“I took some time to live my life, but don”t think I”m just his little wife,” sings Mrs. Shawn Carter, i.e. Beyonce, on “Bow Down/I Been On,” a track she dropped via SoundCloud on Sunday.
[More after the jump…]
The trap- influenced track opens with a heavily-manipulated voice as a not-so-sugary sweet kid before Beyonce comes on full of attitude and ego, telling us “This is my shit/Bow down, bitches.” There”s only about 40 seconds of Beyonce sounding like Beyonce in the entire 3:34 minute track before the song segues into “I Been On,” which features Beyonce”s vocals, chopped and screwed and manipulated to sound like a man”s, rapping about being all that. She”s clearly in a mood to salute her Houston hometown.
Hit-Boy, who also produced Jay-Z and Kanye West”s “Ni**as in Paris” and Lil Wayne”s “Drop the World,” produced “Bow Down/I Been On.” He’s now working with Britney Spears on her next album.
Fans have already taken the track and unpitched her voice so you can hear here (h/t MTV) what she really sounds like on the “I Been On” rap as she says “smack that trick.” “Tell me who”s going to take me off because I been on,” she says before giving out a shout out to Willie D and to the late Pimp C and the UGK (Underground Kingz)
The song, the first new music we”ve heard from Bey since 2011″s “Four,” is all posturing and it”s hard to think it”s anything more than a buzz song to get us talking about Beyonce because it”s been all of three minutes since we were, right? If It’s a first single, it’s not a strong one at all.
Beyonce’s Mrs. Carter World Tour starts June 28. No word on the release date for the next album, although we expect it will be before then.