Lemonade

We started playing Beyoncé on WFPK. That’s a sentence I never thought I’d write. Nothing against Queen Bey, but we’re not a Top 40 station, and that’s where her music roosts. Then again, it’s 2016, and this isn’t the world I grew up in, thankfully. We used to define ourselves with genre. If you listened to The Smiths, you didn’t listen to — or own up to it anyway — someone like Bob Seger. That all started changing about 10 years ago, most definitely with the evolution of the mp3 player and iPhones, and the way the web was handling music in general. If you were a teen coming into your 20s, with everything at your fingertips, genre didn’t much matter. It’s all there conveniently with a shuffle button.

Still, that doesn’t completely explain how Mrs. Carter ended up in our regular rotation, but to really explain that, we’ll need to draw that marker in the sand. On the left side is all of her music before Lemonade. On the right, well that’s where we are now. Beyoncé has always been dipping her toe in the water of something more than pop star. Once she got past the youthfulness of Destiny’s Child, the game was on. While her output was still predominantly pop and R&B, she was still able to drop a single that would transcend. “Crazy In Love” and “Drunk In Love” have both had plenty of live covers from the span of indie rockers and rock and rollers. “Single Ladies,” with its minimalist video that mesmerized, seemingly captivated the entire planet for a moment. It was big enough to disrupt people’s art that had nothing to do with it (Taylor and Kanye), but at the end of the day it was still a pop song, ultimately residing in its pop world.

And then she released Lemonade. And it was different. It was more. It was Beyoncé’s jump from pop star to art-artist. She had long been touted as this generation’s Aretha, but with this album, she was directing more toward Bowie territory. A highly-conceptual piece that dove into marriage and, famously, infidelity, but also seamlessly intertwining race, politics, gender and art. I wouldn’t dare pigeonhole this as a black album, but I also wouldn’t bat an eye at including it with such albums as What’s Going On or Innervision, but also with Blood On the Tracks and Rumors. And it’s easily the most important record since To Pimp A Butterfly. Likewise, the visual mini-movie that accompanied it should be held with the same regards as anything Michel Gondry or Spike Jonze has done. It’s like her own version of moving from 1999 to Purple Rain, or from Hunky Dory to Ziggy Stardust. Yes, I’m trying to convey that Lemonade is a masterpiece.

So we decided to look at it through that lens at WFPK. To get away from the ideology that we couldn’t play Beyoncé just because she was Beyoncé. To realize that in 20 years, this album has the potential to be talked about with the most important albums of all time. And to ultimately realize that, “Hey, I really love listening to Lemonade, and I really love listening to The Smiths, and I really love listening to Led Zeppelin, and I really love listening to Henry Mancini, and I really love listening to Fairport Convention, and I really love listening to Jason Isbell.” And none of them are too different from the other. Plus, we’ve always touted ourselves as always looking forward, which I believe this definitely fits. On top of all of that, we had gotten away pretty easily with playing Uptown Funk (with a little credit that we had played Mark Ronson regularly for years), the band Fun long before they blew up, Pharrell’s various weirdo projects and even Miley Cyrus, who’s vocals we sampled in an Alt-J song, so the stage was set. And it can’t be any different from us playing Prince, or Michael Jackson, or even Queen and The Monkees, for that matter. And while I know that we’ll have a few old-school curmudgeons, I mean purists, I mean curmudgeons, who will grumble, I have a feeling that if they just let themselves let go of image and expectations, and just listen to the badassery that will fill their ears, they’re going to enjoy it. And that’ll make it much easier for them to accept that we also added Chance the Rapper, too. •

Kyle Meredith is the music director of WFPK and host of the nationally syndicated “The Speed of Sound.” Hunting bears was never his strong point.

This article appears in June 8, 2016.