical reference revived eight years after its cultural apex, Beyoncé cites lyrics from Soulja Boy's "Turn My Swag On" for "Hold Up," singing, "I hop up out the bed, turn my swag on." It's the most clear lyrical check on the plucky track, which weaves together the most hat-tips and samples out of any song on the LP. Soulja Boy's smash had long legs on the sampling market: Willow Smith, Trey Songz, and ScHoolboy Q are just a few of the artists to slice segments of it for their own.
The most prominent sample on "Hold Up" comes from the instrumental intro to Andy Williams' "Can't Get Used to Losing You," written by Jerome Pomus and Mort Shuman. The original song was a hit back in 1963, peaking at No. 2 on the charts. It's a fairly little-sampled tune, but oft-covered, by a litany of musicians including The Beat, Skeeter Davis, Martha and the Vandellas, and Paul Anka.
Led Zeppelin's "When the Levee Breaks" is a go-to for sampling. The iconic rock group slotted a new version of the song, recorded in 1929 by husband-and-wife team Memphis Minnie and Kansas Joe McCoy, as the conclusive bookend to 1971's Led Zeppelin IV. Since then, "When the Levee Breaks" has lived on all over the music world, with fragments appearing on Dr. Dre's "Lyrical Ganbang," Bjork's "Army of Me," Beastie Boys' "Rhymin' & Stealin'," Ice-T's "Midnight," and Sophie B. Hawkins' "Damn I Wish I Was Your Lover."
A handful of producers—Danny Boy Styles, Ben Billions, Boots, and Beyoncé—mined from Animal Collective's psych-folk, synth-spotted 2009 single "My Girls" for "6 Inch," using the line, "I don't mean to seem like I care about material things" and reinterpreting it as, "She too smart to crave material things." Boots explained that the reference was accidental, though Childish Gambino took a more direct approach by parsing out raps over the instrumental in 2010.
Dionne Warwick popularized "Walk on By" in 1964 after Burt Bacharach and Hal David penned the song, and it took Isaac Hayes five years to putty-stretch the breezy tune into a 12-minute epic in 1969. Beyoncé stripped away part of the instrumental for "6 Inch," but she's far from the first. Hip-hop has laid claim to Hayes' rendition, as Notorious B.I.G.'s "Warning," Tupac Shakur's "Me Against the World," and Alicia Keys' "If I Was Your Woman/Walk on By" previously turned to the slinky soul number to flesh out their compositions.
The acid-smeared organs from Beyoncé's "Freedom" come from Puerto Rican band Kaleidoscope's sole eponymous release, which dropped in the late 1960s. The LP, which had a run of 200 copies via Mexican label Orfeon, was later licensed by German imprint Shadoks before Now-Again Records put it back out in 2013. An extremely rare sample, and one of the most obscure on Lemonade, "Let Me Try" is the driving force of "Freedom," a sizzling late-quarter conclusion on the album.
"Freedom" also includes folk preservationist Alan Lomax's 1959 field recordings at Memphis' Great Harvest Missionary Baptist Church, where Reverend R.C. Crenshaw's sermon bolsters the song's gospel feel. A fuller version of this field recording exists on a corner of the internet that documents vestiges of historical bids for cultural equity, if you're curious to hear more.
Another Alan Lomax field recording—one featuring a prisoner—appears on "Freedom"; it was recorded in 1947 at Lambert Camp at Mississippi State Penitentiary, also known as Parchman Farm. According to the site that hosts the song, "Stewball" was featured on a 1958 album titled Negro Prison Songs, and is included on the Lomax collection Prison Songs (Historical Recordings from Parchman Farm 1947-48), Vol. 2: Don'tcha Hear Poor Mother Calling?.
The melodic essence of Outkast's "SpottieOttieDopaliscious" is the crux of "All Night," harnessing the horn blasts from the Atlanta duo's cut off of 1998's Aquemini. It isn't the first time that Beyoncé sampled the track, sourced for the remix to "Flawless" with Nicki Minaj, while J. Cole, Lil Wayne, and Jill Scott also used it prior.
Works by 27-year-old poet Warsan Shire are used in the Lemonade HBO special, similar to how Beyoncé featured feminist author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie on "***Flawless." This time, Bey overdubs spoken-word segments as a transition between her music videos, sourced from Shire's poems including "The unbearable weight of staying (the end of the relationship)" and "For Women Who Are Difficult to Love." Shire has become a star in the poetry world, honored as London's inaugural Young Poet Laureate and currently serving as poetry editor at SPOOK Magazine.
Civil Rights activist Malcolm X's speech from May 22, 1962 is played during the HBO special, telling a Los Angeles audience, “Who taught you to hate the color of your skin? Who taught you to hate the texture of your hair? Who taught you to hate the shape of your nose and the shape of your lips? Who taught you to hate yourself from the top of your head to the soles of your feet?” It reflects the pro-black rally-cry of "Formation," the first single off the album, and the powerful imagery that appears through the film.
