Beyoncé is so cute when she gets angry: If the art accompanying her new song(s) "Bow Down / I Been On" is any indication, she looks like her prepubescent pageant-girl self Photoshopped onto a picture of her old living room/trophy display area. That's only the first indication the weirdness of the release, which came via Beyoncé's Tumblr yesterday. The song amassed over a million streams on Soundcloud in less than 24 hours, which must be some sort of record.
Singing her melodramatic heart out, Beyoncé rhapsodizes herself ("I know when you were little girls you dreamt of being in my world") and commands those who look up to her to "bow down," like they aren't already. It's redundant and a more straightforward way of boasting than, say, the elegant fuck-you of her Super Bowl performance. Just when it seems a little too human, the song transitions to "I Been On," in which a scarily pitched-down Beyoncé voice raps about her past ("I remember my baby hair with my dookie braids…shout out to Willie D. I was in that Willie D video when I was about 14. Lookin' crazy. Shout out to Pimp C. We used to sneak and listen to that U.G.K.").
Miss Info reports that "Bow Down" was produced by Hit Boy and Planet 6, while the spacey and sparse "I Been On" was done by Timbaland, Polow da Don, Sonny Digital, with The-Dream. Did they each push one button, and like Kraftwerk can we please have them line up and do that at MOMA?