【搬运译】Pitchfork评Beyonce 2019年现场专辑《Homecoming:The Live Album》
搬运自：微信公众号【评论搬一堆】（在原文基础上添加了英语原文与排版调整）
翻译：WhitneyL
校正：Nina Wang
排版：Ryan-Chopin
Beyoncé’s historic Coachella set is preserved as a stunning live album that captures an artist at her peak, flexing her catalog and shining a light on the genius of black artists that came before her.
《Homecoming:The Live Album》记录了科切拉音乐节上Beyonce呈现的史诗级音乐现场。这张专辑展现了一位艺术家在她巅峰时刻的无尽才华，是迄今为止黑人歌手天赋的极大释放。
Six solo albums in, six years after the surprise release of her self-titled album, three years after the groundbreaking Lemonade, one year after the rap album she delivered with her husband, and we’re starting to get it. We’re starting to understand Beyoncé Knowles-Carter as a musician with unparalleled range, depth, and power: acknowledging her rapperly talents, her breathless musical ambition, her ear and eye for synthesis and abiding love for black culture. With the release of Homecoming: The Live Album, the 40-track companion to her headlining sets from last year’s Coachella released as a documentary film with Netflix, we glimpse the artist at work during her peak—in voice, physicality, and confidence—reimagining and remixing her own catalog, decentering herself to shine a light on her influences and foundations.
六年前，Beyoncé的同名专辑惊喜问世；三年前，她的《Lemonade（柠檬汁）》开启了一个新时代；去年，她和她丈夫一起发行了说唱专辑；今天，我们终于迎来了《Homecoming:The Live Album》。透过她惊人的说唱天赋、令人窒息的音乐抱负、善于发现美的眼睛和耳朵，以及对黑人文化的永恒热爱，我们逐渐知晓这位音乐家，不论是在广度、深度还是力量上都无与伦比。今年，纪录片《Homecoming》于Netflix上线，记录了去年科切拉音乐节上40-k混响与Beyoncé声线的完美融合。透过这张专辑，我们见证了Beyoncé嗓音、身体、和内心共登峰顶的巅峰状态，见证了她对自己音乐风格的一次改写和重塑，见证了她惊人的实力与影响力。
#Beychella redefined what was possible for a music festival. On stage, over 200 bodies undulated in unison but miraculously, every body moved in its own way. They filled out a set of risers constructed into a pyramid, built to look like the bleachers of a football stadium at a black college or university. Filling the structure was an orchestra that included a drumline and a full brass band that introduced themselves with the steady refrain of the Rebirth Brass Band’s “Do Whatcha Wanna.” Male dancers stood in a trembling line like black fraternity pledges, female dancers dressed as majorettes, background singers formed a choir of unified sound and movement, folding their bodies into Beyoncé’s intricately aggressive choreography.
科切拉音乐节中的Beychella表演重新定义了音乐节的可能性。舞台上，200多个人此起彼伏，每个人舞步各异却又能奇迹般地统一，最终所有人组成一个金字塔，活像黑人大学的足球看台。金字塔由一支管弦乐队构成，包括一个乐鼓手和一支完整的铜管乐队，他们用Rebirth Brass Band的“Do Whatcha Wanna(做你想做的)”引燃全场。男舞者们像黑人兄弟同盟会一样站成曲线，女舞者们则打扮成鼓手队长，合唱歌手们组成了一个唱诗班，跳着Beyoncé精巧又攻气十足的舞蹈。
It was an old-fashioned revue, a cacophony of talent. It was a defiant celebration of complex, diasporic blackness. Woven into Beyoncé’s performance was a genealogy that hat-tipped the Clark Sisters, Big Freedia, Nina Simone, Fela Kuti, and James Weldon Johnson. I was home on the couch when I saw a grainy live stream of the first weekend’s show, dazzled, mouth agape, proud: Here was Beyoncé practicing black studies in front of a broad audience, digging into the long, living archive of black ephemera. The Netflix film gives you the performances as Beyoncé wanted them seen, with close-ups of bedazzled costumes and their pastel colors worn by bodies of all sizes. You see the sweat of rehearsals and Beyoncé’s exacting physical regimen to get herself back into performing shape after the 2017 birth of her twins. You see the underlying ethos that guides her work in the form of quotes and music cited from the poets, writers, and artists like Maya Angelou and Toni Morrison, who conjured worlds that demanded and centered an abundant, fecund blackness.
这是一部老式的表演剧，是一场才华横溢的闹剧，是复杂离散的黑人们举办的一场颇有挑衅意味的盛典。Beyoncé在表演中融入了the Clark Sisters、Big Freedia、Nina Simone、Fela Kuti和James Weldon Johnson等风格。当我窝在自家的沙发里看到这场秀的时候，我目瞪口呆，同时心中充满骄傲：Beyonce正在挖掘黑人文化的悠久历史，并向广大观众展现她对黑人文化的深刻剖析。Netflix公司的这部纪录片呈现了Beyonce引以为傲的镜头和故事，比如体型各异的人穿着五颜六色的服装，彩排时的汗水，以及Beyonce在2017年生下双胞胎后为了重回舞台而进行的严格的身体锻炼。这部纪录片将她的作品所蕴含的精神世界展现得淋漓尽致：她的创作灵感源于诗人或作家的名言以及艺术家的音乐风格（比如Maya Angelou和Toni Morrison），以及他们创造的一个由黑人主导的文化灿烂的世界。
Homecoming is an important document of those performances, with careful mixing and engineering that render each track with stunning lucidity. We hear, for example, Kelly Rowland’s feathery soprano during the three-song suite of Destiny’s Child hits; it allows us to linger for a moment on the group’s legendary chemistry and three-part harmonies. Homecoming doesn’t stand on its own as an album experience separate from the film. It probably doesn’t need to. Beyoncé and her sister Solange increasingly rely on visuals to paint a fully embodied and populated vision that includes music. Homecoming, an accompaniment to a concert film, feels as if it wasn’t ever meant to be experienced in isolation. Still, it could be one of Beyoncé’s most important releases for how it illuminates both her past and her future.
《Homecoming》是这些表演的重要记录，细致的混合与精心的设计使得每首歌曲都清晰明朗。例如，在Destiny’s Child的三首热门歌曲中，Kelly Rowland轻柔的女高音让我们在听到乐队歌曲中传奇般的副歌和第三部分的和声时都不禁停留片刻。Beyoncé和她的妹妹Solange越来越依赖视觉效果来传达她们的音乐理念，因而《Homecoming》的专辑体验与电影密切相关：这是一部音乐会电影的伴奏，不应该脱离电影而独立存在。作为Beyoncé最为重要的专辑之一，《Homecoming》照亮了她的过去和未来。
Beyoncé’s core musical vocabulary is the rhythm and bounce of a tune. She’s a classicist who believes in a song’s structure—choruses, bridges, meticulous verses, extended vamps, key changes. Her uptempo songs like “Crazy in Love,” “Countdown,” and “Love on Top” are some of the most inventive, dexterous pop and R&B music of the past couple of decades. For nearly the entire 110 minutes, she isolates these adrenaline-spiking cuts, amplifying their kinetic energy with marching-band arrangements. The extended version of B’Day’s 2006 single “Get Me Bodied” is a highlight here, as is 2005’s “Check on It.” Both are supercharged booty thumpers, more than a decade old that sound newly baptized in the world of Homecoming: the clarion calls of trumpets and whoomps of sousaphones, the foot-stomping on the risers and the off-mic “ayys” of the dancers that are sprinkled throughout. The arrangements amplify the relationship Beyoncé’s music has to the inherently percussive body.
谈起Beyoncé的核心音乐风格，自然是曲调的节奏和音调的跳转。她是一个古典主义者，也就是说在她看来最重要的应该是歌曲的结构——合唱、衔接、一丝不苟的诗句、延伸的肢体语言、关键性的变化。她的快歌如“Crazy in Love（疯狂爱）”、“Countdown（倒计时）”和“Love on Top（把爱放在第一位）”是近几十年来流行音乐和R&B音乐中且最巧妙且最富有创意的歌曲。在整整110分钟的时间里，她把这些刺激肾上腺素分泌的歌词拆开，通过军乐来释放它们的力量。2006年的单曲“Get Me Bodied（让我展现）”（出自专辑《B 'Day（生日）》）的加长版和2005年的单曲“Check on It（确认一下）”是这张专辑的闪光点。这两首活了十多年的歌都是超级劲爆的狂想曲，然而在《Homecoming》的世界里，小号的号角声和萨瑟笛的呜呜声、踏在立管上的脚步声、以及不带麦的舞者们发出的“ayys”声使这两首歌焕然一新。这些舞台安排加深了Beyoncé的音乐风格与现有打击乐之间的联系。
Still, Beyoncé’s a singer first, and it’s thrilling to hear her full-throated, low-end brassiness with so much clarity. She’s still got the flexibility to play in her upper ranges, but the musicality at the bottom of her range, where she belts the early notes of the rare ballad in this collection, “I Care,” is stunning. She growls through Lemonade cuts like “Sorry” and “Don’t Hurt Yourself,” but also whispers and coos through the early notes of “Partition.”
话说回来，歌手终究是歌手。Beyoncé那带有黄铜质感的嗓音清晰而又低沉有力，总能振奋人心。唱起高音，她灵活自如；唱起快接触到她音域下限的民谣“I Care,（我在乎，）”，她令人如痴如醉。《Lemonade》中，她断断续续地咆哮着“Sorry（对不起）”和“Don’t Hurt Yourself,（别伤到你自己，）”；而在“Partition（分割）”首段中，她又开始喃喃细语。
The recorded versions of Homecoming’s interludes and transitions draw out the black pop musical history Beyoncé cites and interpolates. “SpottieOttieDopaliscious” and “Swag Surfin” are important moments, but so are those when she employs TRU’s “I’m Bout’ It, Bout It” UGK’s “Something Good”—regional classics of the black South. She doubles down on her archival work, her career-long project of interpreting black music and big-upping black Houston and black Louisiana. (The only new piece of music on Homecoming is a bonus studio cover of Maze Featuring Frankie Beverly’s 1981 “Before I Let Go,” an evergreen black jam that gets every generation moving.) The moments feel like nods to the audience she so deliberately centers. The film captures this phenomenon of a mutual, pointed gaze with its frequent close-ups of black audience members, who were few and far between at the actual shows. Her rapport with the crowd is loose, filled with “I see you’s” that are left in the recording and further punctuate that Beyoncé was hoping to make a specific statement to a specific group of people.
《Homecoming》的插曲和转场的录音版本叙述了Beyoncé引用的黑人流行音乐史。“SpottieOttieDopaliscious”和“Swag Surfin”，还有她使用的TRU的“I’m Bout ' It, Bout It”和UGK的“Something Good（这些美好时刻）”(南方黑人地区的经典歌曲) 都是黑人流行音乐史上的里程碑。纵观Beyoncé的职业生涯，她在不断地研究黑人音乐文化，并致力于诠释黑人音乐和大力提升黑人在休斯顿和路易斯安那州的地位。(《Homecoming》中唯一的一首新歌是对Maze Featuring Frankie Beverly 1981年的 “Before I Let Go（在我放手前）”的翻唱，原曲是感动了一代又一代人的黑人音乐典范。)纪录片中，Beyoncé刻意把注意力放在观众上，看起来就像是在向观众点头致意。这种相互凝视的画面是通过对黑人观众频繁的特写拍摄捕捉到的，而事实上现场的黑人观众寥寥无几。Beyoncé与观众的互动实际上也不太频繁，录音中我们只能时不时听到她留下的一句 “I see you’s”，不过这也进一步突出了她向特定人群传达特殊信号的渴望。
The album sounds communal, like a revival meeting in a small, sweaty tent that leaves you lifted and fortified. It’s as much about Beyoncé as it is about the people who made her and the people who sustain her. As I was listening, my upstairs neighbors, two young black women, were also listening at full volume. My friend in Miami was texting me hot takes, while my sister, who’d attended the show on the second weekend, was tweeting about how much the white people in the audience seemed to just not get it. Every Beyoncé event is a gospel you want to tell somebody about, but this one doubles down on this feeling of communion. She’s singing songs you already know, and connecting them to other songs you remember, too. She’s drawing on her past, looking back, but also looking squarely back at us.
这张专辑听起来就像是在一个挤满人的小帐篷里举行的一场复兴会，让你感到兴奋不已。这不仅关乎Beyoncé，也关乎她的塑造者和支持者。当我在听的时候，我楼上的两个年轻的黑人妇女也在全神贯注地听着；我在迈阿密的朋友给我实时共享Beyoncé的热点消息；我的妹妹在第二个周末也参加了这个节目，还推特上说观众中的不少白人看起来并没有听懂这些歌背后的含义。Beyoncé的每一次活动都会让你迫不及待地与他人分享，而这次的活动更是将这种渴望交流的感觉放大了一倍。她唱我们熟悉的歌，也唱这些耳熟能详的歌组合成的新歌；她在回忆过去的自己，也在注视现在的我们。
Black women and rock’n’roll pioneers like Memphis Minnie, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and Etta James, and contemporary queens of rhythmic music like Janet Jackson and Missy Elliott have not received sufficient credit for their innovations. Beyoncé, famously, was the first black woman headliner of the nearly 20-year-old festival. In a space where she was not obviously welcome, she made an enduring impression. A home. Then she made it about something other than herself. She brought an entire lineage into the room.
黑人女性中，不论是摇滚先驱Memphis Minnie、Sister Rosetta Tharpe和Etta James，还是当代节奏音乐女王Janet Jackson，她们的创新都没有得到足够的赞誉。但同我们所知晓的一样，Beyoncé成为了有近20年历史的科切拉音乐节中的第一位黑人话题女王。在这样一个显然不受欢迎的地方，她给人留下了经久不衰的印象。而且，除了自我塑造之外，她还将整个黑人群体都带入了大众视野。
Within a few months of each other, both Knowles sisters released projects that reimagined home as a soulful black utopia, rooted in the best of its abundant past but queerer, more holistic, self-aware, embodied, and feminist than before. Homecoming is a wondrous, rapturous collage that reveals how Beyoncé has made a career of playing, dipping, and diving in the “great pool of black genius”: the genius of her forebears, her contemporaries, and her own. For her entire life, she’s brought the mainstream over to her. Where will we all go next?
在一起相处的几个月内，Knowles姐妹（Beyoncé和她妹妹）都发布了几首歌曲，把家乡重新塑造成一个历史悠久人情味浓的黑人乌托邦，不同的是这次比以往更奇特、更全面、更具自觉性、更具体、更女权主义。《Homecoming》是一幅奇妙又令人欣喜的拼贴画，讲述了Beyoncé如何在几代“黑人天才的泳池”中自在地嬉戏、浸泡和潜水。回顾过去，音乐的主流一直与她同行。那么接下来，她会带领我们走向哪里?
