Summary
The two predominant themes shown are Female and Black empowerment, while using financial and artistic success as a part of driving some points home. Beyonce displays a lot of pride in her roots, from her ethnicity/race to her upbringing in the south, using the foods she grew up with and the slang used where she is from to convey the point of pride she has in who she is. The video shows various settings, from protests and slavery themed sets, to being in a “formation” with many women of color displaying their natural hair. There is a juxtaposition between the lyrics and feel of the song with the images displayed in the video, as a metaphor to show the events it took for the progress of a Black woman such as herself, to come into fruition. My initial reaction to the video did go along the lines of what I learned about it, granted I have heard the song before and songs alike, regardless it is displayed very well and I can tell it was intentional to display a message in the video that juxtaposed the feel of bravado and luxury in the song, with the underlying meaning of the lyrics of Beyonce in many ways taking ownership of certain themes and putting her own spin on them. Matsoukas did an exceptionally good job and brought those metaphors and euphemisms to life. A good euphemism was also spoken of in the New Yorker article, where Beyonce says, “might take him on a flight on my chopper.” This line and its set up had apparently angered some feminists, but the context is more empowering than it seems, Beyonce simply took one of the stereotypes that are commonly associated with “powerful men” and applied it to herself with her own twist, not in a serious manner but more so a tongue in cheek way of expressing it, it is quite a smart line and it’s unfortunate it was treated as offensive. Also, most of the images in the video paired with the lyrics are a euphemism, showing scenes of an African American child dancing in front of riot shielded police, taking some power over the events that have occurred throughout history in a “we’ll still prevail” way, with a simple display, but in a way laughing or in this case dancing in the face of the perceived adversity. The song became controversial because in many moments throughout history and in this era, people get taken out of context. Beyonce wanted to send out many messages with this song, from parts of her own life to various cultural messages, but much of the public only see the surface, the difficult images to see or words to hear, instead of taking note of the meaning of what she was trying to convey, which were points that would actually help the beliefs of the “offended”. Unfortunately, many do not like to dig deep and understand others.
