Beyonce
Beyoncé in her "Formation" video
If you’ve opened a web browser any time in the past 36 hours, you are probably aware of Beyoncé’s new song and video, “Formation," an internet-breaking celebration of southern blackness. In what has to be the most memorable image of 2016 so far, Beyoncé sits atop a sinking cop car in post-Katrina New Orleans. A voice-over from the late Messy Mya, a NOLA comedian and rapper, starts the video: “What happened at the New Wil’ins?”
Over the next five minutes, we don’t get a direct answer to that question, but we do get a visual and musical litany of powerful references to black southern life, present and past. “I like my baby hair with baby hair and afros,” sings Bey, over a shot of her daughter Blue Ivy, before musing, “I got all this money, but they never take the country out me.” Mixed in are shots of the police opposed to graffiti that reads “stop shooting us,” shout-outs to Red Lobster, and Southern-Gothic-styled images of Bey fanning herself in period clothing while repeating, “I slay, I slay, I slay.”
Rhodes College sociology professor Zandria F. Robinson was among the first to weigh in on the radical potential of “Formation.” Robinson wrote on her blog, “‘Formation’ is an homage to and recognition of the werk of the ‘punks, bulldaggers, and welfare queens’ in these southern streets and parking lots, in these second lines, in these chocolate cities and neighborhoods, in front of these bands and drumlines. Movements for black liberation are led by black folks at the margins who know we must all get free to sink that car.”
Robinson, whose academic work focuses on race, class, gender, and region, with a particular emphasis on black southern cultures, was quoted by NPR and Time. She also penned an article for Rolling Stone, writing, “In her latest work, Beyoncé opts to tell a sweeping history of her southern identity and the black South writ large, bringing the weight of black New Orleans, past and present, and black women's and queer black men's cultures to the task.”
Both articles are worth a read, and if you haven’t seen it yet (because you live under a rock?), watch “Formation”:
