The sound: ‘It sounds like a push to dominate all of pop’
Of late, some music writers have got into the habit of referring to Beyoncé as Queen Bey. It doesn’t exactly imply a great deal of critical distance, but you can see why the nickname has stuck. It is hard to think of a recent album that feels more commanding and imperious than Lemonade, not just in its lyrics – where defiant woman-scorned wrath meets righteous social anger – but in its music. It sounds not like an R&B record, but a push to dominate all of pop. “Country, alt-rock, left-field electronics, hoary Jack White blues-rock? I can do the lot.” That seems to be one of its messages.
So pervasive is the Queen Bey persona that it is easy to forget that there was a time when Beyoncé didn’t seem to know what she wanted to be, at least musically. Her solo career never faltered commercially – she continued the run of peerless pop hits that had begun with Destiny Child’s No No No as if the group’s dissolution were a mere formality, as if she had been the only thing that mattered about them all along – but she also gave the impression of being torn between a career as an R&B diva and the desire to be an MOR entertainer.
Many of the best tracks on her first two solo albums tended to point up her voice’s similarity to R&B singers of the 60s and 70s – the raw drums and see-sawing organ of Freakum Dress, the funk-rock of Suga Mama, Crazy in Love’s blaring Chi-Lites horns – but they were surrounded by stuff that erred on the sickly side of perfect, as if she were quietly investing in a future that might have more to do with cabaret than clubs.
The sense of an artist being pulled uncomfortably in two opposing directions reached its peak with 2008’s wildly uneven I Am … Sasha Fierce: one disc full of self-help-motto power ballads and tracks that sounded as if they were following trends (Halo was audibly made in the image of Rihanna’s Umbrella), and another that suggested, for the first time, a willingness to experiment – the percussion battery and oddly doomy minor chords of Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It), Video Phone’s minimal fusion of crunk rhythms, sampled groans, and needling synthesisers.
I Am … Sasha Fierce sold 8m copies, but its follow-up suggested a rethink or at least a focusing of her approach. Made after she had severed ties with her manager and executive producer father, 4 built on its predecessor’s more experimental aspects, and introduced the I-can-do-anything musical expansiveness that you hear on Lemonade. There were influences drawn from Afrobeat, dancehall and alt-rock; thrown together with Kanye West collaborator Jeff Bhasker, the Sleepy Jackson’s Luke Steele contributed the psychedelicised Philly soul of Rather Die Young.
Destiny’s Child had largelyshied away from the kind of ultra-futuristic R&B sound big in the late 90s and early noughties – their singles were always about the chorus rather than the novelty of the production – but, just at the point when the charts were awash with R&B stars making tinny pop-house tracks, Beyonce released Run the World (Girls), based on Major Lazer’s Pon De Floor, a battery of drums, dancehall rhythms and squealing noise. It was refined on Beyoncé, the album on which she finally abandoned the last vestiges of conservatism. The sound was rooted in hip-hop, but dragged everything from chillwave to the Aphex Twin’s abstract electronica to doo-wop into its orbit. It was filled with tracks that stopped abruptly, as though she was impatient to move on to the next idea. There were songs that sounded like suites (Haunted, Partition), even, on No Angel, an audibly off-key vocal allowed out into the world.
A gushing profile in Vogue found her “joking” that she might take on jazz or even country next time. As it turned out, she wasn’t joking.
Alexis Petridis
The dance icon: ‘She and her troupe move as one unit – a drill team, an army’
Beyoncé’s music, style and message make her an untouchable ruler at the top of the pop-culture pyramid. Her dancing, however, is what makes her feel reachable.
We have watched Beyoncé grow from seductive showpiece to sexually empowered woman. She has graduated from the male-gaze booty-shaking of Crazy in Love to the unapologetic, hard-hitting struts of Formation. Sure, all the action still happens in her pelvis and chest, but the execution is different, with a sway back, upturned chin and heavier step. Something about it says: “This dancing is for me and no one else. Not for your eyes; not for Jay Z’s.”
Notice that Beyoncé is rarely without her all-female squad of dancers, and that she doesn’t usually deviate from their choreography. That is completely deliberate, because Beyoncé can certainly carry a stage alone. Instead, she and her troupe move as one unit – a drill team, an army – in the name of black pride and girl power. Allow your eyes to blur and it is as if Beyoncé is multiplying, until 50 of her are swarming the stage.
Refocus your vision and she is just one woman among meticulously organised rows of dancers. She might be the point of a pyramid or centre of an X, but she is always standing with them. It helps convey the idea that Beyoncé is your spokeswoman; that she is in this with you, fighting the same fight. That no matter how rich and powerful she is, she is a girl’s girl, the Everywoman. That she walks, spins, and grinds like each dancer behind her. Because what anchors Beyonce’s persona – once a shiny display, and now a little more vulnerable – isn’t the dancing itself, but the staging. She does not underestimate the simple and persuasive power of movement in unison.
That is not to say that the actual movement that Beyoncé and her team puts out is particularly inventive (though they have certainly come up with some great hairography). While Beyoncé has become more radical in message, she has actually toned down the creativity of her dancing since the days of the Bob Fosse-inspired Single Ladies video. Formation’s punchy isolations, booty-bouncing and chest-popping are evenly set with the beat and the melody, with knees twisting in and out. At its most basic, it’s a heightened, polished version of something you would do in the privacy of your own living room, music blasting, two glasses of wine in – a feel-good romp. It’s another way to connect with her fans. For modern-day Bey, dance is no longer a main event; it’s there to serve her highness. And sometimes, that is all dance is supposed to do.
Kristin Schwab
The brand: ‘She doesn’t release albums; she creates cultural events’
There’s the A-list, and then there’s Queen Bey. Beyoncé has risen to a rare level of fame where she has surpassed mere celebrity and become an archetype of achievement. When she dropped Lemonade, the world dropped everything to listen – Beyoncé doesn’t release albums; she creates cultural events.
Beyoncé has been famous for almost 20 years, but, it is only in the last eight that she has gone from phenomenal to phenomenon. This is no accident, but the result of strategic brand-building learned from Madonna and Apple.
Her metamorphosis into a brand can be seen in three key milestones. First, she married Jay Z. Then she killed Sasha Fierce. Finally, she fired her father. Strategic partnerships can be a highly effective way to build a brand and, leaving romance aside, Beyoncé’s 2007 marriage to Jay-Z was as strategic as you can get. Both benefited from the merger … I mean marriage, gaining new fans and elevating their respective statuses.
When Beyoncé married Jay Z, she was going through a period of transition. You can see this play out in the character of Sasha Fierce, an alter-ego that let Beyoncé experiment with a more risqué sexual persona while maintaining her traditionally wholesome image. The 2008 album I Am … Sasha Fierce reflected this tension. One side had more mainstream songs for new fans, the other was aimed more at old fans.
In 2010, she announced she didn’t need to separate her persona from that of Sasha Fierce any more. Killing off Fierce signalled a Beyoncé newly confident in what she stood for. This was reinforced shortly after, when Beyoncé made arguably her most important move ever: she dropped her father as manager and seized control of her brand. “When I decided to manage myself, it was important to me not to sign to some big company,” she said. “I wanted to follow in Madonna’s footsteps and be a powerhouse.”
Part of becoming and staying a powerhouse was exerting painstaking, Apple-like control over her brand. It’s a mistake to call Beyoncé’s notorious attention to her image “diva” behaviour; it’s businesswoman behaviour. Beyoncé understood that she couldn’t let Beyoncé-the-person encroach on Beyoncé-the-brand. So she stopped saying much, and rarely gave interviews. In 2013, she made waves by appearing on the cover of the September issue of Vogue without deigning to give the customary interview that went with it. Her silence made her voice even more powerful, and reinforced the mythology she was creating.
A couple of months later, Beyoncé really dropped the mic when she launched her fifth album, eponymously titled Beyoncé, unexpectedly on iTunes. The launch broke all the conventions of music marketing and announced to the world that she only played by her own rules. The next year, she was on the cover of Time for their most influential people issue.
Today, Beyoncé is more influential than ever. She has become a voice for feminism and civil rights. While this move to the left may seem to run the risk of being polarising, remember that her timing has always been flawless. She understands exactly when she can activate activism for her own benefit. Further, the sign of a strong brand is that it can evolve with culture, and weather the occasional controversy. The strength of Beyoncé’s brand is such that, at the moment, it seeems she can do no wrong. After all, to err is human but Beyoncé is divine.
Arwa Mahdawi
The feminist: ‘She calls out to the masses to rise up’
It’s all Maya Angelou in those now iconic first 15 seconds of Beyoncé’s visual album masterpiece Lemonade. As the most famous pop star on the planet, golden cornrow coiffed, and supine on the back of a sports utility vehicle, comes up off the back of her ride in haunting slow motion, the spirit of legend Angelou’s classic 1978 poem And Still I Rise pulsates like an undercurrent: “You may write me down in history/With your bitter, twisted lies/You may trod me in the very dirt/But still, like dust, I’ll rise.” Our heroine has taken Angelou’s words (that many a black girl has memorised) to heart, turning the wisdom of her lyric anthem into a long-form visual and sonic meditation. The result is a feminist breakthrough in the world of stadium pop. It is “18 million cracks” in pop music culture’s “glass ceiling” delivered by a sister wielding a baseball bat in a marigold sundress.
One of the biggest pop-culture events of the year so far, Lemonade has nonetheless weathered some high-profile handwringing from feminist scholars such as bell hooks, a notorious Beyoncé hater, who conceded that the album’s visual imagery “shifts the gaze of white mainstream culture … challeng[ing] us all to look anew, to radically revision how we see the black female body …” while nevertheless continuing to warn of her oppressive ties to capitalism and patriarchy. These sorts of concerns about Beyoncé’s “brand” of feminism are nothing new.
If you are a woman whose independence depends on “making money”, as Yoncé and her fellow children of destiny would sing about in the year 2000, can you ever really be free of the systems that have historically oppressed women and people of colour? If, in your celebration of the single life, you are still chastising your ex for not having sealed a commitment with a rock, are you more of a material girl than empowered woman warrior?
The ambivalences in Beyoncé’s pre-Lemonade musical repertoire have led some, such as critic Andi Zeisler in her razor-sharp new book We Were Feminists Once, to characterise the superstar’s relationship to the “F-word” as a form of “marketplace feminism,” a “mainstream, celebrity, consumer embrace of feminism that positions it as a cool, fun, accessible identity that anyone can adopt …” But Zeisler is also quick to point out that we need not “hate the player”, but rather “the game” in which our reigning queen of pop is ensnared.
The difference that Lemonade makes in Beyoncé’s career-long, increasingly sophisticated engagement with feminist politics is that it is an album that ambitiously aims to address “the game” of large-scale, deeply entwined racial and gender oppression, even as it foregrounds a tale of intimate deception and duplicity. True, this is still the Bey we’ve come to know who extols the virtues of “revenge” by way of “paper”, when many a feminist longs to hear her say instead that “best revenge is dismantling patriarchy in all facets of modern life”. But Lemonade is ultimately an album that moves well beyond a focus on being “black Bill Gates in the making”.
Just when a series of pop starlets from Taylor Swift to Emma Watson and Chloë Grace Moretz were willing to embrace a kind of feminism that oversimplifies its meaning, that thinks in limited and sometimes twisted ways about “girl squads”, making women’s equality welcoming for men, and “gender neutrality”, along comes Bey with a new album that demands that we think about feminism as a sophisticated and multilayered practice rather than a slogan. The album encourages black women, in particular, to examine the wholeness of their beings and the complexities of their identities.
Beyoncé and her team of artistic collaborators turned what had been an initial embrace of feminism into an epic sonic event. It demands that mainstream popular culture reckon with the conditions of being a modern black woman in ways never before seen and felt.
For the first time, a superstar black female musician aligned herself with intersecting racial and gender freedom struggles by way of a concept album, as well as the Super Bowl halftime routine watched the world over.
Most would be hard-pressed to recall the last time a black female pop star had enough cultural capital and sheer recording industry power to boldly weave together critiques of racial and gender inequality into a full-length recording. The go-to reference for many is still Atlantic Records-era Aretha, crowned the iconic foremother of the feminist pop anthem. Others might cite the audacity of Lauryn Hill’s ferociously introspective narratives of self-discovery and personal redemption, the biting lyricism and sophisticated instrumentation of Meshell Ndegeocello’s or Erykah Badu’s finest releases, or the recent Afrofuturist liberation odysseys of Janelle Monáe. But none of these artists, not even the Queen of Soul, have commanded the kind of multimedia global platform that fourth-wave Bey has been able to seize upon in this rapidly changing digital age.
And so enter Yoncé with her Run-the-World army of women: an all-female dance troupe, backup singers, her celebrated Suga Mama band, and her pathbreaking alliances with diasporic black feminist intellectuals such as Warsan Shire and Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie. At the height of her artistic powers and political vision, she calls out to the masses to rise up, Angelou-style, and ride with her as she sits behind the wheel of a Hold Up video demolition monster truck, driving pop culture forwards and into the future with no turning back.
Daphne Brooks
The celebrity: ‘Even sneezing on stage gets her coverage’
Pop superstars fall into two camps: the boy or girl next door, or the character who would buy the house next door, evict the family and erect a neon and diamanté castle in their own honour. Britney, Ed Sheeran and Taylor Swift would have you believe they would pop round for a cup of sugar; Kanye, Gaga and Madonna appeal because you know they would send in the JCBs. Fans engage with all those artists with a similar intensity, but we attach ourselves to the humanity of some and the audacity of others.
Most artists stay in one lane, but during her two-decade career, Beyoncé has deftly segued from sugar (early interviews show an artist with little to say – maybe, we might now speculate, she simply wasn’t being asked the right questions) to steamrollers: April’s Lemonade addressed, owned and even exacerbated rumours surrounding her marriage to Jay Z in the pop equivalent of a controlled explosion, by an artist now able to unleash, control and manipulate her own celebrity on her own terms.
Tech companies pivot when their original proposition goes wrong: Beyoncé did it when things were going right – or, at least, before diminishing returns set in. And she did so while achieving critical and commercial success.
The shift in Beyoncé’s celebrity status didn’t happen overnight. Her relationship with Jay Z created a celebrity whole far exceeding the sum of its parts, while the aggressive sound and styling around Run the World (Girls) put a hard edge on the broad-stroke feminism of early Destiny’s Child tracks. But 2013’s surprise album really saw Beyoncé take control. The power of instant releases shouldn’t be underestimated: by stripping critics of any meaningful role in an album’s release, Beyoncé and others have allowed for a frictionless exchange of celebrity energy between fan and artist.
Six months later, Beyoncé topped the Forbes celebrity power list, based on mentions in print, radio, TV and online, for the first time since her initial appearance on the list a decade earlier. This reflects shifting, click-driven priorities of the global news agenda, but Google Trends echoed Beyoncé’s role in that shift: before 2013 there were clumps of interest around album campaigns, but in December 2013 Beyoncé began prompting huge peaks in interest that wildly outstripped any that came before.
As her politically charged Super Bowl performance earlier this year showed us, Beyoncé understands tentpole moments, but she also understands the smaller details, the pegs without which tentpoles wouldn’t hold up. She knew this early on. Consider “Question!” in Independent Women, Pt 1 or “I ain’t gonna diss you on the internet” when the world was still on dial-up — lyrical proto-memes that now seem like Beyoncé staking her claim on the modern world of social-driven celebrity culture.
Fast-forward to 2016 and Becky With the Good Hair – the woman rumoured to have been a third party in the Beyoncé-Jay Z marriage – is a celebrity in her own right, while restaurant chain Red Lobster reported a 33% boost in sales after being namechecked in Formation as the ideal location for a crustacean-themed post-coital lap of honour. If that is interesting in itself, interesting, too, is how widely that news was reported. But this is an era when Beyoncé sneezing on stage can guarantee coverage from Time, Vanity Fair, Mail Online and the Hereford Times. That, as much as anything else, defines the meaning of celebrity in 2016.
Peter Robinson
