Beyoncé’s 'Lemonade' album but a sip of her evolving feminist story
Long live the Queen.
When pop megastar Beyoncé releases new music, it's a game-changing moment. But no one was prepared for the narrative film album that was Lemonade, coming on the heels of the surprise release of Formation and a defiant Black Panther-themed performance in the Super Bowl halftime show.
Beyoncé championed black Southern womanhood in ways that none of her contemporaries had done. The backlash was swift. Law enforcement blasted the Formation video as anti-police, with its references to police-involved shootings and a sinking cop car in post-Hurricane Katrina New Orleans. Police officers created a "Boycott Beyoncé" movement and threatened to not work security for concerts on her world tour.
It was all for naught.
Why Beyoncé’s 'Lemonade' lost the Grammys - and why she should have won
Lemonade was released in April 2016 and by June had become Beyoncé's sixth million-selling album. Multiple charts and critics named it among last year's top albums. She would go on to stage a smash hit world tour and even poke fun at the Boycott Beyoncé movement by selling merchandise with that logo printed on it. She set her Beyhive of loyal fans abuzz with news in February that she and rap star husband Jay Z are expecting twins.
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And although Beyoncé won none of the major categories at the 59th annual Grammy Awards — losing album of the year, record of the year and song of the year to Adele — she still took a huge risk when she eschewed pop songs to make a visual album about the pain and triumph of black women. It was a risk that won her the hearts of peers, fans and even Adele for her artistry.
"I can't possibly accept this award," Adele said during her album of the year acceptance speech on Feb. 12. "My artist of my life is Beyoncé. ... The Lemonade album was just so monumental, Beyoncé, so monumental and so well thought-out and so beautiful and soul-baring. ...All of us artists here ... adore you. You are our light."
As the Grammys would seem to hint, although many lauded Lemonade's celebration of black feminism, others were uncomfortable with such ardent advocacy — a far cry from her safe Destiny's Child days.
"She wanted to talk about her experience and use her own words and her own story and her own history," says Adrienne Trier-Bieniek, a gender and cultural scholar at Valencia College and editor of The Beyoncé Effect: Essays on Sexuality, Race and Feminism. "We get really uncomfortable in this society especially when black women do that."
Lemonade resonated with the masses by touching a common nerve — a woman's feelings of betrayal — and linking it to a historical African-American narrative of triumph over tragedy. The rumors of infidelity that Lemonade inspired, especially the infamous lyric in Sorry about "Becky with the good hair," overshadowed the album's nod to female solidarity.
"It's a tradition in black women's blues to talk about the no-good man that eventually you go back to because you believe in the love," says Janell Hobson, an associate professor of women's, gender and sexuality studies at the University of Albany and a Ms. Magazine blogger.
Her audience recognizes the unfaithful lover narrative in women's music, and Trier-Bieniek supports Bey's play to that audience.
"Any study of women and gender and music shows that women respond more positively when they can see themselves reflected in the music they are listening to," Trier-Bieniek says. Not only that, but women want their music to reflect their social and political beliefs, she writes in her book Sing Us a Song, Piano Woman: Female Fans and the Music of Tori Amos.
Ultimately, though, whether or not Jay Z cheated on her is irrelevant.
"Beyoncé is working out for herself what she thinks feminism is. And her working that out publicly and working through those certain ideas, it appeals to a lot of people" and encourages them to examine their own practice of feminism, says Kinitra Brooks, an associate professor of English at the University of Texas at San Antonio who specializes in black feminist theory. At the same time, though, "it also fails to appeal to a lot of people and pushes back (at) what they believe feminism to be."
The public unpacking of Beyoncé's ideas about her identity, her marriage and her sexuality over her past few albums, coupled with a provocative 2014 Time magazine cover, led famed cultural scholar bell hooks to call her influence on young girls "anti-feminist" or "terrorist."
Hooks followed that gut punch, delivered during a 2014 panel discussion at The New School, with a May 2016 essay, "Moving Beyond Pain," that accuses the singer of merely mining black women's pain for money.
"Viewers who like to suggest Lemonade was created solely or primarily for black female audiences are missing the point," hooks writes. "Commodities, irrespective of their subject matter, are made, produced, and marketed to entice any and all consumers. Beyoncé's audience is the world, and that world of business and money-making has no color."
But Tia Tyree, a Howard University communications professor who has researched the lyrics of Beyoncé's previous five albums, believes Beyoncé's music is simply reflecting that the star is more comfortable in her own skin.
"There's this prediction in my work that says as she gets older and as she performs you're going to start to see more of this in-your-face black feminism. And that's exactly what Formation was as the first release of her album," Tyree says. "You see this as she's calling to women, (saying) 'Get in formation or get eliminated.' That's saying, 'Listen, we've got an agenda. We have things to do. Either you're with us or you're against us.'
"It's uncomfortable for some traditional feminists to look at a booty-shaking, weave-wearing, pop star and say she is working for black women ... but the reality is she's absolutely one of the most powerful modern-day black feminists there is," Tyree says.
“She’s earning her bonafides. She’s making people paying attention. I think the longer she does this work, people are going to have a hard not agreeing that she’s doing something special,” says Tamara Winfrey Harris, writer and author of The Sisters Are Alright: Changing the Broken Narrative of Black Women in America.
“What she does is not perfect and I think we shouldn’t expect it to be ... It’s imperfect but it’s still amazing,” Winfrey Harris said.
And as the faces of politics change and as protest and civil disobedience continue, look to Beyoncé to continue mixing social justice and feminine power long after Lemonade.
"If there's any moment where we can talk about having lemons, it's clearly in this moment that we are in right now. It's about not letting this break us but making lemonade and resisting and moving forward," says Quita Tinsley, Feministing writer and activist.
"Lemonade is giving us thoughts of resistance going into this moment that we're in, to really push us through."
Mabinty Quarshie is a digital editor at USA TODAY. You can follow her on Twitter @MabintyQ.