Beyoncé’s name has been synonymous with perfectionism and power for a long time now. But the most recent phase of her career has sought to peel back the superhuman veneer while still maintaining an extreme degree of control over her image. One of the achievements of her 2013 self-titled album was reminding audiences that her current reign came about only through a long slog of hard work: The fierceness barrage of “Flawless” was bookended by a clip of her on Star Search in 1993, where the host mispronounced her name and then announced her group had lost to a rock band.

Her new album and film, Lemonade, is not about rising to greatness; it’s about being great and still having to struggle. Part of the genius of it is in putting specific and interesting meaning back into the “lemons into lemonade” phrase, otherwise washed of its power by overuse. The lemons here are the betrayal (we are led to think) of Beyoncé’s husband Jay Z. They are also the historic burdens black women have faced. Highlighting these obstacles communicates that Beyoncé is not above the rest of humankind—she is right in the middle of it, facing personal problems like we all do, yoked to history and society like we all are.

Lemonade goes further still in disassembling cliché and using each piece of it for effect. Lemonade is associated with the American South, where much of the visual album is set. Turning lemons into lemonade entails exactly the kind of labor—traditionally feminine, communal-minded, nourishing—that Beyoncé seeks to elevate. We don’t just hear Jay Z’s grandma Hattie say she turned lemons into lemonade; we get her actual recipe (“one pint of water, add a half pound of sugar, the juice of eight lemons, the zest of half lemon ...”).

Perhaps most impressively from an artistic perspective, Beyoncé deepens the victim-to-victory narrative by avoiding pat moments of uplift. Some people might argue that the visual album’s eventual arrival at the images of cute, diverse couples seems Hallmark-y. But sit with the album and you find the real story Beyoncé tells is of a measured victory, won on compromised terms, with much work left to be done. That’s why the climax of reconciliation, “All Night,” is sung in future-tense: It’s about the expectation of rekindled passion, not yet the existence of it. That’s why you have a queasy interstitial like “Forward,” during which she shows the mothers of black men killed by police. Triumph does not erase loss. Personal success only means so much in a society that’s failing in so many ways.

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The controlling metaphor of Drake’s new album, Views, is the cycle of seasons in Toronto from winter to summer to winter again. This is a perfect Drake concept on so many levels—the cold edges, the hometown pride, the overlap of banal and specific—but the most important one may be the fact that it communicates stasis. Winter is always coming; a year from now, most things will be the same. One of the threads through the album is an odd and arguably pathological belief in the permanent present when it comes to romance: “If I ever loved ya, I’ll always love ya that’s how I was raised”; “I group DM my exes / I tell ‘em they belong to me, that goes on for forever.”