Beyoncé's stunning visual album, Lemonade, is a celebration of Black women and culture. Now, it's earned one of the top awards in entertainment. As reported by E! Online, Lemonade just won a Peabody Award.
The coveted prize honors excellence in television, radio, and digital broadcasting. This year, Bey's Lemonade is the only album on the list.
The Grammy-nominated work — which many felt should have received the Grammy for Album Of The Year, but lost to Adele's 25 in one of the ceremony's most controversial moments — is one of seven honorees this year, the rest of which are TV series. FX's Atlanta and Better Things, BBC One's Happy Valley, Channel 4's National Treasure, Hulu's Horace & Pete, and HBO's Veep were also celebrated.
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According to the organizers of the awards ceremony — which will be hosted by Rashida Jones on May 20 — the reason for Lemonade's honor had to do with the way in which it "challenges our cultural imagination."
"Lemonade draws from the prolific literary, musical, cinematic, and aesthetic sensibilities of Black cultural producers to create a rich tapestry of poetic innovation," the organizers said in a statement. "The audacity of its reach and fierceness of its vision challenges our cultural imagination, while crafting a stunning and sublime masterpiece about the lives of women of color and the bonds of friendship seldom seen or heard in American popular culture."
Though many fans initially saw Lemonade as an analysis of infidelity — or perhaps a catharsis from an experience with infidelity — it's so much more than the bat-swinging, window-bashing revenge that Beyoncé flirts with in the video for "Hold Up." It's about the fierceness of women, specifically Black women whom society often overlooks, no matter how special or rare they are. While Bey may not have won her deserved Grammy, being the only visual album on this list of honorees proves she's not going anywhere — and that her voice is louder than ever.