It’s a blockbuster-adjacent curation that embraces African genres to reflect its feature film’s aesthetic.
That sentence also describes last year’s Kendrick Lamar-ledBlack Panther: The Album.
But Beyonce arguably has less wiggle room than Lamar despite being the planet’s most beloved music star.
Credit: Kwaku Alston/© 2019 Disney
“I wanted it to be authentic to what is beautiful about the music in Africa.”
Live-actionLion King, perhaps to its detriment, is a gussied-up shot-for-shot redo of the original.
Overall,The Giftcan’t help but be as palatable as possible.
Perhaps the worst perpetrator is “My Power.”
Mufasa’s spiel about universal balance opens the album and of course foreshadows something that threatens it.
Predictably,The Gift’s biggest successes come when Beyonce and the crew decide to play it straight.
Untethered to the grandioseness of the project’s premise, the mother-daughter collaboration is instantly likable in its earnestness.
