ALBUM OF THE DAY

In pop music, the audience’s hunger for authenticity has long since been vanquished. Once a temple to the real, live and unmediated, the medium now thrives on a sort of joyful skepticism. For modern stars like Katy Perry and Ke$ha, the artificiality of their tone and the Auto-Tune that helps complement their average (or worse) singing voices have become part of the act. Often, as with the later work of Britney Spears, the pleasure in recent pop can be found almost entirely somewhere inside the technology — that place where woman and machine meet.

And yet late last month, to a growing murmur of astonishment, a video began circulating after a man calling himself “Andy WarHOV” posted it to the Internet with minimal explanation: “Sometimes you need perspective. You’ve been right in front of greatness so often that you need to step back and see it again for the first time. This is the dressing room rehearsal for ‘American Idol.’ NO MICROPHONE. No effects.”

The clip depicted Beyoncé, who is married to Andy WarHOV (he also goes by the name Jay-Z), in front of a mirror, warming up for an appearance on “American Idol” by singing “1+1,” the first track of her new record, “4.”

“1+1“ is written by The-Dream, a longtime Beyoncé collaborator, and is in the self-consciously antiquated mode the producer sometimes favors in his ballads. The song quotes Sam Cooke’s “Wonderful World” in both lyrics and melody, and returns over and over, with slight variations, to an R&B sentiment so classic and familiar as to be nearly meaningless: “Baby we ain’t got nothing without love,” she sings. “Darling you’ve got enough for both of us / So come on baby, make love to me.”

Nevertheless, the song — and the unadorned way she delivered it in the “Idol” dressing room, accompanied only by a keyboard and a couple of hushed interjections from three wide-eyed backup singers — left her husband, a man who does not typically lack for words of his own, shaking his head. “WOOOO,” you can hear him shout as the clip goes dark.

Beyoncé’s place in the pop firmament has long been secured, whether you choose to judge her by her hits (75 million records sold and counting), the quality of her voice (pretty much unparalleled), her longevity (her first platinum single, with Destiny’s Child, came in 1997) or her marriage (don’t do that). Lately, though, she seemed to be undergoing something of an identity crisis; or, more accurately, she seemed like she thought that Beyoncé should be going through an identity crisis, and so engineered one. 2008’s “I Am … Sasha Fierce” employed the already-tired rap trope of dividing an artist’s identity into “real” and “pop” halves — you can probably guess to which camp Sasha Fierce ostensibly belonged.

Identity has proved to be a fruitful subject for stars as diverse as Lady Gaga — who has made its endlessly mutable permutations her chief subject — and Katy Perry, who makes an art of changing hers to suit whatever commercial winds are blowing. But Beyoncé is too inexorably herself to develop a convincing alter ego. Sasha Fierce blusteringly proclaims, “A diva is a female version of a hustler”; regular ol’ Beyoncé, who had a hit with “Independent Women” all the way back in 2000, just rolls her eyes and says, “I know.”

“I Am … Sasha Fierce,” in its arbitrary division between bangers and ballads, suggested that the “real” Beyoncé was the one who sang all the love songs, despite significant evidence to the contrary (need we mention “Single Ladies”?). But perhaps that record was more prescient than it seemed at the time.

The new album is occasionally vengeful, sporadically energetic and frequently wistful, but mostly it’s a portrait of an artist accepting her rightful status as R&B’s most reliable balladeer and singer of love songs, both bitter and sweet. That Beyoncé is also a better dancer and pop collaborator than her peers is increasingly an irrelevant fact. “1+1” belongs at a wedding, not in the club.

Not that “4” is all midtempo heartbreak and declarations of eternal love. The record’s first single, “Run The World (Girls),” flips a Diplo production into a sly reversal of feminine surrender: “Boy I’m just playing / Come here baby / Hope you still like me / eff you pay me.”

“Countdown,” with its clever interpolation of Boyz II Men’s “Uhh Ahh,” is a galvanizing declaration of love that embodies the wild exhilaration it produces. The song also contains an entertaining riff on a growing punchline trend in hip-hop known as “hashtag rap” — “All up in the kitchen in my heels / Dinner time.” ( In this case, #dinnertime would be the Twitter hashtag.)

But mostly “4” finds Beyoncé reaffirming, nodding at, and then sinking into classic R&B tropes, rather than subverting them. Diane Warren, the grand dame of the love song, is here with a typically bombastic contribution called (yes) “I Was Here.” The playful, Michael Jackson-reminiscent lite funk “Love On Top" is Beyoncé’s unironic homage to Warren’s heyday in the ’80s.

Beyoncé has a way of coaxing her co-writers, however unlikely, into this same nostalgic mood. “I Miss You,” penned by the R&B sensation of the summer, Frank Ocean, becomes in Beyoncé’s hands a ballad of stately, Whitney Houston-sized proportions. Ocean’s kidspeak—“I miss you, like, everyday” — will never sound more solemn or adult than it does here, even if his moment lasts another 50 years.

For all Beyoncé’s collaborators on “4,” there is only one credited guest. That would be the ever-fluent and cheerful Andre 3000, of OutKast, whose turn on the Kanye West-produced “Party” finds the artist in an uncharacteristically somber mood. “Never thought that we could become someone else’s hero,” he raps, right after declaring: “Kiddo say he looks up to me / This just makes me feel old.” There is, at this point, no other way to feel when guesting on a Beyoncé record. She’s embraced it. The rest of us might be advised to do the same.