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Beyoncé Serves Up Black Feminist History
Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter never ceases to amaze audiences. For nearly 20 years, she has consistently recreated herself, her music and her brand.
It is easy to forget that she began her career in 1998 at age of 16 as part of the girl group Destiny's Child. Since then, she's become one of the most recognized R&B/pop singers in the world-and one of the most critiqued. With each album, listeners delve into her creative subconscious, and her latest (sixth) solo project, Lemonade, is no exception. In fact, since the release of "Formation" in February and the title song in April, no artist, male or female, has garnered more buzz this year than "Bey."
Dropped the day before her performance during the halftime show at the Super Bowl, 'Formation" is a not-so-subtle nod to the aesthetics of the New Black Panther movement-with its Afro hair, faux-bullet bandoliers and berets. The video features the singer sprawled atop a New Orleans police car, circa hurricane Katrina in 2005jablack youth dancing before a line ofwhite police officers in riot gear; abandoned Louisiana homes; flashes of civil rights resistance; the Black church in Charleston, South Carolina in which churchgoers were killed; and a fierce all-woman dance troupe. It includes powerful lyrics like, "I like my baby heir with baby hair and afros/ I like my Negro nose with Jackson Five nostrils."
This is a far cry from her previous girl-power anthems, such as "Who Run the World (Girls)" and "Flawless" (released in 2011 and 2013, respectively), which featured a sampling of Nigerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's TEDx talk, "We Should All Be Feminists." "Formation," make no mistake, is not about the universal "we" but the Black "us."
Following the Super Bowl, a Saturday Night Live skit, titled "The Day Beyoncé Turned Black," parodied a group of Beyoncé s fictional white fans responding to the new-found Black political consciousness of her music. The skit featured several confused white fans coming to grips with the fact that, after seeing "Formation," they realized for the first time that Beyoncé is a Black woman.
The skit was more than just parody. Beyoncé, like many mainstream R&B artists before her, has often had to balance being palatable to...
