The Tortured Lemonade Department: Part 1
Baby girl he’s playing you
“I love you it’s ruining my life.” - Taylor Swift, Fortnight
Lemonade and The Tortured Poets Department are albums about relationships at inflection points.
Beyonce overhears her husband on the phone in the bathroom. He’s cheating. Gulp. Taylor’s boyfriend withdraws into apathy, what she calls his “bluest days.” She’s at her wits end.
But these albums have different endings. One of the relationships survives, the other ends in the grave.
What’s the difference? Let’s dive in and find out!
“I ain’t sorry.” - Beyonce, Sorry
What a Wicked Way
The surface-level issue in these relationships is different (cheating vs withdrawing), but the root issue is the same. Both women fail to connect with their partners.
Beyonce is on the other side of the bathroom door: “My lonely ear pressed against the walls of your world” (Pray You Catch Me). Taylor is screaming “don’t you ignore me” (You’re Losing Me*). They’re both shut out.
In the same breath that they profess their commitment, their partners betray them: “Can’t you see there’s no other man above you, what a wicked way to treat the girl that loves you” (Beyonce, Hold Up) and “I gave you all my best me's, my endless empathy, and all I did was bleed” (Swift, You’re Losing Me).
These relationships are hurtful and not changing: “I’m getting tired even for a phoenix” (Swift, You’re Losing Me) and “you're caught up in your permanent emotions, all the loving I’ve been giving goes unnoticed” (Beyonce, Love Drought).
It becomes more than a question of should I leave? It’s an exhausted admission of defeat: “You say I abandoned the ship, but I was going down with it, my white knuckle dying grip” (Swift, So Long, London). They hold on—until holding on any longer would sacrifice themselves.
Then, they leave: “Just how low did you think I’d go before I’d self-implode? Before I’d have to go be free?” (Swift, So Long, London) and “I left a note in the hallway, by the time you read it I’ll be far away” (Beyonce, Sorry).
What now?
“For a moment I knew cosmic love.”
I’m the Best Thing at this Party
Both women leave, yet neither wants her relationship to end. In fact, they’re pissed it ended: “I’m just mad as hell cause I loved this place,” “fuck you if I can’t have us,“ “fuck you hater, you can’t recreate her,” and “I am the dragon breathing fire” (Swift So Long London and Down Bad, Beyonce Don’t Hurt Yourself).
Okay…what’s below that anger?
Pain. Like a lot of pain: “I can’t get out of bed” and “all the pieces of me shattered” (Swift, loml and I Can Do It with a Broken Heart). At the end of a banger about a stripper making her own money, Beyonce eerily calls out to her husband, “Come back, come back, come back” (6 Inch).
Despite this pain, neither woman falters in her choice. There’s an inner strength, like a silent, stubborn locomotive, that keeps them going: “me and my baby [daughter], we gonna be alright” (Beyonce, Sorry). Swift is even tongue-in-cheek about it: “I cry a lot but I am so productive” (I Can Do It…).
I’d argue this strength is actually what led to the demise of these relationships.
Strength is so integral to these women that both albums dedicate an entire song to the backstory of their strength. Beyonce has Daddy Lessons: “when trouble comes to town and men like me come around, my daddy said shoot.” By the end, it’s not clear if “men like me” refers to men like her father or men like Beyonce herself. Swift has Who’s Afraid of Little Old Me?: “you wouldn’t last an hour in the asylum where they raised me.”
They’re not just strong in spirit. They’re confident: “I’m the best thing at this party” (Swift, You’re Losing Me) and “the baddest woman in the game” (Beyonce, Hold Up). And they have money to back it up: “keep your money, I got my own” (Beyonce, Don’t Hurt Yourself) and “don't want money, just someone who wants my company” (Swift, The Prophecy).
What might it feel like to stand next to such a powerful woman?
Our ladies strutting their stuff.
Stop Interrupting My Grinding
Beyonce and Swift are billionaire superstars, but this phenomenon stretches down to us mortals, too. Women don’t need marriage for economic survival anymore.
But if women aren’t economically dependent, what are they? There are two extremes to this answer. One half might say there is no such thing as womanhood anymore. That gender might be neutralized or mutable. The other goes toward sex-based roles, like housewives devoted to the home with the grace of a Disney princess.
So women are either androgynous or super-feminine. These reactions are opposite but they come from the same place. For the first time ever, women can choose their husbands. Which means they can choose to leave them.
The guys on these albums can’t control that their women have choice. But, they can control what the women choose. By withdrawing from the relationships—through depression or cheating—they force the women to choose: the relationships or their personhoods.
It’s ironic that the trait that likely drew the men to these women—their strength—is ultimately the thing that ends it. Because if Beyonce and Swift were the kind of women who would self-sacrifice for a relationship, their men wouldn’t push them to this choice in the first place.
Beyonce goes out with a bang: “better call Becky with the good hair” (Sorry). Swift with “a bland goodbye” (loml). Either way, it’s over.
But these albums aren’t over! Where do we go from here??? Come back next week to find out.
*You’re Losing Me is a single released before The Tortured Poets Department.