Abstract
Hip-hop over the past 30 years has become an indispensable cultural artifact in American society generally and black culture specifically. Visual musical albums—a musical album constructed in a thematic manner accompanied by a visual storytelling of each song—are not new phenomena having become relatively popular this year alone. Beyoncé’s visual musical album Lemonade (2016) is particularly important because of the ways in which the vocal and visual narrative speaks to the historical marginalized experience of black women by both society and hip-hop. However, black women have persisted, resisted, and used their literary creativeness to reshape notions of black womanhood in both society and hip-hop (Pough 2004).
Lemonade is structured around 11-chapter titles narrating the relationship between black women and black men. The story starts with the chapter titles, “Intuition,” “Denial,” and “Anger,” then progresses to “Forgiveness,” “Resurrection,” and “Redemption.” Beyoncé lays out an emotional progression for how black women negotiate their relationship with black men, specifically their husbands and fathers. She offers visual images of black women being confident and living through their blackness. The first half of Lemonade largely discusses the ways in which her father and husband have failed her due to infidelity. As Beyoncé narrates the first half of the visual album she says, “I whipped my own back and asked for dominion at your feet” (“Intuition”). Beyoncé encourages her audience to think through the ways black women have historically devalued their humanity for the purpose of keeping together black unions.
As the visual album progresses, it moves from themes surrounding anger to songs and images about “apathy” and “emptiness,” thus highlighting a void created within black women—a void largely due to society’s marginalization of black bodies but also due to black men’s inability to see that black women’s issues must be incorporated into the black community’s struggle (Crenshaw 1989). In the second half of the visual album, we see a transformation in the affective nature of the chapter titles, highlighting the love black women have for society, which gives them the ability to offer grace and forgiveness. We see this when Beyoncé says, “Black women have found healing where it did not live” (“Redemption”).
To understand Lemonade from an historical perspective, I analyze the visual album from a black feminist theoretical framework specifically influenced by the work of bell hooks. hooks, in Ain’t I a Woman (1981), gives an account of how black women did not immediately join in the fight for feminism because the feminist struggle was largely shaped around white women’s middle-class ideals. For black women, sexism was insignificant when compared to the harsh reality of racism. However, the historical movement to free all black people did not take up the issues that specifically impacted black women, with hooks arguing that the fight against racial oppression was an attempt to establish black male patriarchy. This dialectic forced black women to choose between being black and being a woman. For both black men and white women, identifying as oppressed apparently freed one from the possibility of being an oppressor. Accordingly, black men and white women both divested in conversations around the way they contribute to the marginalization of black women.
While the first half of Lemonade focuses on themes of betrayal and infidelity committed by fathers and husbands, it highlights a larger historical pattern of black men failing to see the ways in which they marginalize this other half of the black population. Black solidarity has historically suppressed the voices of anyone outside of the dominant black male heterosexual paradigm. Black women have had to relinquish aspects of their identity to exist in harmony with black men; hence Beyoncé’s quote, “I whipped my own back and asked for dominion at your feet.” In the process of narrating how black men have failed black women, Beyoncé juxtaposes the black woman body with that of a white woman’s. In the chapter “Anger,” she says, “I can wear her skin over mine.” Here Beyoncé gets to the heart of hooks’ question, “Ain’t I a Woman?” The black woman’s body has been devalued to a status void of womanhood and they are required to perform their femininity to be viewed as a woman.
The second half of the visual album centers on forgiveness and hope. Forgiveness is rooted in an historical tradition of black women offering compassion and understanding as a strategic tool of liberation (Vanzant 1996). This tradition dates back to slavery where we see slaves such as Sojourner Truth offering love and forgiveness to whites (Fitch and Mandziuk 1997), very similar to the notion of grace rooted in the Christian tradition. The second half of Lemonade where the black woman forgives the black man in hopes of keeping the black family strong and alive is identical to the way in which black women have historically suppressed their womanness to invest in the liberation of the black community. However, Lemonade does not offer a critique of the capitalist institution nor does it speak to the ways in which class impacts the manner poor black women experience their womanhood in relation to black men and white women.
This visual album highlights the ways in which black women negotiate their relationship with black men. It illuminates the historical pattern of black women being forced to choose between being black and being a woman and having to suppress one-half of their whole identity. The album does not deal with the way class influences experience, thus not fully representative of poor and working-class black women’s historical relation with black men and white women. Beyoncé speaks generally about the relationships between black women and their husbands and fathers, but her overall thesis sheds light on a historical power relation and negotiations between black women and men.