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Since the year 2000, more and more Black women have been nominees for album of the year: India.Arie, Missy Elliott, Alicia Keys, Mariah Carey, Rihanna, Janelle Mon\u00e1e, Cardi B, H.E.R., Lizzo, Doja Cat, SZA and Mary J. Blige. But it\u2019s Beyonc\u00e9\u2019s appearances in this category \u2014 beginning with \u201cI Am \u2026 Sasha Fierce\u201d (2010) \u2014 that have garnered the most headlines. The tension between the evolving, colossal ambition and innovation of her nominated releases, their critical acclaim and their global popularity, set against the Grammy voters\u2019 repeated unwillingness to reward these efforts, has amounted to the greatest ongoing Grammy drama: \u201cWill she or won\u2019t she win this year?\u201d<\/p>\n
Beyonc\u00e9\u2019s self-titled album<\/a> was a cultural sensation, replete with unexpected forays into alternative R&B. Its out-of-nowhere arrival inaugurated the era of the \u201csurprise\u201d album drop. It was released with videos for each song, introducing the modern visual album. And it included the sampled speech of a feminist intellectual, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, expounding on gender equality. At the 2013 Grammys, it lost to \u201cMorning Phase,\u201d a moody album from the alt-rock shape-shifter Beck.<\/p>\n The defeat did nothing to lessen her experimental boundary pushing. The 2016 magnum opus \u201cLemonade,\u201d<\/a> Beyonc\u00e9\u2019s second visual album, turned a personal tale of domestic strife and wounded intimacies into a reckoning with slavery\u2019s legacies, the fracturing of families and communities, the lingering effects of Black grief and mourning and the specifically acute ordeals facing Black women in American culture. It encompassed spoken-word poetry, archival voices, provocative samples and a visual vocabulary that yoked together allusions to iconic Black feminist art \u2014 the cinema of Dash, the photography of Weems \u2014 as well as scenes shot on former plantation sites and visions of post-Katrina New Orleans.<\/p>\n \u201cLemonade\u201d took the idea of the concept album and stretched it to its multi-formalistic limits, absorbing the tradition of Black women\u2019s epics and becoming a sonic \u201cvehicle,\u201d as Griffin said in an interview, for \u201cBlack women\u2019s epics\u201d from multiple genres, \u201cnot just music but literary and visual ones as well.\u201d The album <\/em>was such a phenomenon that it spawned scholarly articles as well as a critical anthology, and it remains a staple on Black cultural studies syllabuses. Grammy voters were less bowled over, awarding album of the year to a visibly shocked Adele<\/a>.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n