Beyoncé's Pray You Catch Me: A Gift of Melancholic Vulnerability

Beyonce is 40 just 40. I say that not in regard to how she's aged, But to what she's done what she's accomplished in what to me is a very short time. Her discography sounds and feels longer stretched out across time than her age. And it's a discography with a seemingly endless amount of ubiquitous hits and astonishing deep cuts. So one would think picking a fave would be a difficult task, but when thinking about my favorite Beyonce track it really was quite easy. Though I wouldn't say “It’s not close, it feels that way regardless of whether I would say or not. The track in question; 2016's “Pray You Catch Me”. The track for me represents everything that makes Beyonce great and everything that made lemonade the definitive classic that it is. It’s sung with the kind of precision and discipline that has made Beyonce one of our greatest vocalist. It’s distant enough, and yet as the rest of Lemonade would continue to amplify - it is intensely personal, to a point that goes beyond merely knowing the “what” of a painful event, or even the “how” of a personal response and or feels, and travels further yet into the recesses of a conversation with one’s subconscious to reveal a vulnerability rarely articulated by Beyonce or any artist. What I love about the song is how beautifully, poetically, and easily it captures the complex emotions behind betrayal by someone you love so deeply. It conveys precisely a contradiction of emotions to such an exactidude and level of relatability that I dare any listener to not start cracking a little bit when you ponder the existence and the connection between the words. “I’m praying to catch you whispering, I pray you catch me listening”. Would seem a conflict of interest but it’s exactly the kind of twisted form of emotional incongruity we display in such a weakened vulnerable position. The want, dare I say it can feel like a need- to both catch the object of our affection in the midst of their betrayal and to let them see us is a type of narcissistic revenge scenario wherein a play in our minds sees the person who has hurt us seeing that hurt and realizing what they’ve lost - as we now having found imaginary closure - find ourselves able to move on. I’ve been cheated on twice in my life and both times I found myself playing out scenarios much like the one Beyonce and Co. so remarkably describe, even now as Beyonce vocalizes “I can taste the dishonesty”.

“CONSTANTLY AWARE OF IT ALL, MY LONELY EAR PRESSED AGAINST THE WALLS OF YOUR WORLD”

It’s one of my favorite lines of music ever. Heart wrenching in its stilted disjointed word play , and so achingly descriptive of the isolation and incredulousness of the scribed lover. Lesser artist than Beyoncé and Co-Writer James Blake ( Kevin Garett is also credited but in spirit and soul this feels like James Blake) migh’tve gone with a more straightforward version of this to the effect of “Boy Im not dumb I been watching and hearing everything that’s going on”. But this is not an anthem about pain, its not Kelis's “Caught Out There”. Its not Bill Duke in the interrogation room in “Menace II Society” repeating “You Know you done fucked up Right”. It’s not even a vocalization, what’s being described isn't even a conversation, nothing has been revealed. We are being made privy to the hurt before the release, the calm before the storm, a journal, a scene written on page before it becomes reality, and that’s why it’s so powerful. Pray You Catch Me is the spiritual sister of Stevie Wonder's “Lately”. A quiet, imaginary back and forth reckoning with the harm caused by speaking only to the desire to have the other person merely see it on you. Like that great Stevie song there is no closure, there is no conclusion, the desire is the end, and it is the beginning, because the song is not really about the other person it’s about us, and her, and it’s a beautiful gift from a deeply guarded artist.