Beyoncé on a revolutionary “tough love”

The article in Seattle’s weekly “alternative” paper, The Stranger, piqued my interest. Beyoncé’s new album had the writer gushing over how it was a powerful feminist statement.  I looked at the thousands of songs in my music library and couldn’t find a single Beyoncé tune. I couldn’t even name one of her songs. The article suggested she is very popular with black women, so on an impulse, I bought her new album, Beyoncé, from the itunes Store. I wanted to know something about this queen of black feminism.

 

Luckily, each song has a music video with it, and the videos really give life to the songs. The Stranger writer had stressed the value of watching them in order, so I settled in to watch the album. She does take a strong “third wave” feminist stance, in the “we want respect and the freedom to be sexy” vein. And oh, boy, is she sexy. It was a delight to get the album for the music and music videos, but her sex-on-the-beach provocations wouldn’t have moved me to write this.

 

But then I got to the one called “Superpower.” It starts off low and slow, like the distant rumbling of a storm in the mountains. She walks deliberately, dressed in a sort of ultra-sexy urban guerilla outfit. Then she pulls up her balaclava, leaving only her eyes visible, perhaps a nod to Muslim women, but certainly in the style of Sub-Commandante Marcos, or Black Block anarchists. One by one, other women join her. The lyrics start as a poetic allusion to solidarity. More people join this march of the resolute, and the scene evolves to full-on riot with broken windows, Molotov cocktails, the smashing and burning of a cop car. The song hooks on “tough love,” and a flaming tire rolls across the screen. In my mind it is a clear reference to “necklacing,” the way South African rebels, in the struggle against Apartheid, dealt with snitches and other traitors. Necklacing is where an old tire is forced over the head of the accused and down until his arms are pinned at his side. Then he is doused with gasoline and set afire. Tough Love, indeed.

 

There is a scene where Beyoncé kneels by a fallen comrade. The lyrics are powerful:

                        “And just like you I can't be scared

                     Just like you I hope I'm spared

                    But it's tough love

 

The video shifts and ahead of the crowd stands a row of riot cops. Beyoncé, now dressed in clothes more appropriate for combat, marches in the front lines of the assembled people. The song turns “superpower” into the power of revolutionary love or unity. Solidarity, as every organizer on the left knows, is our source of mass strength, the one thing that even though we have nothing, we can have. The other day, here in Seattle, when others ended their inaugural speeches with thanks to their supporters, Seattle’s new socialist City Councilperson, Kshama Sawant, ended hers, fist raised, with the single word, “Solidarity!”At that moment, as in the Beyoncé video, we could “feel it in the air.”

 

On screen, the police line braces for the onslaught as the people charge. The message is deadly serious; all-out uprising, and the super power of solidarity. I watched stunned. My mind ran to a short video that one of my wife’s high school students made of the historic U.S. civil rights struggles. We showed it repeatedly on our TV show, Indymedia Presents, because it had that same no-holding-back feeling, ending in a speech by Martin Luther King that sums up his core philosophy:

 

            “Another thing I want to say to you is that hate isn’t our weapon either. I’m not talking now about a weak love. It would be nonsense to urge oppressed people to love their oppressors in an affectionate sense. I’m not talking about that. Too many people confuse the meaning of love when they go to criticizing the love ethic. I’m talking about a love that is so strong, that it becomes a demanding love. I’m talking about a love that is so strong that it organizes itself into a mass movement, saying somehow ‘I am my brother’s keeper, and he’s so wrong that I’m willing to suffer, and die if necessary, to get him right!’”

 

MLK didn’t use the term “tough love,” but it would fit here nicely. The imagery in her video, especially the flaming tire, seems more in line with Nelson Mandela’s South African struggle, but the setting seems vaguely American. The cause is not clear, but the commitment to struggle is unmistakable, and the turning of “superpower” from a suggestion of global dominance to the secret source of people’s power is provocative.

 

And this, my friends, is mainstream popular culture today, a message from Beyoncé, beauty queen turned beach bunny feminist, now full-on revolutionary.