It’s been only 48 hours since Beyonce dropped Lemonade, which has thrusted onto the mainstream this un-parallel vision of the South that’s full of #blackgirlmagic feels. At a time when celebrity culture is prime docu-drama box office entertainment, Beyonce has managed to pull off a release that veers dangerously close to full-on revenge narrative — the visual album’s concept hinges on marital strife with husband Jay-Z — that you almost expected the tabloids to be flooded with a divorce announcement.
But the album ends with redemption — they stay together! — with Beyonce still managing to hold firm on her persona. (This is an artist, after all, who has a temperature-controlled digital storage facility containing every existing video, photo, interview and even diary entry she’s recorded on her laptop.) Beyonce is a performance artist who savvily positions her creative output for real-time, hashtagged (#BeckyWithTheGoodHair, followed by Beyhive bee emojis) collective consumption.
She sees the bigger multi-platform picture, and understands how her work is often affirmed but also misconstrued in American pop culture, especially as it pertains to the representation of the black woman. (And she isn’t afraid to bring it back: she samples Malcolm X, has her self and dancers at one point marked with Yoruban ritual body art.) Screen-based consumption makes Beyonce far more compelling and intimate to a varied cross-section of audiences and fans, and she gives back with spirituality and politics rooted in the diaspora.
In a way, this visual album then expands as a thoughtful meditation on the role of the black woman in our collective imaginations: her struggles, but also her singular strength and beauty. The visuals references range from Julie Dash’s Daughters of the Dust to Pipilotti Rist’s “Ever is All Over” (see the smashing of car windows on the second track, “Hold Up”). It’s narrated with words by British-Somali poet Warsan Shire. Whereas Madonna, in bell hooks’s words, was charged as the “plantation mistress” with the ways in which she exploited ballroom culture, Beyonce opens space via a more transparent citational click-through, which wasn’t exactly possible ten or even fifteen years ago. And let’s be honest: it’s great that #Lemonade has spurred a content farm that brings to the fore these issues.
(Credit: All GIFs were grabbed from beyoncegifs.com.)
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