“Beyoncé's surprise 'Making the Gift' film: 3 takeaways - Los Angeles Times” plus 2 more

Sofia Şubat 12, 2022

Posted: 17 Sep 2019 12:00 AM PDT

Beyoncé's penchant for surprises spilled onto network television Monday night when the pop superstar aired "Beyoncé Presents: Making the Gift" on ABC.

The documentary special — a behind-the-scenes look at her musical ode to this summer's "The Lion King" — dropped Monday with little advance notice, save for an announcement from the network on Sunday and online declarations of an "ABeyC" takeover.

Much like Bey's Netflix concert special, "Homecoming," the doc took viewers through her creative process as she assembled the ambitious companion album. We see her collaborate with her husband, Jay-Z, along with other artists steeped in African tradition.

The summits are cut sparingly with scenes from the Disney film in favor of vignettes from contemporary African life, dance practice and creative studio discussions.

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Beyoncé voiced the lioness Nala in the photo-real blockbuster, which hit the $1-billion benchmark at the box office within its first two weeks in theaters. She said she created "The Gift" album as "a love letter to Africa."

Here are a few takeaways from the special.

Make way for Blue Ivy, Rumi and Sir

The singer traveled throughout the continent — from Egypt to South Africa — with her family, including husband Jay-Z, their three kids (Blue Ivy, Sir and Rumi) and her mom, Tina Lawson, who are all heavily featured in the documentary. Fans have grown accustomed to the fiercely private couple shielding their little ones from the media but were delighted to see glimpses of their domestic life, particularly their growing twins embarking on the global excursion.

"Visiting countries in Africa, it's always an emotional experience for me. It feels like I'm making peace with a part of me that's yearning for my ancestral connection," the singer says. "When I was asked to be a part of 'Lion King' I was overwhelmed and beyond excited. It was full circle for me considering as a kid it was my favorite movie. Now I could share this film with my entire family."

The album was indeed a family affair: Her 7-year-old daughter, Blue Ivy, appears on the track "Brown Skin Girl," and Jay-Z is featured on "Mood 4 Eva," with her costar Donald Glover, a.k.a. Childish Gambino, who is not really featured in the doc. (The actor-musician has repeatedly said that he was starstruck by Bey but didn't work with her much in person.)

"It also was really important to me that the music was not the typical soundtrack, but something that kids felt safe and excited to share with their parents, as well as the parents with their kids," she said of "Brown Skin Girl."

Model Naomi Campbell, Oscar winner Lupita Nyong'o and Bey's former Destiny's Child bandmate Kelly Rowland are shown in clips rocking out to the empowering song.

Authenticity is key

Beyoncé always go full throttle in her projects, which have been exemplars of black excellence and are highly produced on her own terms.

"I did not want to take away the grit and the reality because there are very adult underlining life lessons in 'Lion King,'" the singer explained. "I did not want to water it down. I also did not want to lose the authenticity of Africa. And it all starts off with the drum beat and the groove."

She also described her subconscious-like track "Water," with Kendrick Lamar," as "sonic cinema."

"I wanted it to be authentic to what is beautiful about the music in Africa. So a lot of the drums, the chants, all of these incredible new sounds, mixed with the producers in America, we kind of created our own genre."

Beyoncé's power and spirit are yet again on display

"Making the Gift" was written, co-directed and produced by Beyoncé Knowles-Carter. Ed Burke, Bey's longtime collaborator, co-directed. But as the lofty, interview-shunning superstar waxed poetic about the continent, she seemingly disregarded her own divine influence, which was fully displayed in snippets of fans in Africa losing their minds over the star, holding up her records or featuring her on billboards.

"The concept of the ['Spirit'] video is to show how God is the painter. And natural beauty and nature need no art direction. It's the beauty of color, the beauty of melanin, the beauty of tradition," she says at the end of the film.

"The ['Lion King'] movie has an incredible spirit. It takes you on so many emotional rides," she adds. "I wanted that to be represented in the melody. I wanted to produce a piece of music that gave you those same feelings of tension, and struggle and doubt and realizing who you are in your strength and going for and fighting for it."

Is Rihanna’s ‘Visual Autobiography’ a Triumph or a Tease? - The New York Times

Posted: 14 Oct 2019 04:00 AM PDT

Rihanna has a new release. But it's not a single, or a new Fenty collection, or another Amazon Prime underwear show. It's a "visual autobiography," out on Oct. 24. Just over a foot wide and about one and a third feet tall, 15 pounds and full of glossy pictures, with a few gatefolds and special inserts.

Vanessa Friedman Well, this gives new meaning to "drop:" Rihanna's 500-page tome. If it fell on your foot, it would crush it. She has put her stamp on almost every pop culture form — music, film, fashion — and now, books. Is this an effective addition to the canon? Let's discuss.

Jon Caramanica In this era of social-media personal-brand saturation, pop megastars deploy so many different kinds of nontransparent transparency. But even in this, Rihanna is in a class of her own — not a strategic over-sharer like Taylor Swift, and not a floating-above-it-all icon like Beyoncé. What this book does particularly well is capture the off-the-cuffness of Rihanna's celebrity.

V.F. In another time (maybe before Beyoncé introduced us to the concept of the "visual album"), this would have been called a coffee-table book. But by calling it a visual autobiography, it created — for me, anyway — all sorts of raised expectations.

I was envisioning a personal window on her life, starting back when she was actually Robyn Fenty and lived in Barbados, with some family history thrown in. We get a tiny taste of that — there's an opening gatefold of her youth, complete with a report card — but then we jump straight to touring in 2011. So while it is true that after spending time with the book, I think I learned something, it wasn't what I was expecting.

J.C. This easily could have been a 500-page doorstop of every hyperglam photo shoot Rihanna had ever posed for, but instead it's a kind of behind-the-scenes travelogue, a Shutterfly book of one of the most famous people in the world.

V.F. But it's a pretty glam travelogue. Maybe it's simply the quality of the paper (high, large format), but I can't help feeling that even what is theoretically behind the scenes — off-duty shots of Rihanna on safari, Rihanna on a yacht, Rihanna swimming — has still been Photoshopped into perfection.

As has her posse. You rightly point out that she mostly seems to be always having a great time with great friends, which is maybe how we want to imagine our celebrity idols. But who are they? What do they do? How did they meet? All these questions I want to know.

J.C. Melissa Forde! Jenn Rosales! Jahleel Weaver! Stars of the Rihanna Instagram ecosystem. That this book feels haphazard is both a liability and perhaps an unexpected asset. Most of the pictures appear to have been taken by a photographer with very good access, and around whom Rihanna does not appear walled off. There are several that offer accessible entree into wild circumstances — getting dressed for various galas and balls, smoking weed with Snoop Dogg and getting her famous torso tattoo. Whether that tells much about Rihanna — that's something different.

Indeed, I learned much more about her from her recent Vogue cover story (and given my concerns about the desiccated state of that art form, and also the online pushback against that story, that's saying a lot). But this tome is not about depth — it's about fascination. For $150 — the "luxury supreme" edition is $5,500! — the truly faithful get an opportunity to ride along on tour, on vacation, on the runway. It's niche merch coated with the imprimatur of art.

V.F. It's telling that during the launch party at the Guggenheim, Rihanna told WWD that "my fans are young, and they've got ADD. They'd rather look at pictures than read, let's be real." This is a book for the Rihanna Navy, not the public at large looking for illumination or understanding. Though it's pretty pricey for a fanzine, even one elevated by a publisher of luxury tomes.

In the same way that Rihanna has bent luxury fashion to her will, now that LVMH is backing her Fenty collection, she has bent the book biz. This is, effectively, simply putting more gold bricks into the pedestal on which now resides Rihanna. In that sense, I felt as if I did get some further insight into just how she is constructing her legend: with Russell James, Inez and Vinoodh, Dior and the Met Gala.

In fact, speaking of fashion, what I found fascinating was how important the industry clearly is to Rihanna. It gets almost as much play as music. And you've got to love all the drooling, please-wear-the-free-stuff-I'm-giving-you notes from designers that were reproduced for the world to see (and credit to her for exposing them).

For someone who clearly wants to be considered a designer, though, it's surprising to me that there's no real record of her doing any even pseudo-designing. That's a ride-along I would appreciate.

J.C. I totally agree. And there are a few bits in here that go in that direction: the storyboards for the "Bitch Better Have My Money" video, which appear as a smallish insert late in the book; the photos of the vocal producer Kuk Harrell set up in what seems to be a hotel room, ready to record her.

I also found the "kitchen catwalk" spread — several photos of her strutting in different looks in what I imagine to be a commercial kitchen that doubles as a secret entryway to somewhere fabulous — to be a kind of display of work, the elegance and vim of her outfits juxtaposed against unglamorous obstacles.

V.F. She gives you these tantalizing glimpses, but only just barely, of the work she clearly puts in, and the rough edges that exist in any life. I was very struck by a photo buried amid all the others — a picture of her after the Miu Miu show hanging with Jared Leto on one side and Terry Richardson, a.k.a., the photographer who became a poster figure for sexual harassment, on the other. Not that Terry even gets an ID, like her other buddies. Was including him a tacit gesture of support? A mistake? Who knows?

J.C. Also telling is the opening picture from her 777 Tour, in 2012, in which she essentially kidnapped a planeful of journalists and flew around the world for seven concerts in seven nights. In the photo, she's the target of dozens of cameras and microphones — that's what happens when she steps outside the bubble for even a moment, which makes you appreciate, or at least sympathize with, the bubble.

V.F. Which brings up the other elephant in the room: Chris Brown, who is completely canceled in this version of Rihanna. We all make myths of our lives, I guess, smoothing them over, glossing them up for public consumption. This is, in the end, a knowing and self-conscious way of letting us in on that process. It leaves me both impressed and frustrated.

J.C. Which is to say, you've fully absorbed what it's like to be a fan of contemporary mega-celebs, who deploy a very specific blend of bait and restraint. Social media has created a sense of intimacy and entitlement between fans and their heroes, and has also made very famous people develop new mechanisms of hiding.

To be fair, however, Rihanna has rarely been one to show her work — sweat is not her brand. On record, she rarely pushes her voice (though when she does, it's impressive). In concert, she's almost distractingly casual. She is alarmingly famous, but never seems to be stressing about it. If this book is to be believed, it's because while millions upon millions of people hang on her every gesture, she's somewhere with her friends, having a ball.

OK, so the Beyoncé and Adele collaboration with OneRepublic isn’t happening - NME Live

Posted: 01 Oct 2019 12:00 AM PDT