“Freedom” by Beyoncé featuring Kendrick Lamar

"Freedom" lands tenth on Lemonade, Beyoncé's sixth album from 2016, with Kendrick Lamar riding shotgun, and it's the record's great march, blues, gospel and R&B hammered into a battle cry. She produced it with Jonny Coffer and Just Blaze; Coffer plays keyboards, Marcus Miller brings the bass, Canei Finch adds piano and Stuart White recorded and mixed. Underneath run samples of Kaleidoscope's 1969 "Let Me Try" and two old field recordings, a 1959 lining hymn and a 1947 "Stewball", performed by an inmate logged only as Prisoner "22" at Parchman, the Mississippi State Penitentiary; Alan Lomax and John A. Lomax sit among the credited writers.

Its video is part of the Lemonade film that aired on HBO, and she sang it with Lamar at the 2016 BET Awards and on the Formation World Tour. It drew a Grammy nomination for Best Rap/Sung Performance in 2017 and has since become an anthem for protest and politics, most visibly Kamala Harris's 2024 presidential campaign.

Written with AI assistance from RockLists chart data, MusicBrainz and Wikipedia.