In April, the 34-year-old singer-songwriter Beyoncé Knowles-Carter released her sixth solo album Lemonade on her husband Jay Z’s music streaming service, Tidal. Easily her most personal work to date, Lemonade was accompanied by a “visual album” broadcast on HBO, a lush and beautifully shot series of music videos interspersed with poetry from the female Somali-British writer Warsan Shire. Many of the songs apparently reference Jay Z’s longrumoured infidelity. But the album broadened one woman’s amorous troubles into a collective struggle against layers of historical oppression. “The most disrespected person in America is the black woman. The most unprotected person in America is the black woman. The most neglected person in America is the black woman,” the sampled voice of Malcolm X explains.
Beyoncé’s Lemonade arrived in anticipation of a summer of extraordinary racial tension in the United States. In July alone, we witnessed the horrifying videotaped police killings (at point-blank range in both instances) of two unresisting black fathers, Alton Sterling in Baton Rouge, Louisiana and Philando Castile in Falcon Heights, Minnesota. These were followed by apparent retaliatory assaults on police. In Dallas, a former US soldier murdered five officers during a peaceful Black Lives Matter protest; days later, a man armed with an assault rifle killed three police officers in Baton Rouge. In the wake of such upheaval, it has become something of a cliché to liken the current maelstrom to that of the 1960s. For some, Beyoncé’s latest offering conjures a “Mississippi Goddam” moment—a confluence of pop culture activism and social consciousness (called “wokeness” in today’s parlance) in the mould of Nina Simone’s 1964 civil rights classic, along with a pro-black-woman message of self-love and body affirmation.
But was Beyoncé thinking anything deep? Is a pop entertainer supposed to be thinking deep thoughts? Is it any wonder that as American politics has devolved to the level of a game show—indeed, when the next president may be a reality TV star—our most visible “politically engaged” artist is as superficially profound as Beyoncé? This is a time when one can be deemed a moral authority not for adhering to principle (think of the late Muhammad Ali refusing to go to Vietnam, at great personal cost), but merely for existing in one’s own skin and narrating the feat. It’s a time when feminism and race consciousness can be reduced to free-association games of body-positive images and out-of-context displays of suffering and solidarity. Celebrating pop fare like Lemonade seems a lot less challenging than doing the work of bringing forth—or at least explaining how to bring forth—actual systemic change. That would require, at a minimum, addressing how entertainers such as Beyoncé are wilfully complicit in (and happy to profit from) women’s objectification.