Beyoncé has captivated me. I have, today, probably watched about fifty Beyoncé videos, marathon-style, on a cable channel called “Fuse” that I didn’t even know existed. I’m in my suburban childhood home, watching these on the same large-screen projection television where I probably first set my eyes on [more]
Beyoncé has captivated me. I have, today, probably watched about fifty Beyoncé videos, marathon-style, on a cable channel called “Fuse” that I didn’t even know existed. I’m in my suburban childhood home, watching these on the same large-screen projection television where I probably first set my eyes on Beyoncé, back around Y2K. In the past I never considered myself a particularly avid Beyoncé fan. The Destiny’s Child era was around when I was thumbing my nose at all pop music. For many of the years that Beyoncé was laying down groundwork for permanent residence in the American collective consciousness, I was cultivating an ideological opposition to Television, Mass Culture, and All That Jazz (or you know, all that hip hop).
But a few years ago, maybe around 2009, I saw the video for Beyoncé’s collaboration with Lady Gaga called “Videophone.” Then I flipped out and watched it about eighty more times. Have you seen the video? It’s nuts. It’s some kind of bizarre future-bubble-gum-space-war-cartoon-gangsta madness. Something about it was just sort of weird. Not in the super self-conscious, self-crafted way Lady Gaga is weird. It felt weird for the Beyoncé I knew—she of long, wind-blown hair, choreographed dance moves, and vigilantly protected mainstream image—to be taking this turn. It was her attitude in “Videophone” that most compelled me. Amidst the video’s wild pop color scheme and tongue-in-cheek spy movie references is Beyoncé, smacking her gum, rolling her eyes, challenging her viewer to test her, to take her on. “Shorty, what your name is?” she begins, before suggesting the love interest film her on his eponymous videophone. It’s all very meta. She invites her public to play a game, but first she challenges us to rise to her level. Something about it seemed to suggest to me that she was fed up and that she could not care less what anyone thought.
And with that, Beyoncé was suddenly on my radar. Of course, this was confusing. I didn’t really understand my sudden interest in a bazillionaire pop star. I mean, it’s Beyoncé. She’s a “business, man” just like her HOVA-husband. I’m not trying to say she is the world’s most innovative artist, and neither am I saying that her decisions are not business-driven. This all may be true.
But another thing is true, and this is something I’ve been thinking about since I downloaded her splash-making secret album, Beyoncé, in winter: she’s exactly my age. Watching all those videos in my childhood home today made me realize that I’ve basically grown up alongside Beyoncé, listening to her sing about love the entire way. I’m not really talking about her actual self, so much as her pop persona. Ultimately, I am not interested in accurate details of her personal life. I bothered to watch that HBO documentary while cleaning my apartment a while ago, and found my mopping much more interesting. Moreover, Beyoncé and Jay-Z are pretty good at keeping details of their real relationship private, but judging by the lyrics of her songs over the years (see “Ring the Alarm,” “Single Ladies,” “Freakum Dress,” “Kitty Kat,” etc.), her experience of love is undoubtedly complicated. Beyoncé, the character in her pop songs, has changed as she has grown into womanhood. My interest in her songs and the attitudes she cops while singing them has changed in kind.
Since December, Beyoncé has been written about ad infinitum. I won’t add to the dissonant chorus of conversations about feminist posturing or game-changing industry moves. I just want to tell you about my fascination with Beyoncé as a unified aesthetic object. It is, at bottom, a concept album that relates the story of a woman realizing that she has come into adulthood, with all its attendant power, responsibility, and accomplishment. She is simultaneously looking backward at the path traversed, which is inevitably strewn with defeats and mistakes. Nowhere are youthful songs about being “Crazy in Love,” or “Bootylicious.” The more sexual of the fifteen songs never dip into generics or juvenilia. She gets specific and she gets serious. She sings of love, lust, and jealousy, of disappointment, of learning the parameters of her own weaknesses, of molding herself to please a lover, and of subsequently realizing that she doesn’t have to do any such thing. She sings of grieving and of mothering. She chews gum archly and looks impatiently into the camera in a number of the videos, seeming to say, “Catch the hell up, how long do you expect me to wait for you?”
“Partition,” a song about needing to fervidly consummate desire in a limo before arriving at da club is, I think, a period peace. Her Monica Lewinsky reference places it squarely around the turn of the century, when Beyoncé was probably about twenty. Sure, “Partition” is sexy and empowering, but in the refrain, when she repeats, “I just wanna be the girl you like/the kinda girl you like,” I can’t help but hear the desperate pleading of a young woman—the frantic need to convince your lover that you are the end all be all, that you are the best thing he has ever laid eyes or hands on, that no one could ever compare to you. It is a performance, and it is a lie. But you don’t know that until that someone shames you for not being perfect. And then you grow the hell up and realize that these power plays don’t pay off.
The next single off the album, “Drunk in Love,” is outrageously seductive, but it also speaks to a specific moment in an adult, committed relationship—that of tedium, of needing libation to make things interesting anew, of the work drink must do to replace pheromones. “I been sippin’, that’s the only thing that’s keepin’ me on fire,” she sings near the end of the track. And that line says more than any others about surfboardts or eating cake. Other songs on the album are more explicit about the vagaries of committed love. The Beyoncé persona on this album is confessional to a startling degree—she sings that she is “not feeling like myself after the baby;” that she is jealous and retaliatory but this means she’s “just human, so don’t judge me.” She demands pleasure, recognition, and most of all, respect. She has miscarried, she has mourned, she has had hopes dashed and burned down, and she has made something out of the cinders. In the videos we see snatches of archival footage of Beyoncé on Star Search and practicing for talent competitions. In one scene, grown-up Beyoncé smashes a wall of trophies with another, larger trophy. In a later video, she carries one of these trophies to the beach and it disappears in ocean mist and sloshy lust. We feel keenly her simultaneous affection for and resentment of her regimented child stardom. And we feel her moving on.
My favorite song on Beyoncé is one that only exists as a “bonus video.” It is called, almost facetiously, “Grown Woman,” and is styled to look like a bad-quality transfer of a VHS tape. In it, footage of little tiny Beyoncé is mashed up with a teenage version of her, bouncing around a bedroom in Tommy Girl shorts, dancing before a mirror with overall-sporting friends, all before ascending into some astral realm of jungle cats, afro-pop beats, and up-dos. There she whips her hips around with authority and proclaims, “I’m a grown woman/I can do whatever I want.” And when I watch it, I feel like we have come to the conclusion together. Yes, Beyoncé. Me too.