Her royal highness, Beyoncé, has caused a stir with her tantalizing new cover of GQ magazine. Now that the publication has bumped up more stills from the shoot, plus the cover story, there’s even more reason to get excited. She is coming with new music and so far as worked with the likes of Pharrell, The-Dream, and Justin Timberlake. Plus, she describes the new music as very 1990s, with elements of rock and soul in addition to influences from Prince, D’Angelo, and Diana Ross.
My body is ready.
Get into these excerpts:
On her collaborators: "I’ve been working with Pharrell and Timbaland and Justin Timberlake and Dream. We all started in the ’90s, when R&B was the most important genre, and we all kind of want that back: the feeling that music gave us."
On songwriting: "I used to start with lyrics and then I’d find tracks—often it was something I had in my head, and it just so happened to go with the melody. Now I write with other writers. It starts with the title or the concept of what I’m trying to say, and then I’ll go into the booth and sing my idea. Then we work together to layer on."
On the album’s influences: "Mostly R&B. I always have my Prince and rock/soul influences. There’s a bit of D’Angelo, some ’60s doo-wop. And Aretha and Diana Ross."
On her inspirations: "Even the silliest little thing that you hear on the radio, it comes from something deeper. ‘Bootylicious’ was funny, but it came from people saying that I had gained weight and me being like, ‘I’m a southern woman, and this is how southern women are.’ My motivation is always to express something or to heal from something or to laugh and rejoice about something."
The King also reflected on her own power thanks to her celebrity and musical presence, acknowledging, "I now know that, yes, I am powerful. I’m more powerful than my mind can even digest and understand."
Still, the woman who never shies away from bolstering women, realizes than gender inequality continues to bring us all down:
"You know, equality is a myth, and for some reason, everyone accepts the fact that women don’t make as much money as men do. I don’t understand that. Why do we have to take a backseat?" she says in her film, which begins with her 2011 decision to sever her business relationship with her father. "I truly believe that women should be financially independent from their men. And let’s face it, money gives men the power to run the show. It gives men the power to define value. They define what’s sexy. And men define what’s feminine. It’s ridiculous."
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