Beyoncé’s Lemonade is Smashing

With her latest visual album, Beyoncé is out to free pop culture from its patriarchy.

I cannot lie. I have never called myself a Beyoncé fan. I’m not a member of the BeyHive. I’ve never purchased any of her music, and in the past I have declined invitations to write about Queen Bey. But after experiencing the tour de force of Beyoncé’s 60-minute visual album, I drank her Lemonade.

A prodigious feminist manifesto embodied in spoken word, music and moving images, Lemonade explores the ways we squeeze ourselves and each other into prisons of emotional, racialized and gendered oppression — and insists that it’s high time we broke the spell. No longer will the erotic sexuality of black women be threatened. And while Lemonade is nectar for female and male feminists alike, it is black women who occupy the center of Beyoncé’s feminist vision. She’s out to free pop culture of its patriarchy, inviting viewers to imagine a black womanist world of magical realism through Southern Gothic, antebellum scenes set to an Afrofuturistic song cycle that recalls — and tackles — male domination and female oppression of wives, daughters and mothers.

The struggle to free women in performance cultures is real. For centuries, female characters in opera and ballet were murdered or driven to suicide by men, forced to give up their identity or status with no hope for happiness, or dragged into marriages they never desired. The death songs sung by divas in the 16th, 17th, and 18th centuries created theatrical dramas where female characters — Cio-Cio-San, Carmen, Isolde, Tosca and Desdemona — never survived to threaten the structures of patriarchy.

In more contemporary times, in the cultural figures of Disney princesses, Hannah Montana, and plastic Barbies, women have been expected to sacrifice their voices, lucidity, and bodies in the name of keeping a man. If she didn’t lose her voice, she was deemed mad — and black women are the maddest. Meanwhile, we witness the state’s brutality against our sons and daughters as well as the sexual abuse–to–prison pipeline, online sexploitation, slut shaming, beatings and suicides, all ravaging what we see and think about black girls’ and women’s bodies.

“While Lemonade is nectar for female and male feminists alike, it is black women who occupy the center of Beyoncé’s feminist vision.”

Not so in Lemonade. Visually, water breaks in slow motion from within a catacomb of denial as a bright musical ostinato of pizzicato strings in the key of C alternates with a bombastic bassline. Beyoncé emerges sassy and sophisticated in “Hold Up.” Dressed in saffron, she is Bizet’s Carmen, skipping like a schoolgirl down the street in a seductive tango with pop music’s patriarchal gaze. She smashes men’s toys with her monster truck, decapitates hydrants controlled by the state, breaks windows of consumption — clubbing the constant surveillance of the black female body as though they were pumpkins. And in this world, there will be no arrest.

In the transition in Lemonade between “Don’t Hurt Yourself” and “Sorry,” the sounds of a tiny, wind-up music box plays as a lone female drummer recovers from fury. The music of its metallic combs? A sampling of the principle theme from the second act of Swan Lake. In the 19th-century libretto, the ingenue was always a beautiful white victim in a tutu. Enslaved in the musical box, the symbolic figurine of the ballerina always pops up when the jewelry box is opened to float mechanically above cheap, mass-produced metalwork.

“I see Lemonade as one of the boldest statements a black female artist has offered through song, calling for an examination of how pop culture hides the social suffering of black girls and women while simultaneously objectifying us.”

In Tchaikovsky’s ballet, Odette is a beautiful but cursed maiden — like Beyoncé cursed by a cheating husband. Odette must live as a swan beside an enchanted lake created from her mother’s tears — in Lemonade, the tears of Beyoncé’s black female ancestors — and only at night may she return to human form. In the ballet, the princess can only be freed by a man who loves none but her. Beyoncé’s film is her attempt at restoring black women to their human form.

Beyoncé’s representation of freedom — culminating with a song of the same name in this astonishing filmic narrative — had me break down and weep alone in my living room. Throughout the 20th century, popular artists from Josephine Baker to Bessie Smith to Nona Hendryx to Meshell Ndegeocello have attempted, in their own ways, to flip the asymmetrical positions of masculinity and femininity through song and image. But Beyoncé’s album organizes a whole new vision of the task, and makes “women” and “winner” — nearly homonyms — ever more synonymous. Just listen.

Lemonade is about more than infidelity in marriage. I see it as one of the boldest statements a black female artist has offered through song, calling for an examination of how pop culture hides the social suffering of black girls and women while simultaneously objectifying us. But we must not make a home out of Beyoncé’s voice. Nor can popular music or culture house our politics — though it sure can ignite a revolution in symbolic images. Beyoncé’s vision of crisis in our patriarchy is framed within a dramatic and elaborate album of musical theatre, but we must remember that this story is hers — not ours — to overanalyze.

Lemonade instead puts everyone on notice and reminds us that pop culture can carry the gutbucket politics of a new kind of imagined justice — one that deals simultaneously with race, gender, and sexuality while confronting multiple oppressions. Beyoncé’s opus speaks to inequalities that we all must demand be overcome.

The TED Fellows program hand-picks young innovators from around the world to raise international awareness of their work and maximize their impact.