Me big Beyonce fan. Me enjoy this. Me have other thoughts on this, but who will read? Me thinks me is shouting into the void.

Wanted to see what all the fuss was about. A bit overly self-indulgent and pretentious and it's a little too stop-starty with the music, there are some pretty great visuals and some great tracks towards the middle.

It's not a music video, it's beat poetry with music. Like much of that form, it's self indulgent and sometimes silly and not the best way of communicating ideas, but it's interesting all the same for the dedication it takes to make it all fit together. That it combines that lyrical creativity with equally energetic visual creativity (though it too lacks true originality or depth) makes it stand out as a unique work. It's not something that speaks to me, or entertains me, but it intrigued me.

I've come to rather like the craftsmanship and pace of the album, even though it moves in mechanical form from male-identified victimization to faux-political uplift, all laced with enough self-importance for Bey to culturally stand as a role model. But visually it implodes into film school: whispers, poetic framing, overripe spoken interludes, intertitles aping the Kübler-Ross model. This era's prime video artist is M.I.A.

Pretty pictures but this failed really to excite musically or thematically. No doubt I'm not the intended audience, but it seemed more than anything to stand testament to the elaborateness of the marketing methods tied to contemporary industrialised music. Sentiments were same old same old. Much is apparently made of allegedly autobiographical elements, but one can only wonder about the level of the diva's contribution, given she's a woman who seems not to know how to pronounce the word "sword".