TS Madison on getting sampled on COZY and meeting Beyoncé!

Mike Myers on working with Beyoncé

The misogynistic tone aside, he’s not entirely wrong. Drake and Rihanna are on this table too. But yes, she and her fans helped ruin the way we consume and evaluate music. Music was reduced to numbers. Collaborations became something to demonise. Exceptionalism got diluted, while mediocrity became heavily rewarded, fuelled by media outlets, stan culture and algorithms. Everything that once made music exciting started taking a back seat. “She writes her own songs.” Okay, but is the song GOOD? Somewhere along the way, authorship itself became more important than the quality of what was actually written. I’d rather have 100 people write an incredible song than one person single-handedly write an awful one. Some of the greatest music ever made came from collaboration. Artists needed producers, writers, musicians and outside perspectives to challenge them and elevate the work. Now, having too many collaborators is treated like some kind of artistic deficiency. And I think that’s where she really cracked the code. She found a way to make mediocrity feel like exceptionalism. You don’t necessarily have to recognise great production, exceptional vocals, innovative arrangements or even particularly strong songwriting. The music can be stripped down to something incredibly accessible, familiar and easy to digest, then packaged and marketed brilliantly until its commercial success becomes the evidence of its supposed artistic greatness. That’s what bothers me. The conversation stopped being “Is this actually great music?” and became “Look at the numbers.” Sales, streams, records, chart positions, variants, first-week figures. Commercial dominance became synonymous with artistic excellence, and those are simply not the same thing.

Yemi Alade talks about working with Beyoncé on ‘BLACK IS KING’. ‘I walked into her office and there were all the pictures of African artists on her wall, and my picture was so big.. it had my tribal paints.. I felt so alive. I felt seen in my true element’