Album Review : Beyoncé - I Am... Sasha Fierce
- Written by Greg Salter
I Am… Sasha Fierce originally came out this time last year. Beyoncé announced that she had made a double album about her onstage/offstage personae and people went out and bought it, and now, to celebrate the fact that lots of people bought it, we’ve got a new platinum edition to buy (different cover art, shuffled tracklist, omg Kanye West!) and then if we all buy this one maybe she’ll make a new album, or maybe the whole process will just go on and on into infinity for ever and ever. There may be a recession on, but no, Beyonce, take my housing benefit. I’ve decided to live in a huge Beyoncé replica filled with multiple copies of I Am… Sasha Fierce anyway. I shall entertain guests in her left thigh.
She’s had a busy year though, so perhaps we should give her the benefit of the doubt – singing for the new president, not winning an MTV Video Music Award, getting Jay Z into Grizzly Bear, embarking on the oddly named yet hugely successful I Am… Tour. The rest of us don’t fit all that into a lifetime. Happily, we can live Beyoncé’s life through her music and her product endorsements (the distinction between the two being increasingly blurred as time goes on) while attempting to live our own at the same time.
And as a case in point for this Beyoncé/rest of the universe paradox, here’s ‘Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It)’ – where one woman puts on a leotard and heels, millions of women (and a good few men) follow. Shunted to the front of the tracklist because it’s the best thing on here by an absolute mile, it follows the formula of many of her best songs over the years, such as ‘Bills, Bills, Bills’ and ‘Independent Woman’ with Destiny’s Child. This is Beyoncé doing female empowerment well once again, and it’s a pity that she never really gets the balance right on the other songs, veering from emotional trainwreck to man-baiting caterwauler over arrangements that Leona Lewis might find a bit too middle of the road.
Take ‘If I Were A Boy’ for example - an inexplicable worldwide hit, in which Beyoncé berates a bloke for being male and makes empty sex-change shaped threats in the process. Go on Beyoncé, I DARE YOU. The lyrics on this album do seem to suggest that she could sing an extract from Mein Kampf and turn it into a hit, as long as there was a key change and maybe a guest spot from Lady Gaga (I bet she has the perfect outfit for the video).
‘Sweet Dreams’ finds her back on form somewhat – she rides a wave of Rihanna’s synths to sing about a man whose either AMAZING or AWFUL, such are the realities of relationships if you happen to be a diva (‘the female version of a hustler’, as she puts it). She goes and ruins it with songs like ‘Scared of Lonely’ though – Beyoncé’s pissed all over her ‘Independent Woman’ schtick a few times in the past, and here she’s drinking alone, writhing around in bed on the verge of breakdown because the object of her affection’s not around. This is presumably what drives her towards iffy, carnal feelings towards her stereo in ‘Radio’ (someone needs to play her Joni Mitchell’s ‘You Turn Me On, I’m A Radio’, quick – Solange?).
What will become apparent to anyone who bothers to compare this new edition to the original I Am… Sasha Fierce is that half this stuff didn’t even appear on the latter – and quite a few original tracks have gone missing in the process. It doesn’t really matter how often she mixes up the songs – Beyoncé is now so famous, so recognisable an icon/brand, that she can hawk an album that contains just a couple of decent songs to millions of people. Twice. At least. This wouldn’t matter so much, but for every inspired moment on I Am… Sasha Fierce, there’s an alarming number of misjudged, dull or lazy ones. For a record that was supposed to be so personal, it’s disappointingly confused and, regrettably, vapid.