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Between the song and the video, there’s the club, the church, the wig shop, line dancing, donks on parade, black cowboys and, yes, some footage of New Orleans borrowed from a mini-documentary called “That B.E.A.T.” (which the filmmakers seem alternately frustrated by and pleased with). “Formation” feels like a refinement and amplification of that album - it’s sinewy and thrusting, but also angular and tough. But it’s also important to remember that she was doing similar things all over “Beyoncé,” the album she surprise released at the end of 2013. I think you’re right, Wesley, in that she’s making clear her claims to her old identity even in this new space. Her radicalism is both overt and implicit - she knows that creatively drawn statements of black identity and pride are as powerful as any direct social-political statement. It’s a dab in a video form, playing on a loop it’s phenomenally delicious.ĬARAMANICA “Earned all this money but they never take the country out me”: What’s fascinating about this song and video is how Beyoncé renders her politics both literally and colloquially. That’s baller, and that’s why the world slash Internet is going nuts. Her idea of swag is keeping hot sauce in her bag while she’s decked out in Givenchy. It’s not Pharrell’s new black (no shade!) - it’s your grandmother’s black. WORTHAM Wesley, it’s the blackest of black. Her idea of swag in this song is keeping a bottle of hot sauce in her purse. This woman’s blackness was never in doubt, but I wonder when you become this wealthy and this famous, and when that’s not how you were raised - friends, say, with the former Paltrow-Martins - whether you start to wonder or fear disconnection from what is, in Beyoncé’s case, your less affluent, Southern heritage. When she says, “I like my negro nose with Jackson 5 nostrils,” it’s basically “ my anaconda don’t want none unless you got buns, hon” but for the face - the black, male face.
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WESLEY MORRIS So it sounds like what you guys are saying is that this video is really, really black. It’s easy to think that releasing a video is a soft way to make such a strong statement, but Bey has always been about using striking visuals, clever lyrics and high-impact narratives to express her point of view.Īs always, a Beyoncé surprise drop operates across multiple vectors, and “Formation” isn’t just about police brutality - it’s about the entirety of the black experience in America in 2016, which includes standards of beauty, (dis)empowerment, culture and the shared parts of our history. I think she wants us to know that even though she’s headlining a mainstream event like the Super Bowl, she has opinions and isn’t afraid to share them, nor is she afraid to do it on a national and global scale.
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She wants us to know - more than ever - that she’s still grounded, she’s paying attention and still a little hood.
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JENNA WORTHAM This video feels like the ultimate declaration from Beyoncé that the tinted windows are down, the earrings are off and someone’s wig might get snatched, judging by the scene in the hair store about 1:22 minutes in. Related: Beyoncé Releases Surprise Single ‘Formation’ The halftime show is usually a locus of entertainment, but Beyoncé has just rewritten it - overridden it, to be honest - as a moment of political ascent. This is high-level, visuallystriking, Black Lives Matter-era allegory. And at the end of the clip, a line of riot-gear-clad police officers surrender, hands raised, to a dancing black child in a hoodie, and the camera then pans over a graffito: Stop Shooting Us. She straddles a New Orleans police cruiser, which eventually gets submerged (with her atop it). In “Formation,” she returns to that city this time, she’s in scenes that suggest a fantastical post-Katrina hellscape, but radically rewritten. JON CARAMANICA Beyoncé is nothing if not meticulous, and that’s clear from the timing of the release of “Formation,” 24 hours before the Super Bowl, where she’s scheduled to share the halftime show with - and completely annihilate - Coldplay.īeyoncé has a history with the Super Bowl: her 2013 halftime performance at the Mercedes-Benz Superdome in New Orleans was perhaps the greatest of the modern era.