Why Did Pitchfork Say Beyoncé Sounded Too Real?

Pitchfork faulted Beyoncé for sounding too real. One panelist reads the line straight from the review: most of all, Beyoncé just sounds too real. Pitchfork wrote that her pitch-perfect plasticity gave much of her earlier work its majestic aura. After she voluntarily stepped down from her pedestal, she struggled to inspire the same sense of awe. Her songs emoted as intensely as before, but the emotions were all too human.

A few albums later, the complaint became the thing Pitchfork loved about her. Another panelist calls the path through Sasha Fierce, up into Four, and up into Beyoncé a very clean build of an artist finding themselves and then expressing themselves and their art in new and more interesting ways. In retrospect, nobody could have seen where the run was headed, and the panelist is not going to slam Pitchfork for missing it.