Slay Anything: Is Beyonce Beyond Criticism?

Beyoncé’s recent music video, “Formation,” offered a stunning kaleidoscope of New Orleans post-Hurricane Katrina imagery: Beyoncé lying atop a New Orleans police car as it sinks into an abandoned street flooded with water, she and her dance troupe shimmying in an empty pool, a child clad in a Mardi Gras Indian costume. It incorporates scenes from Abteen Bagheri’s short film on bounce culture, That B.E.A.T., its twerking dancers helping create “Formation”‘s glorious vision of poly-gender blackness amid constant racial, economic and environmental stress. Her appearance during Coldplay’s halftime concert on Super Bowl Sunday brought enough concepts for a day’s worth of Internet textual analysis. She wore a Dsquared2 black leather jacket with a metal sash splayed in X formation across her chest, a homage to Michael Jackson’s costume at his groundbreaking Super Bowl XXVII concert. Her backup dancers sported puffy Afros and raised their fists as tribute to the 50th anniversary of the Black Panther Party, which was founded in Oakland, about a 45-minute drive from Levi Stadium in Santa Clara. In post-concert photos, the dancers held up a “Justice for Mario Woods” sign, drawing national attention to the young man shot dead by San Francisco police on December 2.

Social media effused over Beyoncé’s effortless and seemingly predestined upstaging of Coldplay and wondered aloud whether the OG Black Panthers have approved (it’s not likely, since the Communist theory-espousing group took a dim view of radical chic exploitations like Shaft in their heyday). But it felt like no one was asking what she was doing there in the first place. After all, the NFL is an entertainment conglomerate where 68 percent of the players are black, and yet enjoy fewer job protections than any other major sporting industry. Blacks are underrepresented in the coaching ranks; nearly all of the league’s team owners are white. Yes, one can argue that Beyoncé performed a subversive act by shouting out a radical activist group and frequent critic of capitalist structures and law enforcement during the ultimate showcase of corporate hegemony over American society (and inducing the wrath of right-wing bloviators as a result). Or you could wonder if Beyoncé is simply appropriating controversial black activism for facile symbols that make us feel better about partaking in this uniquely pop apocalypse.

Either way, Beyoncé has become the rare public figure that appears beyond mainstream criticism. It’s easy to dismiss Fox News pundits who hyperventilate against her perceived support of so-called “cop killers.” But her countless fans minimize her occasional missteps. A video clip for “Hymn for the Weekend” which found her cavorting with Coldplay in a sea of appropriated Indian imagery, reduced the second most populous country in the world to an exotic fantasia for Western colonialists. This was quickly forgotten after the premiere of the “Formation” video. A past controversy surrounding her Pepsi sponsorship that reverberated during her magnificent performance at Super Bowl XLIX went either unnoted or unremembered, even though Pepsi sponsored the Super Bowl 50 halftime show too. When an ad for Beyoncé’s upcoming tour appeared right after the mini-concert, she earned kudos for her canny and timely marketing. A post-halftime concert announcement that her #BeyGood organization is co-sponsoring a fund for children affected by the water debacle in Flint, Michigan engendered more goodwill.