Beyoncé - Crazy In Love

Those horns, man. A sample from The Chi-Lites "Are You My Woman (Tell Me So)" slowed down and pumped up into a gargantuan fanfare demolishing anything in its way to rubble. It's one of the most physically powerful beginnings to one of the most physically powerful songs in history. It may sound weird to say this song rocks hard, but it truly does, it has the visceral, propulsive energy shared with the best rock music, not just in the horns but also in the thickness of that gloriously simple bass and those cymbals the beat keeps pounding away at. Then we get the flip side to the sample. The horns drop out, and we get a relief of the tension in the almost jazzy cymbal rhythm as Beyonce introduces the "uh oh uh oh uh oh I'm gonna" hook, with a subtle filter effect swirling around it making it sound silkier.

And that's a remarkable part of "Crazy In Love" in that, despite what I've said about its immense physicality, Beyonce makes the smart move of keeping fairly restrained throughout the first half of this song and avoiding turning a song with that kind of opening into overkill. She keeps it cool and mid-range in the verses and when the horns come back for the chorus, she builds a humble but infectious rhythmic hook that builds up towards the end. We get some overdubs in the second chorus including some strong "wa-oh!"s hinting at more to come and lead into Jay-Z's verse.

Honestly, Jay's verse here is one of my favourite filler-rap verses from hit pop songs, and I can basically recite the whole thing by heart if needed (probably because of how much I love this song). You could probably argue that it's unnecessary part and doesn't add anything and I'm not sure if I could fully refute that, but I'll try. I do think it helps keep the song's momentum going, particularly when they bring the horns back in underneath him briefly (with some backing vocals from Beyonce) and when they drop back out he brings out his most phonetically distinct part of the verse in "Jay-Z in the RANGE crazy and deRANGED they can't figure 'em out they like "hey is he inSANE?"". Plus it helps take the focus of Beyonce for a bit and allow her to arrive back with that monster of a bridge. The horns back sounding huger than ever before somehow (note how the drums are just pounding on the cymbal and kick for 4 bars, not even including the snare until the final 2 bars) and Bey generates an absurd amount of tension with "Got me lookiiiing so CRAZY muh BAABY" coiling up until "baby AAAAAAH DON'T CAAAAARE" and the horns drop out again her voice just lets loose in the way it's been waiting the whole song to do. Now I normally don't go for singing that's bombastic as a whole, infact a lot of the time it grates on me. But it's SO utterly right for a song this exhilarating, and so well-executed for its job at that. And when those final choruses come in I'm going on Will-Butler-on-stage-during-Rebellion-(Lies)-levels of energy. It becomes almost impossible to believe that a song this energised could be made out of little more than one sample, but it happened, and I love it to bits. Even though she's grown so much as an artist overall in the years since this single's release, it still ranks with even the mightiest songs from Lemonade.
Dernière édition: 28/02/2019 13:19