Yesterday I saw Elizabeth Warren speak at a local town hall. My third in-person experience with a presidential candidate, she was easily the best (compared to Bernie and Kamala), and I think she’s got a good shot at the crown. In a 1v1 race against Trump, I have no idea who would win, but her winning the nomination would all but guarantee a centrist independent running (I would love if it was Oprah just to fuck everything up) which might split the vote from Trump and eek Betty Warren into the White House. Not a bad transition, all in all.
But this is not my Elizabeth Warren write-up, perhaps I’ll save that for a while until she becomes the nominee. No, today I want to go back to my piece from a couple weeks ago and dive deeper into the transition from popstar to president of our Queen. So many indicators of our democracy parallel too fittingly Ancient Rome in the transition from Republic to Empire, so if autocracy is to be our long term fate, let’s at least have a face we can all follow lead it, a face for the plebs as well as the patricians. Let’s have Queen B.
Too many laugh at the proposition today, yet I mean it in utter seriousness. Here’s my plan for how Beyonce becomes a serious contender for the presidency in the next year using music, money, and the breadcrumb trail to power left by all who came before her to clear the path.
As you can see from the title, we now enter phase two. This is because Beyonce has already completed phase one, achieving mainstream success across all American demographics, the cultivation of a fanbase with a case of serious cult of personality that lives for her. The Beyhive is one of the more powerful groups of celebrity followings, a huge amount of people domestically and abroad made up of all peoples who keep updated on all things Beyonce, that defend her from the slings and arrows of haters and ensure her stature as Queen remains untouchable. The Beyhive also listens intently to what she has to say, and takes to heart her calls for growth and the self-improvement and love required to create the better reality we hope to create in our world. As I see it, Beyonce achieved this by first proving her bonafides, her talent, and her unquestionable place at center-stage of any performance. After fully solidifying herself as the American artist, she began her political messaging. This leads us into the first part of phase two: music.
Beyonce’s presidential ambition really begins for me with 2013’s self-titled album. There’s a very particular reason this album, officially her fifth album, is self-titled, something usually reserved for a first. This is the beginning of the new Beyonce, the bigger Beyonce, the Beyonce with something serious to say that we all need to hear. This album pushes new boundaries on the previous image of the artist, testing the fanbase for the first time in a way previous albums never did, ensuring they are prepared for the fire to come. With the first four albums, Beyonce is cultivating a generally mainstream sound and proving she’s the best at it, she’s giving us just what we want in her own way, and earning our trust while it happens. Now she’s cashing in on some of that trust for the first time, giving us a new taste of anger, sexuality, and most importantly the deeply complicated humanity that undergirds all of us but we previously did all we could to deny. With songs like Pretty Hurts, Jealous, and No Angel, Beyonce lets us into vulnerabilities and parts of herself heretofore kept hidden, kept hidden by most celebrities in fact, most people, especially ones who spend such effort on the cultivation of image. Showing us her humanity makes us more willing to see her as human like us, and with this she becomes even more a goddess to us all. She’s real, she’s just like me, and she’s QUEEN.
Then she hits us with Flawless and we are sold. With this song we for the first time get a true sense of Beyonce’s politics, and what is to come. Flawless is an amazing song, particularly the Nicki Minaj remix. Flawless brings us the angry feminist Beyonce, the fighter who makes us believe that this woman can be strong, fierce, and make those who stand against her bow down bitches. We also get a sense here of the philosophies guiding Beyonce in her life with the first and only real speech given in the album, Chimamanda’s analysis on the relationship between men and women and the threat women pose to men, this is radical for any mainstream pop artist, but particularly Beyonce who had thus far cultivated a sense of “safe” for white people, allowing her music to be played anywhere safely. Then, like a sleeper agent, she strikes at the heart. She reminds us that she’s an angry black woman and that she has every right to be, for to quote James Baldwin “to be a Negro in this country and to be relatively conscious is to be in a rage almost all the time.” White people seemed to forget this fact. So proud of themselves for allowing a black man to sit in the white house, they came to fully accept post-racial America and ignore the cry of those under the boot. Beyonce reminded us, not so fast. I would argue that in large part because of her efforts, the indignation of The Movement returned in full to our streets and our children. Permission was granted to feel the extent of the injustice we suffer, to demand more from the society we inhabit. Beyonce helped wake so many of us up.
Her initial efforts with Beyonce get magnified tenfold, a hundredfold, with Lemonade. Truly an essential album, it brought to the fore what she flirted (albeit heavily) with in Beyonce. It showed that she was ready to commit to the cause, and commit she did. Lemonade comes fierce and fast and so wonderfully radical as well. What was awakening in the last album is now woke and ready to call out the world she sees as she sees it. Her using her personal life in this is absolutely ingenious, the key to effective politics 101, make us empathize with the speaker and the words become our own. Elizabeth Warren did the same thing to great effect at the rally, using a biographical speech of her life story to both let us feel like we personally know her and to tie her politics directly into the individual’s lived life. With Beyonce, this type of storytelling also grabs our attention, as she is married to one of the most famous names in music, a man we are all equally as curious about discovering. They are an extremely cautious couple when it comes to their public image, very curated (another indication of possible presidential ambitions?), and yet one of the only looks at their relationship we have is a violent attack by Beyonce’s sister against her husband in an elevator. The clip is shocking and so very exciting to the world because we are getting an inside look at true royalty, and it looks messy, human. She hints at it in the Flawless remix (of course shit goes down when there’s a billion dollars on an elevator, brilliant), but nothing real, so our curiosity remains ravenous, until she sated us with a cool glass of Lemonade.
She walks us through the journey of pain, betrayal, suffering, love, and forgiveness required to overcome trauma, abuse, and hardship. That’s what cheating is, an abuse of the sanctity of the holy relationship, and any true union of people is holy. To betray that is to violate a person’s most sacred and vulnerable trust they have to give, the safekeeping of their heart. Yet even after betrayal, the love remains, and the need for union and family still courses deeper yet within us. We are unified in our spirit and inextricably bound to family and the history of blood. Family runs constantly through both Beyonce and Lemonade, generations past and future, and we see the Queen at the center trying to balance it all. After bringing us through the redemptive story of the relationship, Beyonce ends with the most radical call to arms yet with Formation. The single that preceded the album, Formation is a fantastic song that does many things. It calls on us to act together in formation for our cause, it puts Beyonce front-and-center in her relationships by giving her sexual control and power with the famous “if he fuck me good I take his ass to Red Lobster.” That’s the type of line we’d expect out of a male artist in reference to a woman, so to hear a woman claim it as her own is empowering, a type of boldness that seems truly refreshing and a perfect rallying cry for the modern American girl. The song calls us to political action, to prepare ourselves as we stand up and fight for ours. With this last song on her last album, Beyonce drops the mic and tells us “let’s go.”
I don’t want to get too into an analysis of the albums any more than I already have, there are by now volumes of analysis on the two albums dealing with all the many, many important references to thousands of aspects of black culture and life from across the diaspora. Both albums were video albums with film corresponding to nearly every song, allowing the Queen access to a truly intimidating remit of cultural references and touchpoints that seek to educate our ignorant asses with every new viewing and analysis. Beyonce began her career showing the whites she was safe, now she was telling the world what for, why she played it safe early, because we cannot help but listen now. Her stature is too great for anyone to ignore, and if we are going to listen, she made sure to have something worth everyone’s hearing.
Here’s why my speculation begins.
In her path to the presidency, Beyonce must create one more album to conclude this trilogy, and I recommend that album be titled Third, something along those lines. There are three meanings to the title: the first so that it references it’s place at the end of this trilogy and acknowledges them as the trilogy of woke Beyonce. Secondly, it references her old Houston neighborhood that helped craft the child and thus the woman, Third Ward. This is important for her as it reminds us of her humble roots along America’s third coast. Thirdly, it references Africa, for this album will act as Beyonce’s journey through the mother continent, her Graceland almost. This is the corner of the diaspora Beyonce is saving for when it most counts, and that time is now. Her albums have grown more and more international, touching all pockets of the diaspora without spending any real time in the source. Here’s where she does that. I have lots of ideas on the contents of the album, but I will leave that for another post, as here I just want to tap into the big picture, but basically it will involve the relationship between self-discovery and the connection to the great human spirit found in that discovery, and to our commitment to the international cause. True self-actualization only happens when the self can see where it exists in the whole, the whole whole and not just the American whole. To understand what it means to be a person alive today, one must understand history and the world far beyond national and temporal borders. Every black person in the diaspora has at the very least a curiosity about Africa, an understanding that it holds secrets sought, and a feeling of alien detachment and loss akin to children ripped from their mother’s womb and handed off to adoptive parents that were by-and-large abusive, uncaring, and many times cruel. Beyonce giving voice and connecting Africa to her web will act as the final bookend on her three part study of the African-American condition in a way accessible and liberating for any listeners. I know Beyonce can achieve this as she has already done so many times over. This album will act as culmination to all her musical work, tying all sounds, styles, and substance of the entirety of her career, the last piece of the puzzle that shall reveal the final image of a queen worthy of our worship and admiration on high, a person that holds the ear and thus the soul of the nation.
(PS to the music section: I don’t mean for Third to be purely African in any way, merely that it will incorporate many of the sounds of Africa as past albums incorporated the sounds of the caribbean and country music into the music. After watching Homecoming, I firmly believe at least one song here must at the very least involve, if not be entirely, Beyonce singing opera. That was too good a talent not to use and ties in too well with traditionally white realms that she simply must invade and lay claim to, much as she did with her husband in Versaille with Apeshit, so that the entire notion of segregated “realms” of culture becomes smashed. Along those lines, the cover of the album, in my mind’s eye, is a play on the famous Marriage at Cana by Paolo Veronese that hangs opposite the Mona Lisa. Beyonce takes the place of Jesus, and the rest of the figures are made to be representative of the wide diaspora in all its many forms, a milieu of black life.)
(PPS to the music section: I wrote this article over a week ago, and this Tuesday the Beyonce produced The Gift was announced, an album to corresponds to The Lion King cultivating the sounds and music of Africa with a variety of artists. Naturally, this changes much of what I say in the paragraph about the album. It initially flummoxed and annoyed me, as this article’s publication had been delayed and the news changed much of what I now believe the sound of the album should represent. I had Beyonce cultivating the sounds of Africa because that is the continent now with the least modern representation in American culture, and the next logical step in Beyonce’s progression. Perhaps, then, it is good that The Gift takes care of it, so that Beyonce need not worry about the underrepresentation of the mother continent. Instead now, I believe Third will just be a fully international, globalized album, cultivating and using sounds from across the globe, with a slight favoritism to the third world. Africa, India, Latin America. Third should now tie in everything, and then tie it all back to home, to America, to Houston, to the Third.)
Beyonce should then put aside a good part of the proceeds of this album towards public causes, particularly in her old neighborhood of Third Ward. Beyonce’s profits should go entirely to her own brand and glorification, Lemonade’s entirely to her family and their security into the long future, and Third’s towards the people. She should use this album to give back in a way that directly benefits the communities she seeks to empower by generating long-term goodwill and public connections as well as experience with political power. She should work outside of, but with, local governments to fix burdens they cannot themselves ameliorate. The upkeep of schools, community centers, churches, and non-profits in the area, programs of public works and beautification that are often cheap but effective, things like flower gardens and greenspaces. Let her act as a patron of all, I think of the likes of the Medici in Florence whose effects still live long after the family themselves disappeared from prominence. Beyonce would soon eclipse the rest of Houston political life as the unelected leader of the city, the saint. She could easily leverage this into the mayoralty if she wants, in order that she properly familiarize herself with the levers of power, but this is an unnecessary step. What matters in this step is that she cultivate a reputation as a force for public good, someone who truly cares about the wellbeing of the people and the community that raised her. In giving back, she gains a reputation that otherwise could not be bought. Yet here it can, in charity and public goods.
Here ends phase two. Phase three involves the cultivation and creation of the Beyonce Knowles-Carter political machine, the further and complete smashing of the traditional left/right divide in American politics, and the exploitation of the chaos and confusion to rise as the light in the dark carnage of our creation, the hope of a new America. I can see it all so clearly, it’s only a matter of time.
Attending the Warren rally yesterday, all I could think was Queen B would and should be president one day. Our political leaders have already become fully celebrities, figures beyond the realm of the normal or regular American. When Warren spoke of her touring, all the people she’d met, places she’d seen, she elicited the loudest cheer when she spoke of the 35,000+ selfies she’d taken and how she’d be sticking around the rally afterwards for more. Truly abandoned, if it ever really lived, is the idea that the American president is just a citizen tasked with manning the helm of our nation. Trump’s election only gives proof to this. The evil magic loosed on the world cannot be returned to the box, so why not lean in and embrace it? Who’s message of deep frustration and love sounds louder in our ears than Beyonce’s?
Beyonce represents in my mind one of the greatest symbols of feminism in the 21st century, and this is the century of the woman’s ascendancy. Who then would be a more fitting symbol for the face of America than the Queen B?