Beyoncé has developed quite the knack for shock and awe, what with dropping secret visual albums, popping up at award shows unannounced, release unanticipated commercials, and being an all-round enigma. For me though, a particular stand-out track has to be “Partition”, and not only because it's a super-explicit club banger (missing you Lil' Kim & Foxxy Brown).
The French interlude towards the end is damn sexy and Beyonce supposedly got her dancer Hajiba Fahmy to purr the following: "Est-ce que tu aimes le sexe? Le sexe. Je veux dire, l’activité physique. Le coït. Tu aimes ça? Tu ne t’interesses pas au sexe? Les hommes pensent que les féministes détestent le sexe, mais c’est une activité très stimulante et naturelle que les femmes adorent."
Now many people have drawn similarities to the Coen brothers film The Big Lebowski, where Julianne Moore's lines are, "Do you like sex? Sex. I mean, the physical activity. Coitus. Do you like it? You're not interested in sex? Men think that feminists hate sex, but it's a very stimulating and natural activity that women love."
Sound familiar? It's hard to determine if this is sampled directly from a French edition of The Big Lebowski, or if it’s just an interpolation—but the similarity is undeniable. Just listen to the scene in French:
I'm pretty sure I'm part of a worldwide general consensus when I say that Beyoncé created model of a cultural moment that the music industry no longer seemed capable of engineering, especially by putting out new material which is a huge departure from what her fans are used to; because it's so suffused with a raw, earthy sexuality that sounds really personal. I feel that songs like Partition and ***Flawless, should absolutely be released as singles, and not only because of the immense potential to be infectious summer smashes, but more for the fact that they've already become Internet sensations. The song ***Flawless has experienced inevitable appropriation of its lyrics into the everyday vernacular, what with people already quoting; 'I woke up like this' while simultaneously referencing the various memes, Instagram pictures and parody videos that allude to the feminist track. It's actually immensely overwhelming when you stop and think about how omnipresent the world of digital is in our lives; in the 12 hours after its surprise release, the new album generated 1.2 million tweets, reaching a high of 5,300 tweets per minute at its peak. I'm lucky if I get two people 'favourite' one of my tweets.
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