#not good bye but see you again Gga

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Lemonade by Beyonce: F**k Respectability Politics

Lemonade by Beyonce, released in 2016 was her sixth studio album and second visual music album that topped the charts and became her most critically acclaimed album to date. Beyonce uses her platform to radically approach the marginalized narratives of Black people in American history through the use of visual efforts in airing a sixty-five minute film to accompany the album, which showed on HBO. In the visual album, she includes the mothers of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner, and Michael Brown: all of whom have fallen victim to the anti-black police state enforced in the United States. She breaks all stereotypical chains of the cookie cutter Black woman pop artist she portrayed herself as at the beginning of her musical career. Refusing to be known as only being capable of sticking to one sound, she crosses through multiple genres of music including country, reggae, blues, hip-hop, soul, funk, R&B, americana, gospel, electronic, and trap all in one album. Confronting historical anti-black violence in “Freedom” featuring Kendrick Lamar, and facing intersectional forces of oppression that Black women deal with in “Formation,” and “Sorry,” Beyonce lays out her socio-critical perspective on the table whether we were ready for it or not.

“Formation” focuses on prominent issues within the Black community and turns the historical oppression of  “othering” of Black people into an “us,” encouraging the Black community to come together “okay ladies now let’s get in Formation” and rise up against the oppressor. When she dropped this song, she did so a day before her huge Super Bowl Halftime Show appearance as a way to really stick her nose up in the air at the fact that yes, although she is Black and comes from a marginalized community within Houston, Texas, she is still here taking up space on such an esteemed stage, earning millions of dollars for her talent, “I earned all this money, but they never take the country out me / I got hot sauce in my bag (swag).” In Beyonce’s visual piece to “Formation” there are references to Black Lives Matter and Hurricane Katrina that are clear; it includes an image of Beyoncé on top of a sinking police car, walls strewn with "Stop Shooting Us" graffiti, and a young African American boy in a hoodie dancing in front of police officers. The significance behind including Hurricane Katrina is a commentary on the lack of government involvement in providing assistance like shelter and adequate resources, such as food or medical attention to survivors, most of whom were Black. In the video, the young, Black boy is used to symbolize the tragic and inhumane death of Trayvon Martin. Beyoncé uses this as a way to highlight the discrepancies in the government and their lack of support for marginalized communities. Beyoncé also shows Black women in different hairstyles that have been deemed as inappropriate. Not only does she showcase the beauty and power of hair within the Black community, but she uses it to make a statement that Black beauty is majestic. Incorporating lyrics like, “I like my baby hairs with baby hairs and afros / I like my negro nose with Jackson 5 nostrils” she makes a strong statement on beauty standards claiming they have always been eurocentric, while doing the work of marginalizing and demonizing Afro-descendant features like large nostrils, and kinky hair. Throwing the Jackson 5 reference in there further proves her point in showing that the biggest voices in music like Michael and Janet Jackson were harmed because of these societal norms so much to the point where they paid to have their faces reconstructed and even further, skin bleached. I believe she also included these lyrics in response to the racist and eurocentric outlast she got from revealing what her baby, Blue Ivy, looked like after her birth.

In her song “Sorry,” Beyoncé uplifts her Black feminist voice, creating commentary of the cheating scandal involving her husband that broke the internet. Here we see Beyoncé lose all respectability politics by including words and phrases like, “n*gga naw” and, “middle fingers up, put them hands high / wave it in his face, tell him, boy, bye.” Here she is taking a stand and saying she refuses to play the quiet role of the stereotypical Black wife who stays at home and takes whatever treatment her husband puts her through. “he tryin’ to roll me up, I ain’t picking up / headed to the club, I ain’t thinkin’ bout you” and “suck on my balls, pause, I’ve had enough” shows her refusal to stay in the confinement of what society thinks Black women should be and how they should act. She’s bringing the focus to her doing her own thing and making her own money, she does not have time to lose fussing over a man who she can easily replace giving that she is independent and makes her own money and shows it through her use of lyrics like, “suicide before you see this tear fall down my eyes / me and my baby, we gon' be alright / we gon' live a good life” and “stop interrupting my grinding / I ain't thinking 'bout you.” At the end of her song she finishes it with, “he better call Becky with the good hair” providing commentary once again on beauty standards for Black people, but Black women specifically and their hair. The social norm in American culture today focuses hugely on Black women’s hair and how it must look a specific way, lose, soft, curls, in order for it to be considered “good” hair. The association of good hair and Black women historically has always served as a losing-comparison to white women who usually have what is deemed as neater, straight hair. Here she is playing against the stereotype that Black women’s hair is unkept, deemed as ugly, and associated with undesirability and low intellect by pushing that narrative onto “Becky” who is painted here as the culprit and the one being undesirable.

In “Freedom,” Beyonce brings back the theme of #BlackLivesMatter, this time accompanied by Compton gangsta rapper Kendrick Lamar. Separately, both artists have quite much to say on the oppression of Black people and racist institutions. Together, they have created a beautiful spiritual ballad that speaks to the souls of past enslaved Africans. In the chorus you hear the strong, and undeniably sense of a Black Negro spiritual with lyrics like, “Freedom, freedom, I can’t move/Freedom, cut me loose (Yeah)/Freedom, freedom, where are you?/’Cause I need freedom too/I break chains all by myself/Won’t let my freedom rot in hell, hey./I’ma keep running/’Cause a winner don’t quit on themselves.” Alluding to an older spiritual that tells one to “wade in the water”, she also includes, “I’ma wade, I’ma wave through the waters/Tell the tide don’t move” in her lyrics, bringing the timeline of slavery, emancipation, Jim Crow, and segregation full circle.

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.INT Zalacca Avhrilliya