Beyonce’s ‘B’Day’ Might Be Her Best Album To Date

The loud, raw, musical album was Beyoncé becoming BEYONCÉ before our eyes. Let’s discuss.

In April 2006, Beyoncé completed 6 months of filming Dreamgirls, and without telling her father/manager or label, she booked rooms at Sony Music Studios in New York. She called up the best producers & songwriters in hip-hop and R&B, and cut an entire sophomore album in two and a half weeks. She told Billboard she had ”so many things bottled up, so many emotions, so many ideas” at that time. And you can hear every one of them on the album. B’Day turns twenty today, and I want to make a case that I’ve been making for years: this might be the best album she has ever made. Not the biggest. Not the most decorated. The best.

Stay with me.

The B’Day sound is the key, so let’s start there. Dangerously in Love was plush, grown, a little polite – a great introduction into solo stardom. B’Day is all elbows. Hungrier, grittier, funkier, louder. Rich Harrison built “Suga Mama” and “Freakum Dress” out of live horns, drums and 1970s funk grit. It’s cut from the same cloth he crafted on “Crazy In Love,” except meaner and hungrier. Swizz Beatz turned “Ring the Alarm” into an air-raid siren with a woman scorned and screaming over it – which is still to this day the most unhinged single in her catalog (they released it second in the US; it rattled radio a little, and good). “Get Me Bodied” is an energetic choreography manual set to drums and chants that will not let you sit down.

Rodney “Darkchild” Jerkins put the bass and the hi-hat in your face on “Déjà Vu” and let her count the band in like a bandleader, because that’s what she’d become.

Rodney Jerkins on working with Beyoncé for “Deja Vu”:

“She told me that the music I had to make for her – she needed to be able to sing and dance to it. A lot of people can’t do that. So she was like, I want to be able to sing like crazy and dance like crazy. So I’m thinking, okay, well, who sings and dances? Michael Jackson. So we took a page from him. “Deja Vu” definitely puts you in the frame of the ‘Off The Wall’ album, with the live horns and strings and the major seventh chords. But yet, I’m putting 808s on top to give it that newness. The freshness, the scratches, and all that stuff give it that newness. And I think that’s what that song really embodied for her – to be able to sing and dance like crazy, you know? And I wrapped it all around musicality.”

Even the ballads have teeth. “Resentment” is a woman itemizing a betrayal in real time, receipt by receipt. And “Irreplaceable,” the prettiest, most radio-friendly song on the project, is a breakup carried out with the pent-up sass of someone reading you your rights before they set your bags at the curb. To the left, to the left.

Here’s what twenty years of distance lets you finally see clearly. B’Day is where Beyoncé the producer showed up. She co-wrote, co-arranged, and co-produced every track on it, sat in those rooms fourteen hours a day, ran what she called a “healthy competition” between Harrison, Jerkins, Swizz Beatz, and Sean Garrett down the hall from one another, and molded the whole thing with her own hands. Then she shot thirteen music videos in two weeks and bundled them as a visual album in 2007; before any of us had the vocabulary for it.

Beyoncé on B’Day’s 20th Anniversary:

"This album gave me permission to be free...to sang, scream, dominate, sweat, kick, break guitars, cry, experiment, spit [my] bars, and speak [my] mind. B'DAY walked so now I can fly."

Everybody credits 2013’s self-titled album as her “rebirth into a true artist” era: the surprise release, the “I’ll put it out when I decide” control, the visuals. But B’Day created that instinct. Self-titled just gave it a bigger budget with more power behind her name. B’Day saw her celebrating her Southern roots loudly and proudly, something that went against the grain of what we saw in pop music at the time. It was her way of honoring her Louisiana roots after the 2005 catastrophic events of Hurricane Katrina. Beyoncé would go on to be known for being a musical and cultural historian of sorts (think: Lemonade, RENAISSANCE and COWBOY CARTER), but it started here on B’Day.

B’Day matters right now for a reason that has nothing to do with nostalgia. We’re living through an R&B/pop moment that’s obsessed with softness: the whispered vocal, the 3 a.m.-text-as-a-song, the beautiful interior. I love that music. But B’Day is a standing reminder that R&B can also be big, loud, funky, percussive, and physical. It’s a reminder that a woman can make an entire album about being furious and passionate, and STILL make you move your whole body in the process. A lot of emerging artists could learn from a record cut this fast, this unbothered, this certain of itself before anyone had a chance to focus-group it and ask the algorithm for help.

And let’s talk about the performances this era gave us while we’re here. 2006’s iconic BET Awards performance of “Deja Vu.” The iconic 2006 MTV VMAs performance of “Ring The Alarm.” 2007’s iconic BET Awards performance of “Get Me Bodied.” The Oprah Show performance of “Listen.” The Beyoncé Experience world tour. This era was Beyoncé firing on all cylinders in every direction she turned. There were several career-defining moments happening weeks apart from each other. Only her.

It won Best Contemporary R&B Album at the 2007 Grammys. It moved 541,000 copies its first week and has gone 5X platinum since. Those are the numbers people strive for their whole careers. But, they’re not the reason I’m still playing it.

Twenty years later and I still put it on when I feel like moving THROUGH a moment, instead of past it. The sheer number of singles and performances and iconic moments that we got from this album era showcase how hungry Beyoncé was to claim that crown she currently holds. On a good day, my honest catalog ranking has it above Lemonade and RENAISSANCE, which I know is a fighting sentence for most and critics, but it deserves its place at the top of her catalog too. It was a rule-breaker in 2006, and I love rule breakers. They make for the best artists.

Today, on the album's twentieth birthday, Beyoncé reissued B'Day as a sprawling deluxe: remastered vault cuts finally set loose ("Creole," “Lost Yo Mind”, “Back Up”, "Can I Watch You" with Pharrell), and a run of Spanish-language reworkings folding in Maluma, a Celia Cruz sample, and a duet built from the late Selena Quintanilla's vocals with her estate's blessing. In the press release, she says she wanted B’Day to be "big, percussive, hard, and up-tempo," to cut through with live instrumentation, because while hip-hop was swallowing up radio at the time while she was fighting to protect the bridges and harmonies at the center of R&B.

So tell me: what’s the B’Day song you’d defend to the death? Mine is “Upgrade U.”