B13 Peer Review

UPDATE: B-13 PEER REVIEW Presents: Monster  

Beyonce explains her thought process behind the self-titled visual album. Beyonce  released a self-titled album today  (December 13) with no publicized release date prior to its arrival. Hours after the project dropped, she also released a video explaining her decision to unveil an unexpected visual project.  "I see music," Beyonce says. "It's more than just what I hear. When I'm connected to something, I immediately see a visual or a series of images that are tied to a feeling or emotion, a memory from my childhood, thoughts about life, my dream or my fantasies. They're all connected to the music. That's one of the reasons why I wanted to do a visual album. I wanted people to hear the songs with the story that's in my head. That's what makes it mine."   Beyonce also discusses how the release is meant to help fans experience an album as opposed to a single and its "hype." "People experience music differently,...

Leon Morris, Hulton Archive / Getty Images We are now winding down the anniversary of hiphop's 30th year of existence as a populist art form. Testimonials and televised tributes have been airing almost daily, thanks to Viacom  and the like. As those digitized hip-hop shout-outs get packed back into their binary folders, however, some among us have been so gauche as to ask, What the heck are we celebrating exactly? A right and proper question, that one is, mate. One to which my best answer has been: Nothing less, my man, than the marriage of heaven and hell, of New World African ingenuity and that trick of the devil known as global hyper-capitalism. Hooray. Given that what we call hiphop is now inseparable from what we call the hiphop industry, in which the nouveau riche and the super-rich employers get richer, some say there's really nothing to celebrate about hiphop right now but the moneyshakers and the moneymakers—who got bank and who got more. Hard to argue with th...