Enough with the Beyonce Worship Already

Enough with the Beyonce worship already.  We are a free people, living in the U-Nited States of America.  Get off your damn knees, Music Press.  It’s getting unseemly.  Queen Bey, indeed.

You may not have heard this yet but Beyonce has a new album out!  It’s supported, as they say, by the extended commercial of the now-obligatory world tour (because nobody makes any money off record sales anymore.)

All of this product means the entertainment press must fall into line.  But because it’s Beyonce (more on that later) they’re obligated to go above and beyond.  And so, on cue, there they were, the morning after MTV’s annual Video Music Awards television show, falling on the floor, foaming at the mouth, talking in tongues, lining up to pay their tithe, to do their obeisance.

Freaking embarrassing it was.  There was Slate panting that “after intense rumors earlier this week that she would grace the stage with her glorious presence..Beyonce slayed.”

The New York Times supplied the more graduate school-ish take, making suitable Beyonce conversation for the denizens of the Upper West Side, by opining that “a Beyoncé segment will obliterate whatever surrounds it. Coldplay learned that at the Super Bowl, and so it was at the MTV Video Music Awards, where Beyoncé made her 16 minutes a blast of wrath, strength, righteousness and female solidarity. …Videos from the album were showered with awards, but they were just a sideshow to Beyoncé’s vivid live performance.”

Beyonce worship is not confined to the music press.  Take, for instance, this month’s Glamour magazine.  For the big September issue,  they’re featuring (what a unique idea!) a Celebration of American Women (“How we dress, yes, but also how we live and who we are today.  In the issue, on newsstands now, you’ll meet 55 women and hear them define themselves in powerfully unique terms.”)  In interviewing those 55 special American women, editor Cindi Leive noticed a common theme: “Across political and cultural lines [there were so] many Beyonce mentions!Beyism is possibly the one faith that binds us.”

It’s time for Joan Rivers to come back down to earth for an emergency puncturing of this balloon:  Can we talk, please?  Beyonce is a startlingly beautiful woman.  She is  a walking embodiment (at 35-years-old, after two children no less) of what great genes (an exotic combination of an African-American dad and a Creole mom), clean living (no rehabs stint for her), and the best cosmetic interventions money can buy, can produce.  (Now don’t argue with me on the cosmetic interventions part.  This is why God created Google Image.)

Though she is currently working very hard these days to sound street, Beyonce has a wonderful “legit” operatically-trained voice which can go up four octaves from a Tina Turner-esque growl to a very pure soprano.  And then there’s her dancing, which truly is top-notch.  It’s what one would expect from a girl who was groomed from childhood by pushy middle-class stage parents, then at around age 15 swallowed up by what Joni Mitchell called “the star-making machinery.”

Still, that’s it.  She’s a pop star, OK?!  Not Mother Freaking Theresa. A pop star whose songs are mostly crap without a memorable, danceable hook between them. The chorus of “Single Ladies” stuck in your ear like an ear worm, but does that make it a great hook?

So why does Beyonce get the treatment when someone like, say, the equally talented Rhianna does not?  A lot has to do with the canny move of larding her recent work with pretentious political content.  I believe Beyonce worship intensified about five years ago, fanned by the Svengali-like interventions of husband Jay Z who seems to have understood that Beyonce would need more street cred if she wanted to comment on stuff like the Black Lives Matter movement.

 

Thus began what one could call Project Street Cred. There’s more working class accent now, more willingness to look ugly in some (for heaven’s sake not too many) photographs, and some truly alarming (from the physical pain perspective) breast-slinging dancing.  Her video, “Formation,” from the current album, Lemonade, is entirely set in rural “Na Leans,” and features a big dance number in a grotty parking lot and lyrics like “I got hot sauce in my bag, swag.”

 

And it’s all liberally laced with weepy victimology.  The “Formation” video, a veritable fiesta of victimhood, commemorates the Hurricane Katrina sufferings along with police shootings issue, so there are submerged shacks, a little boy dancing defiantly in front of a threatening phalanx of menacing police in riot gear, and graffiti on a wall that reads “Don’t Shoot Us.”  There are Nation of Islam-types standing around on the steps of a plantation-like Old South mansion, and at the end, Bey herself (no makeup and wearing a sharecroppers daughter’s dress) arrayed on the top of a New Orleans police car slowly sinking into a lake.  (She’s drowning, you see and it’s the police wot dun it.)

 

There is also her recent video, “Pretty Hurts” (“Mama said, ‘You’re a pretty girl what’s in your head doesn’t matter”), the video “If I Was a Boy” (“I’d put myself first and make the rules as I go”). There also was the “Ban Bossy” campaign and the anti-gun PSA.

 

And now the piece de resistance, the VMA segment, an everything-but-the-kitchen-sink melange of trendy political themes — Black Lives Matter, empowered women marching around in formation, Beyonce dressed like an angel being welcomed into heaven by a black man wearing a hoodie.  And just in case you’d been overtaken by Beyism at that point in the 16-minute production, Bey helpfully flashed large letters on a screen behind her reading  “GOD IS GOD/I AM NOT.”

 

Here’s an idea for Beyonce for a political act that might really accomplish something.  Young women have obsessed over their looks since time began, and the obsessing doesn’t seem to have mitigated in the era of feminism. In fact, things must be even more difficult nowadays, with cosmetic dermatology and Photoshop all conspiring to make public figures look even more perfect and more perfect for many more years.

Beyonce says she made her video “Pretty Hurts” — featuring a young woman grooming herself to appear in a beauty pageant  — to address this very problem.  “I’m pretending to get a facelift and Botox,” she said in an interview. “It represents all the things that people go through to put up with the pressure that society puts on us.”

Beyonce has just turned 35.  How about she stand on the steps of New York City’s City Hall in downtown Manhattan and take a no-plastic surgery, no Botox no nothin’ pledge.  Buck that societal pressure!  Onward! Into your late thirties, enhancement free!

Now that’s courage.

Why am I so sure this is not going to happen?

Stephanie Gutmann is a journalist based in New York. She has written for dozens of publications including Playboy and the Wall Street Journal. She is the author of two books: The Kinder, Gentler Military: How Political Correctness Affects Our Ability to Win Wars and The Other War: Israelis, Palestinians and the Struggle for Media Supremacy.