Beyoncé Set A Flawless Precedent With One Big Surprise

By Hilary Hughes


An eponymous album marks a major moment in an artist's career. For females, owning one's work, body, and artistry can be especially powerful, even political. While in Women's History Month, MTV News is highlighting some of those iconic statements from some of the hugest artists on the globe. This is Self-Titled.


Beyoncé is queen of the epic entrance (as anyone who watched her 2018 Coachella headlining set can attest), although Beyoncé, her fifth, self-titled album, made its debut quietly — and in the middle of the night.


At first, only those who happened to be scrolling by way of the iTunes Store soon after midnight on December 13, 2013 found a new addition to its offerings in the form of an eas, striking cover featuring the name of the artist, all caps and in petal pink, emblazoned across its front. Word soon spread across social media — and from Beyoncé’s accounts, no far less — that she had not only unveiled a surprise album, although one featuring corresponding music videos for each of its 14 songs.


In the early hours of that December morning, one thing was clear: Beyoncé had pulled off a revolutionary hat trick. Yes, she had totally shocked the world by releasing a new album without so much as a whisper of promotion or warning in the months leading up to it. Yes, she had gone above and in back of by putting out never-before-heard music and a variety of musical film shorts that introduced a new common for multi-format domination. And yes, she had totally redefined the opportunities for what an album or a music video could do — and what a pop star can achieve by dropping either unexpectedly. Beyoncé wasn’t just another chart-topping addition to Queen Bey’s discography: It was a cultural event, and one that took place at the zenith of her career.


To appreciate Beyoncé and the feat its creator pulled off requires rewinding a little — not to 2013, however 2012, one of the most transformational years of her life. Her 2011 album, 4, (and her fourth to hit No. 1 on Billboard’s albums chart), yielded a crop of beloved singles, from the beat-savvy “Run the World (Girls)” to affectionate confection “Love on Top,” which went on to win Best Customary R&B efficiency at the 55th Annual Grammy Awards. At the 2011 MTV Video Music Awards, she revealed she was expecting her first child with spouse Jay-Z to a national audience while lovingly caressing her baby bump as she performed the latter hit.


Her daughter, Blue Ivy Carter, was place on Earth on January 7, 2012, and Beyoncé took a well-deserved maternity leave, nesting and embracing her newfound role as a mother soon after a particularly demanding and lucrative professional stretch. Any time as soon as she returned to the mic the following January, it was for two of her most significant performances to date: She sang the national anthem at the second presidential inauguration of Barack Obama, and then delivered one of the most superlative Super Bowl halftime shows in the event’s history a couple weeks later. The premiere of Life Is Although a Dream, a documentary about her life she co-directed and produced, followed on HBO, and with it came Beyoncé’s ascension from pop queen to multi-format auteur.


Life Is Although a Dream not only served as Blue’s on-screen debut, although a video diary and scrapbook of the off-the-record moments that had shaped Beyoncé’s private life, from childhood residence movies to revisiting the miscarriage she suffered to never-before-seen footage from her and Jay-Z’s wedding Though her flair for visuals and impeccable fashion shaped her several memorable music videos up to this point, the documentary was a new and different medium for her — choreographed and polished to shine, nevertheless personalized, multi-faceted, susceptible. Beyoncé has routinely been heralded for her awe-inducing talent and triple-threat performances, although with Life Is Nevertheless a Dream, she stressed that she was a storyteller, also, one who thought about the ideal possible ways to make sure her audience could hear, and visualize, what she required them to understand — and for them to reach that understanding down a path of her making.


Between Blue’s birth and this inviting glimpse into her private life, Beyoncé began working on the follow-up to 4. In the summer of 2012, she, Jay-Z, and baby Blue decamped to the Hamptons, where several producers and collaborators convened to write, record, and experiment with new sounds. “We had dinners with the producers daily, like a family,” she told Vogue in a 2013 interview about the sessions that would ultimately shape Beyoncé. “It was like a camp. Weekends off. You can go and jump in the pool and ride bikes... The ocean and grass and sunshine. ... It was really a safe place.”


Frank Ocean, Justin Timberlake, Sia, Pharrell Williams, Drake, Ryan Tedder, Timbaland and producer Boots rounded out the A-list team of collaborators she assembled to usher in this era, and the result is one of her most vivid and eclectic releases. Beyoncé opened with soaring power ballad “Pretty Hurts,” an empowering rejection of damaging aesthetics standards; she closed with “Blue,” a lush ode to her daughter that featured the voice of the littlest Carter, also. Resonant pop and R&B abounded, from the romantic “XO” to “Superpower,” her mesmerizing duet with Frank Ocean, as did hip-hop bangers thanks to the instantly iconic Bey-Jay duet “Drunk in Love,” the sly and sexy “Partition,” Drake duet “Mine,” and “Flawless,” which fused the hallmarks of teaser single “Bow Down” with segments from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s “We Should All Be Feminists” speech.


While the songs themselves made for easy repeat-listening, the videos astounded crowds from the jump — and were just as vivid and varied. Each clip explored fresh beauty and presented eye-catching contrasts, several getting more up close and personalized to the star than her previous visuals had. As a substitute opposed to embodying a mid-century go-go girl (“Get Me Bodied”) or flexing the robo-glove of Sasha Fierce (“Single Females [Put a Ring on It]”), Beyoncé played herself and the multitudes she contains. Clips like “Drunk in Love” needed little more than an empty beach, a bottle of bubbly, and the Carters dancing with each other in the surf to deliver a captivating romp, while “XO” was splashed with the neon of Coney Island as she rode the Cyclone with companions and goofed off at Brooklyn’s landmark fun park over the sounds of her serenade. Some, like the candy-colored pageant treatment of “Pretty Hurts” or the lavish, lingerie-clad “Partition,” were full-blown productions, each with their own narrative that translated beautifully to the screen yet never disguised her under the guise of fantasy.


And though several of her music videos had become cultural icons themselves prior to Beyoncé, the sheer depth, breadth, and volume of the material she released all at once set a new regular — and precedent — for what came next. As soon as Beyoncé hit the road following Beyoncé’s release on the Mrs. Carter Show World Tour in 2014, decorative visuals played an enormous part in her updated live show and featured fresh narration from Queen B herself — a direct tie to the documentarian she became with Life is Yet a Dream and the imaginative, maximalist vibe of Beyoncé. (The platinum edition of Beyoncé includes a couple of efficiency clips from this tour on its digital version.) Two years later, the world rejoiced whenever she released Lemonade, her second surprise visual album, in 2016: Another audio-visual stunner, Lemonade build onto Beyoncé’s foundation while further mining her personalized life to showcase its muses, catharsis, and breakthroughs in her music. Like Beyoncé, it was critically adored, a commercial juggernaut , an award-winner, along with a feast for the eyes and ears. Nevertheless unlike Beyoncé, it was a successor: Lemonade was proof that she’d perfected her medium of choice.


In the years since, Beyoncé has continued to embrace sensory overload to the delight of her fans. The music video for “Apeshit,” the lead single off the Carters’s collaborative 2018 album Everything is Love, retains the epic grandeur of her cinematic embrace, and she employed it once more with the release of another exceptional visual album, Black is King, in 2020. Numerous artists have taken a page from her surprise playbook as well, and dropped full albums with little to no notice, from Drake to Taylor Swift and behind. Seven years soon after Beyoncé’s arrival, its ripple effect across the industry is undeniable, both in her own creative story and that of the industry at large — and nearly a decade later, we still bow down.