Fond of the May release, Ciara’s seventh album, Beauty Marks, indeed, marks an occasion. For its been four years since the also May-released Jackie came out. A record named in honor of her mother as “it was the best title for where I am in my life… Being a mom, I can now see the world through her eyes and fully understand what she was thinking. Being a mom has changed me forever.”
Ciara clearly still has motherhood on the mind with Beauty Marks, as well as feeling at last a sense of peace after her very public breakup with Future (whose influence is sonically manifold throughout Jackie). Unlike fellow Texan Beyoncé, Ciara’s call for empowerment somehow comes across as more genuine as opposed to part of a calculated play for having the monopoly on Blackness™®. Because with Ciara, it isn’t about being black, so much as being a human that ought to engage in the life-extending daily endeavor of self-love.
So it is that she commences the record with “I Love Myself” (not a masturbation anthem, as you might be led to believe). While it is more than somewhat tainted by the presence of Macklemore talking about parenthood (the cringeworthiest line being, “Don’t want the ‘Gram telling my daughters what beauty is, nah/I ain’t raising princesses, I’m raising warriors), there are glimmers of the same beat and intonation as Suzanne Vega’s “Tom’s Diner” as she sings, “I was sitting on the bed, Atlanta, Georgia/All alone in my emotions, full of fear/Gotta protect this precious life, I got the future by my side/Be the last time that I cry these tears again.” Going on to share her somewhat prosaic revelations about self-love coming from within (duh, as Billie Eilish would say), she assures both herself and her listeners that so long as she loves herself, she’ll never fall again–particularly since there would be way more backlash in today’s climate if Vibe airbrushed her clothes off without her knowledge before publishing her “nude” form on their pages. So yeah, it’s shit like that that can really kick a girl while she’s down, and throw her own sense of self-worth a little bit.
Luckily, Ciara has chosen to level up in the years since, an expression celebrated on the record’s second track of the same name. Fast-paced and motivating, Ciara urges women everywhere to treat their goals like property, to quote Ari, or rather a game of levels to be conquered. On the Beyoncé-tinged (sounds very similar to “Apeshit,” if one asks this listener) “Set,” Ciara continues to drip with confidence as she asserts, “I hustle ’til I pass out/Treat all my shoeboxes like the bank now/Guess you could say that I’m the man, wow (yes, I am the man)/On that big boss level, and I put that on my set.”
Another sentiment on her “set” is that of the giddiness that comes with love, as evidenced on the second single from Beauty Marks, “Thinkin Bout You.” In contrast to the swaggering arrogance of “Set,” “Thinkin Bout You” contrasts it with a softer side of Ciara as she falls prey to the charms of a new love interest. Presumably based on less than new love Russell Wilson, a quarterback for the Seahawks, her elation at having found someone who makes her feel truly and completely at peace with herself is all over the song.
Accordingly, “Trust Myself” follows with Ciara speaking to her inability to control her emotions as they funnel out through her body whenever she’s around the one who has captivated every aspect of her sentience. She half-rues, half-surrenders, “I don’t trust myself around you/It’s like my body got a mind of its own/One touch and I’m begging for two/Strung out and I don’t know what to do/I don’t trust myself around you.”
Again providing a stark contrast like the themes and tones of “Set” versus “Thinkin Bout You,” “Girl Gang” featuring Kelly Rowland is all about a sense of taking control as opposed to being out of it. And, speaking of Beyoncé by way of Kelly Rowland, there is plenty of musical kinship between “Girl Gang” and “Lose My Breath,” the lead single from Destiny’s Child final record together, Destiny Fulfilled. Yet unlike “Lose My Breath,” “Girl Gang” doesn’t feel like a tongue-in-cheek call to action so much as a barrage of stock phrases generated by the internet, such as, “Girl gang, squad goals, bang bang/Sauced up, sauced up, dripping, ring ring.” However, one can’t help but smile at Ciara’s response to question of her favorite position being CEO. Surely that’s almost enough to redeem some of the less innovative lyrics of the track.
On the marching band reminiscent (again something Bey seems to have the patent on after Homecoming) “Dose,” Ciara warns, “I’ma hit you with a dose/I’ma get a little closer/I’ma give a little more/Put your body in motion/I’ma hit you with a dose/Can you keep your composure?” The beat picks up increasingly as Ciara arrives at the breakdown, committed to never quitting even as the album begins to come to a close.
As though addressing how her listeners might be feeling to that impending end, she brings us “Na Na,” another declaration of her love for Wilson as she touches on her Rihanna-flavored dancehall sound with, “You give me love (go), can’t get enough (bang)/You’re one-of-one (whoa), nothing similar (bang)/No matter what (woah), baby, this love’ll be here for you long time.”
Persisting with a raunchy Rihanna of the Rated R days vibe, “Freak Me” featuring Tekno finds Ciara demanding, “Go down, baby, stay down, baby/In and out with it, right now, baby/I’ll make you smile, baby, make you proud, baby I know what you like, I know what you like.” Taking it way back to the 00s (Ciara is, after all, still one of the queen bees of that era of R&B) vernacular about freakdom, she also adds, “I’ll be the freak, be the freak, be the freak/Be the freak that you need/No, no I won’t tell nobody, I won’t tell nobody/How you freak my body.” Of course, she obviously just did.
Paying further homage still to her relationship with Wilson, “Greatest Love” (not to be confused with Whitney Houston’s “Greatest Love of All”), Ciara slows it down to croon, “Never met nobody real like this, oh/I should’ve known when you took my son as your own [a big burn for Future]/I’m not sayin’ I ain’t like all the carats and the stone/It’s just your love that I want/Now it’s me and you against the entire world, the entire world.”
Even more emotionally tinged than that, however, is the album’s eponymous closer, something of Ciara’s version of “Sandcastles” as she waxes poetic about the power Wilson’s love has instilled her with. Prompting her to bask in the epiphany, “With your heart in weathered hands/And the bruises on my heart that make me who I am/That make you who you are/Baby, when you take my hand/You show me that my scars are beauty marks.” It’s the perfect track for someone recently named as the Global Brand Ambassador for Revlon. Then again, there isn’t always anything pretty about her wedding/birthing footage turned music video in which things get to be just a little too oversharing. Alas, the Kardashian-Jenners already set the precedent for the uncomfortableness of oversharing on the child-birthing front.
In any case, despite certain peaks of schmaltz that the likes of Taylor Swift could never get away with (see: “ME!“), Beauty Marks is one of Ciara’s strongest works to date. As the first record to be put out on her own imprint, Beauty Marks Entertainment, it’s no wonder she has stated of once again feeling as she did at the outset of her career: “I was this young girl excited to be living my dreams and having the best time. I’m back to that phase again.” And, to be sure, there is jubilance contained within each song.
