Outside of Time Issue Three. Blonde Ambition, Beyonce; Bellwether / Horseman of the Apocalypse.

This image captures the direction of culture right now. Because love her or loathe her (Ok ok I know you all LOVE her) she is always attached to the zeitgeist!

In light -not just of the consolidation of power- but fascinatingly too, the capture of cultural capital by The Right, this week I recap on my (frequently unpopular) analysis of Beyonce over the last decade.

A couple of days ago I shared the above image in my IG stories. I was surprised by the volume of people expressing shock and disappointment. Not surprised because its not gross, but rather because Bey’s recent society dinner date with Ivanka Trump and Jared Kushner, maps perfectly onto the trajectory of her career. “Race blind” until the Black Lives Matter Movement was safely established, in an interview over a decade ago with the repellent Piers Morgan, when asked about experiencing racism she replied “I don’t think people think about my race. I think they look at me as an entertainer and a musician and I’m very happy about that because that’s how I look at people. It’s not about color and race” LOL. Ok sis. Yet as soon as it became commercially expedient, Bey was suddenly and vocally Unapologetically Black™. Yet even that charade was contradictory, confused at best, Psy Ops at worst. Discussing Beyonce and the Politics of Lemonade a decade ago on Woman’s Hour (this is such a rich convo and really interesting to listen to ten years later) I said :

Formation is drawing on so many different kinds of really powerful and contemporary imagery, theres a lot of symbolism. I think I part of her all conquering appeal is that she will always be doing whatever the zeitgeist is, and I think Formation really tapped into like the kind of the energy thats surrounding the Black Lives Matter movement, and the activism that is happening at the moment … yet everything she does is still complicit within the framework of neoliberal logic and I don't know if it's all just a very well calculated move at the right moment. There's a blogger called the radical f***** who has a great piece on the Formation album, and he talks about people like Muhammad Ali who were advocating for black movements at the cost of great personal risk to themselves, not at a time when it's safe, when its expedient. The timing of her new found activism is relevant

The year before 2015 I had been part of a panel at the ICA Is it Peculiar That She Twerk in The Mirror which was probably one of the first times I went public with my Beyonce position.

I asked the audience to consider Beyonce and Jay Z in the context of the history of the Black Radical Tradition whose symbolism she in particular would begin to increasingly draw on . During the late 1960s and early 1970s, President Nixon viewed an uncontrolled Black Power movement as a major threat to the internal security of the United States. To address this , he developed his Black Capitalism initiative - a domestic policy designed to contain black protest and to modify behaviour. Nixon achieved his larger ideological goal of subverting Black American radicalism.