I love Beyonce Knowles-Carter. I love nearly everything about her. I love her talent, her adept ability to wield her authority and power with the aims of improving the public consciousness. I love the color she brings to our culture in all aspects. I want more. Anyone who saw Homecoming came away having witnessed something magnificent, a step forward in performance art and especially the concert experience. To bring that to a music festival no less, truly the stuff of stardom. All those present that first night witnessed legend. Culture progressed with a noticeable step as we all came away inspired in ourselves and our future. If she can do that, then what on Earth can I yet do? Her singing keeps swirling around my head. A good part of that is my partners continued playing of “Before I Let Go”, but I just keep being struck by her talent.
First her raw ability, her indubitable mastery of her voice and her body. She flaunts before us a Prima Donna in her prime and we are all of us Max Bialystock screaming “when you got it, flaunt it”. And she does. My god, she does. She throws down gauntlet after gauntlet with each dance number, daring viewing fans to recreate it if they can. She sings her songs both classically as we want them, and then remixed in ways we didn’t even know we needed but now cannot live as we previously did upon hearing. She proves herself in every way a performer can and demands more from every witness and competitor at their shot at the crown.
Beyonce advances the medium, she moves forward the conversation.
We all largely agree that much of American Democracy is broken. Unresponsive to the demands of the pressures acting upon it and the people it claims to serve and protect, nearly all parties feel in some way put out by the failures of the political machine.
Donald Trump broke the machine clean asunder. Shattered in his wake and uncertainly attempting to reattach all the lost pieces, we flounder as the social contract is ripped to shreds.
Using the pulpit of the presidency to maximum effect, Donald Trump dictates the national conversation to the best of his ability and the limits of his power, and determines the focus of the day. Using his amassed cultural influence, he cuts like a hot knife through butter into the partisan squabbles and nonsense that had come to pass for current political discourse. He milked our darker fantasies of burning it down and starting over, but was an idiot, and lay out a plan with no hope in getting nationally won over. Racism, xenophobia, know-nothingness, and poor planning win no long-term gains or realized ambitions, they just lead to shame, degradation, and a closed-off world stalling centuries behind the potential limits of human progress. We clearly work better together, we are all obviously much more alike than we are different, and we seek unity and a new start at our attempt at a peaceful, happier world. Yet we are uncertain, ignorant, uncomfortable, and afraid, and we are uncertain if once we pick up this flipped table there will be a seat left there for me.
Cue Beyonce Knowles-Carter.
Everyone loves Beyonce. People pretend they hate her, people try hard not to like her, but deep down and after plenty watching, she’s impossible not to root for and love. She represents all we hope to achieve and aspire. She is incarnate the American Dream of the 21st century. She should begin now to cultivate a reputation beyond her limited scope of cultural icon. You guffaw at my claim at limited, but compared to the reaches of power she could otherwise have, there are limits to the power that money can buy, limits on the bounds of influence those with money can wield.
She should find how much power her family money can now buy, and she should begin in her old neighborhood in Houston, the eternal Third Ward. The beating heart of Houston’s cultural body and soul, the hardest work has been largely done on the redemption and rejuvenation long promised. Yet there is clearly much work left to do. Many houses remain run down, businesses shuttered, and once busy street intersections dead to anything but history and stray cats running after rats in the road.
Living there for three years, I walked around and cringingly recoiled in despair at the abundant waste laying about all around. Don’t read this wrong, there is much that is beautiful and truly prosperous there, but an eye is drawn to the decrepitude of things, where things are going wrong as we are bored and blase to the sight of things going right. As things go, the ward shall be picked off by the vultures of time and that great beast called today gentrification. Cultural erasing.
Third Ward once extended well into what are today known as the chic areas of Houston: Midtown, Museum District, EaDo, Montrose. Scattered and large was the area left for the slaves and their descendants to come upon which to segregate themselves and long multiply. Then broken apart, segmented, and slowly erased, the tenderly cultivate culture of the community was smashed against the rocks of the white state oppression. 288 at the juncture of I-45 and highway 59, one of the widest intersections in Houston, a city renowned for its wide roads and huge highways, slapped right in the middle of Third Ward.
In a pen-stroke the historic neighborhood was divided again in half wiped and a piece again broken off in order that it be long forgotten. What’s left is small and being picked off by property developers and modernized. The University of Houston grows ever larger and requires more from its neighbors beside. Texas’s historic black university, TSU, sits in the heart right there and I’ve heard talk of theories it will be bought by UH to fill this assumed size. Cuney Homes right there has a timer counting down for how long it lasts before being sold off, demolished, and utterly redesigned. The neighborhood will become unrecognizable and lost to time. This happens constantly, it is the evolutionary nature of culture. But it also doesn’t happen when we fight and survive. Society and nature abound with small indomitabilities and wills to survive. We must find our Nietzchean stride.
This is where Beyonce steps in to lead the fight. She has come steadily out of the closet as a proud and strong Black Woman, a fact of which the nation needed a reminder. Not a puppet for the pawn masters (at least as publicly perceived), she carefully cultivated a team around her that progressed the message of the modern woman, the message of the times. This century will be marked as the normalization of women and minorities in politics to the point of history being our only reminder. Let her lead the charge. Where once taking up the black struggle left you relegated to the doorstep of has-beens and unsafe, it is now the de facto stance and welcomed with ever more open arms. Of course we should eliminate institutional racism, there is no worse charge as being called a racist or pawn of racism and of that we can certainly all agree. Let it be her time to take up the reigns.
Kamala Harris attempts this now. Look at her try to fulfill the prophecy we’ve been promised since Barack left the White Temple on high. Yet we all know she comes up short. She does not quite yet meet the mark. She is still too much of that skeezy political class. Every candidate for the Democratic 2020 side are people we want to see on the team, but we don’t see any as Team Captain. We resign ourselves to the old men by habit, but nobody inspires the hearts of the people, nobody champions the message in a language that anybody speaks with their natural tongue. Just as Trump captains the team, but the rest of the players run the ball, so too should Beyonce take over the Democratic Party at large. Let her be our Reagan to usher in the new face of the multicultural America at-large.
Beyonce, she makes me giddy at the prospect alone. Let her buy what by rights should be hers. Holding the attention of the media with the tabloid microphone while at the same time creating groundswell efforts of philanthropy and clear results of her goodwill, she can earn the presidency outside of politics as we have now revealed we are willing to let her earn. We gave the holy sacraments to a carnival barker to administer as his fickle whims deem fit, and the deeper bonds of the nation seem for the most part intact, or at the very least, surviving. When swept away in media-storm, it might feel like Civil War looms on the horizon, but so too does the possibility of a new dawn.
A good portion of the people that voted for Donald Trump did so despite his racism, xenophobia, and generally bigotry, not because of it. He appealed to myself as well, I ashamedly admit, because he sounded like a real human being. He talked like a person talks, not like an operative. He offended people, as we all sometimes do, and more importantly, he did not try and change who he was so that people would like him. That’s all we see Democrats do and it’s so gross. We watch them constantly pander and say the “right” things, because they are afraid of people seeing through their thin veneer. We have a great sense of sniffing out a disingenuous person in those moments that we want to, and we all want to hate on the powers-that-be. Trump at least offered a different type of character, he was an outsider who promised to change the narrative, and change it he did. Would all these minority women have gotten elected in 2016 had HRC not pulled a JC so that they could be free?
Already, many have called to a close the American century, and turn their eyes east towards China, India, and with fear to Iran. Our challengers seem ready, and we appear weak to the threat. An aspect of us is weak: the white man. Emotionally battered and bruised from holding down the country both from deemed threats internal and abroad, the white man suffers the long legacy of repression and historical denial of his right to express healthily when he feels afraid and uncertain of the path. In reaction to psychological turmoil created in the wake of emotional repressions, white men have institutionally brutalized all others in an attempt to fulfill their promise as strong man, and their dream of themselves as the great leaders. Yet this flexing now reveals its final form in Mr Trump, and anyone is lying who says he’s the dream to act as guide towards the promised land.
But Beyonce. She’s a leader, she’s someone we want to follow. She’s Queen B. So let us give her the crown. Let us open ourselves to the possibility that our times have truly changed and we need to harness new powers and create new alliances in the social fabric that empowers our communal lives. Why can she not lead us? Did David not give us the Psalms? Can Beyonce not bring us the modern reply with her verse?
She represents the face of the next American Century, and it is beautiful and empowering to people everywhere. Nobody on earth carries more resonance with the public than Beyonce KC, and I would argue that in any drunken bar fight or university arena, nobody represents better the face of the 21st Century America.
Just as JFK represented the new America emerging from the smoke of the war, Trump represents that same face now. Bloated, tired, angry, and feeling constantly persecuted while always on the attack, the time for retirement is long nigh.
The Democratic Party looks for a challenger and debates between Bernie and Joe, and the heart of the nation just sighed.
Give us what we want.
The Republicans did it, they appealed to our id, and it worked and they won, changing political discourse forever. Let Beyonce do the same. We want her to lead the charge.
The power structures are changing, the old orders are realigning, and new forces are coming to grow into their charge. The social movements of the past millennia culminating in the liberation charges of the last century planted strong seeds that now bear the fruits of the soil for which many died to fertilize. In this great ecological tsunami commonly known as the 6th extinction, so too go the old world social hierarchies.
This first century of our twenties we shall spend flexing our muscles of adulthood, cleaning up our teenage mess, and doing the hard work of owning up to our hurtful habits and escapes. Nobody wants another old white man in charge, we have grown sick of that character. We need a new face, we need a new rhythm and tempo, we need a fresh beat for this fresh start, and we know we liked the taste of the beat brought by Barack. The snakes of racism lashed out and revealed themselves, now begins the work of chopping of each of the Hydra-heads, but it shall happen with current trends staying as they are.
This century represents the new start where we shall all be centered in that cheesiest of motivators–yet most essential–love. Beyonce preaches the gospel of love both inside and out, physical and emotional, for the self and your partner and the family to come, she tackles love in its many forms and many aspects. She grapples publicly with what the nation too is grappling with, and at a pace with which the general public can follow. We can marinate in her evolution and it serves us such deep benefit beyond what most truly appreciate, see, or can currently know. In the promises of all these candidates about how they will serve the American public and vision of our future, we feel unfulfilled and hear that nagging verse swirling around in our head until it drowns out the inane chatter: “they don’t love you like I love you.” Ain’t nobody gonna do us like Bey, and we all know it, so let nation be anointed now in this century: U.S. of BEY.