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I Was Given Lemons and I Made Lemonade: What Beyoncé’s Album Says About Contemporary American Race Relations

I Was Given Lemons and I Made Lemonade: What Beyoncé’s Album Says About Contemporary American Race Relations

The release of Lemonade brought with it a public fervor. More than any other record last year, it spurred think pieces and discussion by the public and major music publications alike. Some were quick to praise Beyoncé’s visual narrative album as a complex and textured take on feminist politics and black identity. Others founds its themes of infidelity to be nothing more than manufactured drama with the intent to sell records — an example of commercial spectacle at its absolute worst.

What quickly became clear was that, regardless of the kind of conversations that were being had, they were certainly being had at an alarming rate. Something about Lemonade, beyond merely its commercial significance, had struck a chord with the American cultural conscience.

It’s hard to talk about Lemonade without mention of its creator’s cultural clout. Beyoncé, the R&B artist and business mogul, has been at the epicenter of American culture for sometime now. With six platinum studio albums and 62 singles, Beyoncé has cemented herself as one of the most successful solo artists of the century. And Beyoncé’s relationship with the American masses – at times messy and controversial – is emblematic of something else about American authorship and how impossible it is to navigate the constructs of the American race binary. Three particular moments, isolated in this paper, each suggest something significant about contemporary race relations: 1) Beyoncé’s Super Bowl performance and the subsequent White Rage that followed; 2) the release of Lemonade and the questions of authenticity that swirled around the record; and 3) Beyoncé’s loss to Adele at the Grammy’s. Each of these moments say something unique about the racial dynamics that rendered themselves so explicitly within the past year, culminating in the emergence of a new radical right regime.

***

“So when the national anthem started playing, I was not looking at the ground. I was praying. The lord’s prayer. My hands went up in the air. I wore black gloves, to represent social power, or black power. I wore socks — not shoes — to represent poverty. I wore a scarf around my neck to symbolize the lynchings, the hangings, that black folks when through while building this country.”

John Carlos

American sports institutions have long been a hotbed of racial and political tension. From the black power salutes at the Olympics in 1968, to Muhammad Ali’s anti-Vietnam speeches on University campuses, to Colin Kaepernick’s recent refusal to stand for the national anthem — the legacy of black athletes using their respective sports institutions as platforms for protest are well documented. And the reaction of the White masses is just as visible. But often this history of white violence is borne less from an ideological disagreement than from the threat posed by a black presence in spaces largely characterized by their whiteness. Claudia Rankine, in her popular novel Citizen, details how the arena of sports is often defined by the expectations and ideologies of its white audience with an essay on Serena Williams’ treatment by the tennis umpires. Williams place in American culture runs largely parallel to Beyoncé’s: both are entertainment titans, masters of their respective crafts, and powerful wealthy Black women who are often in the spotlight. Her presence on Lemonade itself speaks to this parallel. Rankine describes how the experience of being a black woman in a white space is often itself enough to garner a reaction from the American masses. Serena becomes the victim of aggressions from line judges in several major tournaments, where a series of egregious calls over the course of a number of years altered the course of key matches. This came to a head in 2009, as Serena reacted to a bad call with an expletive tirade launched in the direction of the line judge: “I swear to God I’m fucking going to that this fucking ball and shove it down your fucking throat, you hear that? I swear to God!” (29). Rankine calls this reaction somewhat laudable, or at the very least, understandable. It’s a response borne from “being thrown against a sharp white background” (29). And it was another sharp white background where the first defining moment of 2016 came for Beyoncé. On one of the most watched national events of the year, Beyoncé performed her recently released “Formation” at Super Bowl 50 in front of the largest T.V. audience of 2016, and the third biggest U.S. audience in history. After some muted and sterile performances by Coldplay and Bruno Mars, Beyoncé entered the frame, introduced by the pounding thump of a bass drum. She assumed center frame, surrounded by fire, and was quickly joined by her dancers — all black women, dressed in a black ensembles, hair styled into afros. Although Beyoncé’s “Formation” music video alludes strongly to issues of police violence, the Super Bowl performance itself hardly warranted much in the way of critique. Beyoncé spoke exclusively through matters of style: the afros, black clothing, and hip-hop inspired dance moves. There was nothing in the way of lyrical or spoken ideology. And yet, Conservative media was quick to react. David Clarke, a regular contributor to Fox News, posed the question: “Beyoncé in those Black Panther-type uniforms, would that be acceptable if a band, a white band came out in hoods and white sheets in the same sort of fashion? We would be appalled and outraged” (“Interview with David Clarke”). Rush Limbaugh followed suit, suggesting that perhaps Beyoncé because Beyoncé was a woman who was probably “not a big sports fan,” she likely read an article that was recently run in the “Huffington Puffington Post — which claimed that the Carolina Panthers were the first NFL team to be unapologetically black.” Out of this confusion, “it's understandable that Beyoncé might have thought the Black Panthers were playing in the game, and hence her tribute to the Black Panthers” (The Rush Limbaugh Show). Michelle Malkin joined the conversation on Twitter, writing, “Cuz nothing brings us all together better than angry Beyoncé shaking her ass & shouting "Negro" repeatedly.” It is no secret that this American reaction had nothing to do with politics or overt displays of ideology, and everything to do with the performance and its proud declaration of blackness — itself a frightening threat to white bourgeois power. And it’s worth taking a moment here to reflect on Clarke’s comment, as it's the most explicit reaction to matters of black style among any of the conservative commentators. While style might not be a spoken ideology, it plays an important role in establishing and influencing one. It was the Black Panther’s who recognized this better than anybody: “This brother here, myself, all of us were born with our hair like this. And we just wear it like this. Reason for it you might say, is like a new awareness among black people that their own natural appearance, physical appearance, is beautiful,” stated one member of the Black Panther Party (Stanley). Style has the potential to disrupt norms and operate as a genuine act of subversion. And it was this style on display at the Super Bowl that was clearly the source of the outrage. Because for every empty critique of Beyoncé’s homage to the Black panther party was another critique that framed the performance as a danger to The Great American (White) Family. Rudy Giuliani referred to the Super Bowl show as a “terrible” display of “a bunch of people bouncing around and all strange things.” He continued, ”Let's have, you know, decent wholesome entertainment, and not use it as a platform to attack the people who, you know, put their lives at risk to save us” (“Fox and Friends”). Laura Ingraham similarly lamented the death of wholesome television: “So in ‘Formation,’ women dressed like prostitutes. That's the message to little girls today...This is only 8:43 p.m. last night, Eastern time. 8:43 — no family hour. Family hour is over. There is no family hour” (“The Laura Ingraham Show”). In his book Race Matters, Cornel West talks about the taboo subject of “black sexuality.” He writes, “Americans are obsessed with sex and fearful of black sexuality” (West 83). West claims that this fear is derived from myths about black sexuality that still persist today. Which form of these myths Beyoncé is seen for is relatively unclear: is it the “seductive temptress” Jezebel (West 83)? The “evil, manipulative bitch” Sapphire (West 83)? It hardly matters. The presence and threat of black sexuality itself is enough to garner a visceral response, enough to elicit the White rage that became so visible a sentiment in our past electoral season. West argues that it is a cultural space occupied by both artists and athletes that presents an opportunity for a dialogue about black sexuality, that “when white and black kids buy the same billboard hits and laud the same athletic heroes the result is often a shared cultural space where some humane interaction takes place” (84). It’s easy to push back against this claim. As has been noted historically by many a cultural commentator, America has always had a relationship with black culture that has been more parasitic than symbiotic. The valorization of black music does not equate to a similar valorization of black people. This is certainly relevant in the case of the Super Bowl, where this shared cultural space is complicated by the aging demographics of the National Football League. While the NBA has been quick to adopt youth and millennial culture as its backbone and has offered its players at least some semblance of a political platform, the NFL has taken an almost totalitarian and apolitical stance on matters of politics, and especially issues of race. This may have less to do with the political good-will of the NBA than with each institution’s respective capital audience. According to a 2015 Nielsen report, 43% of the NBA’s viewership is under 35 years old: one of the youngest fanbases of all sports. In addition, 63% of NBA viewership was done on behalf of African-American viewers (“Hoop Dreams”). Beyoncé’s performance at, say, the Super Bowl as opposed to the NBA Finals is different than not only in the sense of the magnitude of viewership but in the dynamics of its space. The National Football League is the same organization that’s recent decline in viewership was arguably tied almost directly to the Colin Kaepernick protests. When white America is watching, blackness seems remarkably more offensive. Perhaps nothing sums up better the extent of the white reaction more than that of Tomi Lahren, America’s blond alt-right spokesperson: “What is it they are trying to convey here. A salute to what? A group that used violence and intimidation to advance not racial equality but an overthrow of white domination?” She continues: “You’re just like President Obama, Jada Pinkett Smith, Al Sharpton, and so many others — you just can’t let America heal. Keep ripping off the historical band aid. Why be a cultural leader when you can play the victim, right?” (“The Blaze”). Lahren’s slip here is remarkable: remarkable for the way it simplifies the ideology of one of America’s most radical, successful, and powerful black organizations; remarkable for its acknowledgement of white domination ; remarkable for its blatant acknowledgement of racial violence and the total erasure of its historical implications. This white fear of the black body and black sexuality, ironically, strengthen the relevance and importance of Beyoncé’s project. Is not the only way to combat fear of the black body by making that same black body hypervisible? Is that even possible within the confines of an American cultural enterprise that puts a premium on black style but continually devalues and destroys the black body? How can black creators resist a framework that “either liberates black people from white control in order to imprison them in racist myths or confines blacks to white ‘respectability’ while they make their own sexuality a taboo subject?” (88).

***

Months after her Super Bowl performance, the release of Lemonade drew another wave of reactions spanning the full breadth of American cultural commentators. The conversations this time had nuance, lacking some of the vitriol that came with the world stage of Super Bowl 50. And yet, the questions that replaced the outrage seemed troublingly loaded, complex, and difficult to answer. In her article “Why We Shouldn’t Be Afraid to Critique Beyoncé,” Zeba Blay argues that it’s okay to have conversations about Beyoncé’s position in contemporary culture. These conversations further “important discussions about the ways in which we underestimate femme feminist women, about the roles that capitalism and consumerism play in Beyoncé’s work, and about what we should (and shouldn’t) expect from our feminist and pop cultural icons” (n.p.). This points to an interesting phenomenon: so much of the conversation surrounding Lemonade became less concerned with the content of the record than a conversation and critique of Beyoncé: her identity, her role in American life, the authenticity of her messages. When was the last album where so much of the criticism hinged on questions of authenticity and authorial intent? Infidelity, a major thematic strand of Lemonade, was often central to this critique. The media and critical commentary was quick to frame the album’s narrative as a commercial ploy to sell records, a cheap attempt at manufacturing an artificial drama between two music industry titans. Yet, this is a gross simplification of the scope of Lemonade’s thematic ambition. Much of what Jenna Wortham had to say about the “Formation” video rings true of the record as a whole, it’s not just a record about police brutality, or infidelity — “it’s about the entirety of the black experience in America in 2016, which includes standards of beauty, (dis)empowerment, culture, and the shared parts of our history” (n.p.). Lemonade borrows quite heavily from contemporary poet Warsan Shire. Her poem “For Women Who are Difficult to Love” is recited by Beyoncé as the voiceover track for many of the visual album’s most pivotal and evocative narrative moments: like when Beyoncé walks a deserted street, baseball bat in tow, smashing car windows. Shire grapples with many of the same questions Beyoncé does: how does any black woman manage to level the varying identity expectations continually imposed upon them? How are feelings of reactionary violence (“so what did you want to do love / split his head open?”) reconciled with adherence to traditional notions of femininity (“and you tried to change didn’t you? / closed your mouth more / tried to be softer / prettier”)? (n.p.) And yet, the aforementioned inquiry makes sense, and is almost impossible to ignore. Lemonade remains available today exclusively on Tidal, a streaming service that Beyoncé and Jay-Z have joint ownership in. Both artists are industry moguls. And this was the year where a dissatisfaction with the status-quo became a rallying cry for both sides of the political spectrum. It is worth asking: how do we remedy questions of capital intent with those of aesthetic authenticity? And in their influential work “The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception,” Adorno & Horkheimer frame the answer quite simply — you can’t. Art made in the era of mass industry is art made for the purpose of consumption. Mass produced art is “nothing other than style,” and incapable of “creating truth” (103). It’s purpose is purely industrial. It exists solely for mass consumption. This critique was raised not only by the white masses but among prominent critics and writers as well. In bell hooks blog post “Moving Beyond Pain,” she argues that we cannot divorce the process of listening/viewing Lemonade from its status as a commodity object. This, however, is not necessarily a problem for hooks. While hooks acknowledges that the “celebration” of black female bodies is also impossible to differentiate from their “exploitation,” she differentiates that the commercial intent of Beyoncé’s record is quite different than many other commercial contexts (“Moving Beyond Pain” n.p.). This is commercial art created for the sake of ascribing value to black women. And yet, hooks has reservations about Beyoncé’s brand of feminism. In this context of high-stakes relationship drama, the black woman remains in the “victim” position to which her only escape is violence. Hooks states, quite controversially, that violence “does not create positive change” (“Moving Beyond Pain” n.p.). Additionally, Beyoncé’s conception of feminism lacks an intersectional approach, and is situated closer to the Hillary-Clinton-class-enemy brand of feminism than a true radical feminist ideology. Beyoncé adopts a contemporary conception of feminism that ultimately is not rooted in resistance in patriarchal domination but which is tied to it; and that is concerned ultimately with matters of capital self-interest. Ultimately, hooks questions the merit of the fictive space that Lemonade occupies: a world in which words like “Intuition, Denial, Forgiveness, Hope, [and] Reconciliation” are seen as effective combatants to racism and misogyny. In 2016, mainstream feminist ideals ultimately rang hollow: the wage gap feminism of the Democrats was not enough to rally a progressive base that wanted something lasting and systemic; and the radical right, angered by the very idea of a woman president, retaliated with fervent vulgarity. While hooks ultimately finds Lemonade as falling short of its feminist potential, is not the very fact that it puts such a value on black life, on black representation, and on the pure celebration of black culture a radical politics in and of itself? At the conclusion of her article, hooks asks a question of Lemonade that speaks to a point about black women authorship in general: how can one move beyond celebrating pain and instead look to how it can be transcended? What does a transcendent feminist politics look like? How does black authorship escape the condition of a parasitic consumer culture? ***

On February 12, 2017, Adele’s album 21 won album of the year at the Grammy Awards. In her speech, she talked about why she couldn’t accept the prize:

“...but tonight winning this kind of feels full circle, and like a bit of me has come back to myself but I can’t possibly accept this award, and I’m very humbled and very gracious but, the artist of my life is Beyoncé, and this album to me — the Lemonade album — is just so monumental, it’s just so monumental, and so well thought out, and so beautiful, and soul bearing. And we all got to see another side to you that you don’t always let us see. And we appreciate that. And all us artists here, we fucking adore you. You are our light, and the way you made me and my friends feel, the way you made my black friends feel, is empowering, and you make them stand up for themselves. And we love you, we always have, and we always will.” (“Adele’s Grammy Acceptance Speech”)

Adele’s speech is important for a couple reasons. The first is that it speaks to a critique that has become rather common of the Grammy’s the past couple of years: victories by black artists have been confined to the Hip-hop, Urban Album, and R&B categories. Not a single black artist has won album of the year since 2004; a black woman hasn’t won the category since Lauryn Hill did so in 1999. Meanwhile, the last few years have featured some high-profile snubs, including Kendrick Lamar’s To Pimp a Butterfly in 2016, Beyoncé (again) in 2015, Kendrick Lamar (again) in 2014, and Frank Ocean in 2013. The Grammy’s failure to recognize the relevance and cultural significance of certain artists is partially the reason why it has lost some credibility in the past few years, with several high-profile artists refusing to attend the ceremony, and others speaking out publicly regarding their declining cultural clout and position as an outdated, archaic institution. It’s become impossible to define what it exactly is that can win you an Album of the Year Grammy. It is not solely commercial success (see: Beck’s win two years ago) neither is it totally critical reception. What you’d guess is that the recipe lies somewhere in between: an album that has popular appeal and that is critically viable; that speaks to a certain condition of the American politic at that time; that promises to reshape cultural trends in a way that is both significant and lasting. So what wrong? That inquiry feels almost ludicrous in a year where the stakes felt so high. It’s difficult to reconcile a relatively meaningless spectacle like the Grammy’s with the current American sociopolitical turmoil, where the threat of violence against marginalized people is real and tangible. In that way, maybe hooks was right: there is a limit to what the fictive imagination can do and say. But sometimes, the politics that play out on the small stage say something profound about the politics that play out in the midst of our real and frightening reality. They lead us to conversations, to discomfort, and to the promise of something different. And that brings us back to Adele’s speech. Somehow, Adele’s awkward and imperfect display of appreciation for Beyoncé and her art made startlingly visible what was so obviously playing out before our very eyes. The moment Adele marked her “black friends” was the moment that the thematic concerns of Beyoncé’s album became visible on the world stage. And on this world stage, Beyoncé’s album made sense only as one thing — a “black” album. And that was, arguably, Beyoncé’s intention. But despite the declining clout of the Grammy’s, the album’s loss felt profound. And glaringly obvious. No other outcome made more rational sense with the context of contemporary American race relations. And that’s why it matters so much As easy as it is to fault Adele for the deficiencies in her speech, it’s also sort of admirable for the way she is able to cut through the codes and signifiers that even Beyoncé seemed unable to do. In her own acceptance speech for Lemonade’s win in the Best Urban Album Category, she stated:

My intention for the film and album was to create a body of work that would give a voice to our pain, our struggles, our darkness and our history. To confront issues that make us uncomfortable. It’s important to me to show images to my children that reflect their beauty, so they can grow up in a world where they look in the mirror — first to their own families as well as the news, the Super Bowl, the Olympics, the White House and the Grammys — and see themselves. And have no doubt that they are beautiful, intelligent and capable. This is something I want for every child of every race. And I feel it’s vital that we learn from the past and recognize our tendencies to repeat our mistakes. (“Beyoncé’s Grammy Acceptance Speech”)

Beyoncé employs an “us” that is shifting and uncertain: sometimes clearly alluding to the black experience, at other times alluding to a collective American experience, and even, at one point, alluding to “every child of every race.” She certainly is not entering any All Lives Matter territory here, but is it fair to call her an activist? Beyoncé speaks about race like an American who is afraid to say the wrong thing. And although her performance and her album spoke very clearly in matters of style, it’s strange to see Beyoncé speak so carefully around matters of race, of police brutality, of problematic gender expectations and matters of black beauty, of violence against black lives. It’s clear what she’s talking about, but the ideologies remain invisible, unspoken — to use Morrison’s phrase, “playing in the dark.” And that seems strange for an artist that seemed so concerned with, in the context of their art and performances, making visible the black American experience. Lemonade goes to great lengths to subvert our concept of the literary imagination. Less talked about than it’s visions of blackness are its spots of whiteness: like when Beyoncé jumps to her death in an all-white dress, or when she’s surrounded by a blindingly white mise-en-scene. It’s an album where the black/white binary is turned on its head; where blackness takes center stage and pushes whiteness to the periphery — but where the threat of the white imagination is still present. And here we are on another national stage, with whiteness somehow pushing Beyoncé to the periphery, the world re-orienting itself. Despite Adele’s best intentions, her refusal of the award means little. What does it mean for a white women to refuse an award and offer it to another artist’s work because she understands its importance for her black friends? I think again of Serena Williams and Rankine’s essay: of being “thrown against a sharp white background.” On Lemonade and it’s most popular single “Sorry,” -- viewed over 213 million times on YouTube -- Serena Williams makes an appearance. And although she doesn’t appear in any other songs, her appearance is memorable because, like Beyoncé, she is so clearly a symbol for everything Lemonade is trying to do. For what she represents to American culture and the American people. For her tendency to inspire white rage and overt displays of racism (see: Serena’s appearances at Indian Wells). For her position as a successful black woman and the significance that holds to other women and girls of color. And I wonder, in the context of the Grammy Awards, where that moment of rage — one that looked like Serena yelling at the line judge — was for Beyoncé. Why was it Adele who got to speak on her behalf? Looking back on Kanye’s infamous Taylor Swift incident, it seems oddly more sensible now, less like an awkward and personal attack on Taylor Swift than a genuine but misguided effort to right an injustice. The Grammy Awards affair makes it again clear how impossible it is to define what “success” means for black authorship in America. If a genuine radical politics is the goal for black authorship, than why does it matter who wins what popularity award? And adversely, 2016 was a year where not just black texts, but black texts about race were tremendously successful commercially. And what did these commercial accomplishments mean for black and marginal people? It seems difficult to answer anything in a time of such complete and uncertain political chaos. But if it’s true that the “subject of the dream is the dreamer,” is there anything else to do than dream (Morrison 30)? Maybe the fictive world holds more weight than we care to believe.

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