Bonus Episode: Beyoncé Knowles-Carter and the flip-flop, flippy flip flop and ass bitches.

“Just wish you would get unobsessed with being boring and pretty all the time” (Banks, 2024).

do not group me in with these ashy-lipped rutabagas calling her untalented.

One of the constant frustrations Lydia (my sister) and I have with any critical thought regarding Beyoncé is the lack thereof. The Beyhive is quick to cite her Herculean work ethic, which is… tbh still an understatement. She works. so. hard. She’s worked since she was a child. Literally no one else on earth could do what she does. The trouble with this argument is the sense of deservingness that follows suit. “Beyoncé is so deserving of her wealth and other people exploit labor too, so who cares if she pays Sri Lankans less than their cost of living? Why don’t you go be mad at a white man?” The seamstresses are locked in their accommodations at night so she can sell Ivy Park for a wider profit margin¹ and she “works hard enough” to justify… slave labor? Do the seamstresses not work hard enough to return home to their families?

…Like… can you hear yourself? Can you taste the words coming out of your mouth. Please go brush your tongue.

The other side equally rolls my eyes. Folks that critique the heinous displays of wealth and the deeply inconsistent politic (or the one her art persona claims to have at least) also manage to follow that up with, “and she’s sooooo overrated. She’s famous for no reason! She’s not even talented.”

…Beyoncé? Beyoncé Giselle “The L in LGBT is for Labor Rights Because I Sho’ Do Love My Husband” Knowles-Carter? Overrated. Oh my word. Why be a hater unfounded? When there is plenty of valid critique to be had? Just… dusty. I understand you think her wealth is disgusting. It is. Billionaires are a policy failure, and this lady keeps telling us via her lyrics that she is one (even if she’ll never let Forbes in her pocketbook).

Beyoncé in a (since deleted) youtube video with Pharrel, laughing to the lyrics to Family Feud: “What’s better than one billionaire? Two.” (Jay-Z, 2017)

But most assuredly, multiple things can be true. I am here to spark and entertain reasonable gripes, worthwhile discussion. If you say she’s untalented you are either a miserable (!!!) hater or the kind of former sporty dad who says, “I can do that too!” while Simone Biles defies gravity at the Olympic (and still sincerely expects us to laugh at that stale ass joke). She has no peers in the most literal and obvious sense. She is among our pantheon of Black women that quite obviously have no peership.

Incomparable in their craft. GOATS from the same herd. Can we BFFR

I think both sides of the hero/demon argument fail the scope of Beyoncé’s genius. Gods can’t be geniuses and they especially cannot be Black; the result sees our brilliance attributed to divinity or to aliens. I rebuke and I refute this. Beyoncé is a human person who has dedicated her life to becoming legendaric— not just one of the greatest vocalists alive, or one of the best performers, or the “hardest worker,²” but also one of the richest visual and cultural artists walking the earth. Her knowledge of Black canon in the United States is encyclopedic. Her visuals bring us to our knees every fuckin time because she manages say worlds, whether live or in her filmmaking and directing. She even documents her genius for us. She still speaks to the public on her terms, which is wild considering what the public has said about her³.

I want to stop here because this is a note that’s often missed. The fact that people are so weird about celebrity culture creates a society that legends cannot comfortably exist in. Beyoncé the human cannot exist in normal society. Whether she’d even want to remains to be seen, but we cannot ignore the matter of fact: Beyoncé cannot just go outside. There are some old enough and cultured enough to remember a time where she spoke to the world with enthusiam (pre being dragged about Destiny Child’s membership when that really was above her). She used to be able to go out in public. She is a forty year old woman. Beyoncé remembers a time before the internet and cell phones were this way. When she pursued fame as a literal child, she could not have imagined what the surveillance state would become and how it would ruin her life. The paparazzi have always been sickening, but there wasn’t always a time where people could track your live location and broadcast it to the world. You and your children. The only safe place for you to go is up: into private airlines, into opulence, into becoming a god among men. I cannot imagine she doesn’t feel lonely. She has to feel lonely.

In a TikTok circulated within the summer of Renaissance (2022), I stated the following:

“Beyoncé has world-building amounts of money— like, once you get to a certain point of social and literal capital, you can literally make the world that you would like to live in. It is world-building amounts of money. On the same album that she has, ‘I am the standard, I am my own bar, alien superstar,’ she’s also trying on the workman’s boots— ‘oh, you know, my regular 9-5 job is killing me.’ First of all, Beyoncé has never touched American poverty in her g*ddamn life. Secondly, lines like ‘only double lines we cross are dollar signs’ are blatantly disrespectful when you cross picket lines in recent public memory. Beyoncé does market research. This was not an accident. The rich are seeing that class consciousness is growing, and so they try it on and make it fun because once they do, that politic becomes toothless.”

The only thing I regret about this video was saying “g*ddamn.” I feel like at 3.3 million views (on TikTok alone) Ms. Tina could have seen that and I cringe. Shouldn’t have cussed on your baby. My b. The rest I stand by!

I was not exaggerating when I said “world-building” money, with emphasis on social and literal capital. I’m not arguing that Beyoncé can make a world for everyone off her checks. I am arguing that she is not hyperbolic when she sings, “male or female, it make no difference: I stop the world.” The level of influence she has means that she could, if she wanted, truly be a Black Messiah.

Take, for instance, the worker’s strike of Chateau Marmont, beginning in spring of 2021.

taken from Emma Dabiri’s piece from The Guardian: Jay-Z and Beyoncé crossing a picket line to party shows how shallow celebrity activism really is

By the time the staff of The Chateau Marmont went on strike, the hotel had already laid off 248 of its workers without severance pay at the start of the pandemic. “For me, after 33 years, they left me out on the streets without any money, without any healthcare,” Moran said [to The Daily Beast] on Thursday. “I am asking the hotel to respect the law. I need the support of the community…the hotel threw us out like trash.”

Then, harrowing accounts of sexual assault, public substance abuse, racial discrimination, cocktails of the aforementioned and more come out preceding the workers’ strike. Later in 2020, allegations ranged from sexual advances and violations perpetrated by guests and management to the CEO himself engaging in illegal substances in front of staff members. Note this excerpt from The Hollywood Reporter’s 2020 exposé: While his alleged immoderation affected his employees, resulting in erratic, rageful and impulsive behavior directed at low-level staff as well as managers — “It’s like having an alcoholic, drug-addicted father, but it’s your CEO,” an employee explains.

Amidst the strike, despite being asked not to, Jay-Z and Beyoncé still choose to host their Oscar’s After Party at The Chateau, with their celebrity invite list crossing an active picket line to attend the function.

While many of us are pro-union, few of us actually know what it is like to be on strike. Even with the protections of a union, you gamble your employability for the rest of your life in your chosen field (and with it, your health insurance, your ability to pay rent— basically every basic right that we have to pay for in the United States). This is why I noted in that TikTok that Beyoncé has never known American poverty— not as a dig, but as an important frame of reference. She has no personal idea of what it means to give up one’s meager livelihood, to risk home foreclosure or loss of health insurance or myriad other financial catastrophe because your working environment truly is that bad. You would think that she, self-purported feminist, she, self-purported Black-justice motivated artist, would pause at allegations of racial and sexual abuse. She could have refused. She could have said nothing, not attended, walked away. And she chose to cross an active picket line, in all her glitz and glam, the same summer she has an album out with lyrics like, “I just quit my job // I'm gonna find new drive, damn, they work me so damn hard.”

♫Work by nine, then off past five// and they work my nerves, that’s why I cannot sleep at night.♫

The level of fame she has completely erodes our sense of her humanity: she literally cannot go out in public. It takes a fuck ton of money to live a life worth envying and disappear in plain sight. Beyoncé, if she wishes, never has to see working class people who do not work for her.⁴ I also venture: the level of fame she endures erodes her own sense of humanity. You get to a point, managing world-building capital, where you see striking union members as roadblocks, background characters, rather than people who should be championed (and have been championed by the race leaders before us).

The Paradox of Excellence

feel like if I raised Basquiat from his grave to see this he might just sigh and go lay back down.

Within the paradox of being trapped in wealth but also not wanting to slum it down here anyways, she still manages to make rich, decadent art so damn good it feels like love. The works and life of Beyoncé are so intense that her skill and effort alone feel loving.

And it is effort. My word. Listening to Beyoncé and then growing up to embody your own art helps you understand how much work it is— similar to when you grow into adulthood and you realize just how much your mother loved you for making you dinner every night. It is some WORK. Do we know how much talent and precision is necessary to hand-stitch a tapestry and have it look simple and machine-made? Beyoncé manages an effortless incredible in the way she never shows her seams. And her mind! Do we know how smart this lady is? I studied visuals from Beyoncé’s Lemonade in my 300 level African-American courses for a grade. The woman layered in a religious awakening and a great return to the rich and longstanding bloomings of African Traditional Religions over an album about heartbreaking infidelity.

I’ve had academic papers to consider about Beyoncé’s art every year of my undergraduate education. We had Beyoncé readings that were thirty pages long! Longer! Her and her team are so deeply entrenched in Black radial traditions my professors assigned her as homework. The pulse she has on the common moment, the life she gives to shared experiences of Blackness so innate to us they almost feel unnameable— Beyoncé is an ethnographer. She simultaneously writes and defines cultural history. Mrs. Knowles-Carter is, in sincerity, one of the foremost artistic genius minds of the last era.

This is why I find her displays of wealth so despicable.

An addition from March of 2024: I actually got to see the recent KING PLEASURE exhibit in Los Angeles, put on by his sisters.

a picture I snapped in September of 2023 from the KING PLEASURE exhibit in Los Angeles

Enjoying such a wide array of Basquiat in person allowed me to see his radicalism over time. Much of his work features not just Black liberation but anti-colonial sentiment, especially in the later years of his artwork. He speaks not just of police brutality against Black people, but of military industrial complex other forms of imperialism in the margins of his works, the words doodled in bold to thread imagery together. I regret to not have a picture of that piece which references the annexation of Hawaii in particular. We flash forward a few decades to see the King and Queen of the contemporary Black renaissance displaying Basquiat as a symbol of their personal wealth and power, instead of the collective wealth and power of the growing social consciousness. Beyoncé drapes herself across her billionaire husband, smiling, in love, in a blood diamond sponsored by Tiffany next to a priceless work of art whose maker overtoned anti-imperialism into his work overtly. It makes my brain buzz.

And this is also my answer to the “Why Beyoncé?” senselessness. Yes, there are richer people with larger-scale exploitative practices. Yes, there are whiter people with more money. I insert here a strong, heavy, Negro sigh. Let me just say: I have no beef with people that make excuses for Beyoncé, because she really makes me feel the line they hate me because they want me. I’m more so disappointed with how badly allow this lady to shamelessly posture herself as radical because it sells. To everyone.

Beyoncé has an intrepid, if not magical, knack for giving us art that fits us like custom couture, including in radical positions of Blackness. And. She knows what she’s doing. The first unit of any Womanism (or Black Feminism) learning is misogynoir (see: Lemonade). The second is anti-capitalism. Black radical traditions are quite famously anti-capitalist because (even today! even still!) the most lucrative forms of capital are human bodies enslaved in for cheap labor, and human bodies killed to steal the land they grew from.

Black radicals are anti-capitalists because we are the capital. Still.

You don’t be as studied in Black culture as Beyoncé is and not know what the Black Panthers thought about the Black celebrity. And yet she still plays in our face with costumes of figures that would denounce her and her shady ass, cheating ass husband.

remember when actors dawned Black Panther uniforms and went to a BLM protest and we hated that shit? why is this different? are they not actors? Is this not cosplay?

Video Transcript: “Show me in the white community where a singer is a white leader or a dancer or a trumpet player is a white leader. These aren’t leaders. These are puppets and clowns that have been set up over the Black community by the white community and have been made celebrities and, usually, they say exactly what they know the white man wants to hear.”

*insert Beyoncé’s background vocals on BLACK EFFECT: I’m Malcolm X!*

The Black Panthers, by the way, were and continue to be in staunch support of Palestine’s liberation efforts.

a brief open letter to the public with, Mrs. Beyoncé Knowles-Carter cc’d:

It’s been nearly two years since I originally wrote this piece. At the time I first published these opinions, they were wildly unpopular. I remember feeling something deeper than disappointed— demoralized?— at how many of us from the masses, from the working class went to bat for a billionaire who would laugh at you. I find now that where I expect to feel heartbreak about what we could have in Beyoncé and don’t, I feel… apatethic. I just cannot bring myself to care. I find the dedication to being pretty and boring, as Azaelia Banks put it… just that. Pretty and boring. So I want to be clear why I revisited it: to (1) show my work, and to (2) ask us, to beseech us to have higher standards for the art that we consume.

I want to feel inspired by Beyoncé in the same way I want to feel close to my conservative, Jack and Jill aunties. I love you because your art (and/or person) has shaped some fundamental things about mine; that love is distant because we want very different things from this world. I don’t take advice from people who do not want to live the life I want; I severely limit the consumption of art from artists antithetical to the world I want. I don’t love Beyoncé. I don’t know her. I love whoever I think she is. I love the ways I imagine that we can relate. It’s as if she sheds the skin of whoever she is at the time and allows us to wear it. We sing the songs and we watch her documentaries and we attempt her runs and we learn her choreo so that we, even if for a moment, get to understand like what it is to let go of this body. She loans a suit of herself to us so we can get drunk off the feeling of dancing with her prowess, twirling on her power, being, completely and in full, our own bar— and we can believe sincerely she makes all her shit so good and so vulnerable and so close because she wants to connect us with her through her art… right? But we’ll never really know, will we? It really could, at the end of the day, be simply amazing marketing.

Unfortunately, the moment we are in grows larger than her hand of influence. I’ve revised and resent this article on March 25th, 2024. Wars in across the colonized world (via targeting civilian bombing, slavery and resource extraction, mass rape, occupation and economic blockade) curl the minds of the masses towards art that doesn’t require so much cognitive dissonance. Megan Rice, TikTok sensation and makeshift community pastor, aptly summed the cadence of the moment in this video partially quoted here.

Transcription: All I know is that I’m forever changed and there’s no going back to escapism. There just isn’t. I’ve tried. And there just isn’t. Beyoncé’s ads started rolling about the Renaissance movie, and I knew that I was forever changed when I said, “ooh, girl! I do not care.” Like, I don’t. I don’t, not in the slightest— I don’t care what a single celebrity has to say or do if it’s outside of Free Palestine.

Mass radicalization brings the death of celebrity as we’ve known it. More and more, I see the inquiry: how have we allowed teams of the same billionaire oligarchs to manufacture the art of this time? When art is one of the most effective weapons we have in our fights for freedom?

Look: Beyoncé dawns a persuasive politic like a nigga she loves to fuck on but won’t ever let sleep in her house⁵. I don’t care that it’s marketable. I don’t care that she reaches down to be accessible. She don’t care about being reachable or accessible until it is time to pay for the expensive champagne bottles she empties into hot tubs. Beyoncé renders our politic toothless when she finishes trying it on and squeezing it out, and she knows. Black empowerment that supports billionaires is toothless. The deradicalization is an intentional move to soften the growing, conscious anger among the working class. I am here upset and heartbroken because radicalism is one of my heartbeats in this world. It is the reason I wake up every day subject to the atrocities of peasantry— because I am certain one day we will win.

I am a better artist for Beyoncé’s work, both because the beauty her touch has bloomed within me, and because of how much she makes clear my politic will cost me. I have to commit myself to my peoples, not just in aesthetic, but in action. My politic is alive and she will kill me; I can never use the love of Black radicalism for marketing. To make myself an enemy of my people? Not ever. She teaches me so much, and so I am here to discuss the ways she, as an artist, loves us with earnest effort and, simultaneously, only at her convenience.

Thank you for your coursework, Mrs. Knowles-Carter. Thank you for your inspiration. If I ever get to be great in this good and fleeting life, I want you to know I am compelled by your art— or at least, at a point in time I was. And how it makes me feel. I will remember how you make me feel: grateful to witness excellence, and hating myself a little bit because I know that I’ve been belly up for a nigga that openly tells me with how much you do not care about me. I commit myself and my focus to the art that compels me.

peace.

ismatu gwendolyn

Updates: the big podcast episode is out now!

Her Music Academia is a podcast where a dope ass Black girl talks music theory.

In that viral TikTok, I mentioned that me and my sister Lydia were working on a longer podcast episode about Beyoncé for her podcast. It is out and linked above! Lydia is a third-year phD student and teaching fellow at The University of Michigan, studying music theory, making her one of ten Black women music theorists in the country. She manages to be so cute and interesting that she makes me love music theory?? How. Amazing. What a star. She already has one episode on Beyoncé up! Available on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, or wherever you listen!

1. “How Much It Sucks to Be a Sri Lankan Worker Making Beyoncé’s New Clothing Line.” n.d. www.vice.com. https://www.vice.com/en/article/d7anay/beyonce-topshop-ivy-park-sweatshop-factory-labor.

2. How do we actually go about measuring that? Money increases your capacity to work many times over.

3. Reporter, IBTimes Staff. 2011. “Beyonce Wearing a Fake Baby Bump, Not Really Pregnant [PHOTOS & VIDEOS}.” International Business Times. October 12, 2011. https://www.ibtimes.com/beyonce-wearing-fake-baby-bump-not-really-pregnant-photos-videos-708732.

4. News, A. B. C. n.d. “Beyonce and Jay-Z’s Baby: New York Hospital Clears up Rumors.” ABC News. Accessed September 28, 2022. https://abcnews.go.com/Entertainment/beyonce-jay-zs-baby-york-hospital-clears-rumors/story?id=15327243.

5. if only she would treat her blockhead billionaire husband with the same contempt. hmph.