Beyoncé’s Lion King Album Is the Event the Movie Wishes It Could Be

Every well-meaning effort to make The Lion King “more African” over the years has had to contend with the fact that, at its root, the franchise is about as African as a party of Trump children on safari, although infinitely more pleasant. So now she’s also released a tie-in album of new songs that aren’t in the movie itself, titled The Lion King: The Gift, which Beyoncé has described both as “sonic cinema” and as “a love letter to Africa.” Those claims seem debatable, but I’m confident this album is mountains, valleys, rivers, and savannahs better than the movie. Some of that made its way into The Lion King stage musical as the Nala-led number “Shadowland,” which strangely wasn’t used as a Beyoncé showcase in the new movie. Otherwise, though, from the opener, “Bigger,” The Gift transliterates the leonine royal-family drama and “circle of life” worldview of The Lion King into the recent main leitmotif of Beyoncé’s own work. Likewise, the second song, “Find Your Way Back”, may coincide with the scenes of Mufasa imparting fatherly wisdom to his cub, but it’s especially moving as a gentler sequel to Lemonade’s twangily tense “Daddy Lessons.” Elsewhere there’s the Carter-clan victory dance of “Mood 4 Eva” with Jay and Childish Gambino—Jay laying in the Afrocentric references both impressively and a bit thick: “At the Saxon Madiba suite, like Mandela/ Bumpin’ Fela on the Puma jet, like we from Lagos/ Mansa Musa reincarnated, we on our levels.” After the earliest two Beyoncé-free tracks, each musically and verbally head-spinning—“Don’t Jealous Me” from Tekno, Yemi Alade, and Mr. Eazi, and then Burna Boy’s solo,“Ja Ara E,” all hailing from Nigeria—she returns with Lamar on “Nile.” It’s a meditation on the psychic effects of motherland dreamtime: “Darker the berry, sweeter the fruit/ Deeper the wounded, deeper the roots/ Nubian doused in brown, I’m loungin’ in it.