A Note About Beyoncé's "Black Is King" (Patreon)

I'm of two minds about this. Overall I think it's great how Ms. Knowles-Carter has essentially taken millions from the Disney Corporation under the auspices of reimagining The Lion King only to completely subvert the assignment. The short dialogue clips from the film are incidental to Beyoncé's broader agenda of celebrating Pan-African culture, even if she is implicitly connecting generations of tribal royalty to ostentatious African-American wealth in the cultural sphere. (For a more thorough consideration of this issue, I hand you over to Judicaelle Irakoze.)

It's difficult not to think of this project as Beyoncé's response not only to the recent Black Lives Matter protests in the wake of the murder of George Floyd, but also a cryptic call-out of Kanye West's gospel turn with his Jesus Is King album. By reasserting Africa as the land of kings and queens, as well as the cradle of civilization, Beyoncé rebukes the white supremacist lie that Black people have no worth, while also calling on a centuries-old set of spiritual traditions and cosmologies that predate (but do not exclude) the Western conception of Christianity.

I'm not certain that this is the most radical or necessary intervention Beyoncé could have made at this particular moment. It may be unfair to compare Black Is King to Lemonade, given that the latter is one of key artworks of the decade. But where Lemonade combined the personal and the political in a mixture of palpable sorrow and rage, Black Is King feels remote, very much like a theoretical proposition. Aside from the dance numbers, this visual album returns to the static tableaux style that characterized a lot of the 2013 self-titled piece, an approach I'll admit to not being a fan of. It's a non-motile avant-garde tradition that one finds in Jodorowsky and Paradjanov, among other places -- and a film like this, clearly influenced by fashion photography, intensifies the deadening effect.

But still, what other artist of Beyoncé's stature would use her clout to provide a global stage for lesser-known musicians such as South Africa's Moonchild Sanelly, Ghana's Shatta Wale, or Nigeria's Yemi Alade? This alone strikes me as reason enough to appreciate Black Is King, despite its occasional lapses into awkward mythmaking and First World tourism. Others, of course, need not be so generous.