viz.

Image Credit: Screenshot from "***Flawless" video

I’m so glad to be back on viz again after some time away, especially as having to write posts again gives me the chance to discuss Beyoncé Knowles’s newest record, Beyoncé, which was released without any press or preview in late December as a “visual album.” The album has 14 songs and 17 videos included in it. While critics had things to say about Jay-Z’s verse on “Drunk in Love” and the remixed audio from the 1986 Challenger disaster in “XO,” the most noticeable song was “***Flawless,” which features an excerpt from Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED talk on feminism. Paste Magazine’s review of the album noted the album’s feminist thematics, which others have discussed as well. Since I’d like to add to this conversation about Beyoncé’s feminism, I thought I’d take up how Beyoncé’s visuals, especially in “***Flawless,” depict those concerns.

Image Credit: Beyonce's SoundCloud 

Some necessary backstory for the song, however: the major verses actually were first previewed in May 2013 in a track called “Bow Down/I Been On.” The cover depicts the singer wearing a pretty pink dress while surrounded by trophies; yet the proud young girl’s visage is contrasted by the song’s bridge:

Bow down bitches, bow bow down bitches
Bow down bitches, bow bow down bitches
H-town vicious, h-h-town vicious
I’m so crown, bow bow down bitches

The rough vocals emphasize the “H-town vicious” identity she’s claiming here as she announces her superiority; the “crown” imagery links to her husband’s own assertions of power as it also reinforces her position as Queen Bey. The heavily modulated vocal pitches her braggadocio into masculine tones, juxtaposing her aggression here with the girl power rhetoric of her earlier song catalogue. Critiquing Beyoncé’s language here, Rahiel Tesfamariam notes, “While intentionally deciding to have an all-woman band was a cutting-edge and progressive decision for Beyoncé to make, why would she undermine it by releasing a song that says she reigns supreme over other women?” How can we reconcile the female slur with the empowerment that Beyoncé purports to offer as a declared feminist?

The song’s remix into “***Flawless,” which pairs these lines with both Adichie’s discourse and video from Beyoncé’s 1993 appearance on Star Search, turns Beyoncé’s declaration of superiority into an invitation for other women to join her in accepting themselves as “flawless.” Even as the framing video points out a less successful moment (her group loses out to the generic metal band Skeleton Crew) for the star, we read it within her larger career arc as an incredibly successful performer. The Beyoncé who confronts the camera here is familiar: tiny shorts, beautiful wavy long hair, heavy jewelry. However, her plaid shirt and wide eyes are tougher and more aggressive from, say, the Beyoncé of “XO.” The camera weaves back and forth towards her as if in battle and the dancing at the video’s end where she’s surrounded by four dancers seems to remix the famous “Single Ladies” dance—the hands here more back and forth faster, the movements are jerkier.

Image Credit: Perez Hilton

The shift into the Adichie excerpt in the song’s middle creates a visual and aural correction to these earlier moments. If Beyoncé dominates the screen early on, we see punk-looking men and women moshing and Beyoncé is only occasionally visible within the crowd. Other women present the same confident direct gaze to the camera as Adichie declares, “We teach girls to shrink themselves, to make themselves smaller. We say to girls: ‘You can have ambition, but not too much. You should aim to be successful, but not too successful. Otherwise, you will threaten the man.’” Reading this in contrast with the earlier lyrics, it’s as if Beyoncé is responding to her critics. In other words, when Beyoncé asks women to “bow down, bitches,” she’s not demeaning other women. She’s just repping her own greatness, and in so doing, encouraging other women to see that as being possible for them, too. Likewise, when Adichie mentions that “We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way that boys are,” the album’s other songs like “Rocket,” “Blow,” and “Drunk in Love” show Beyoncé as sexually aggressive in the marital bed, “graining on that wood.” The kind of feminism that Beyoncé constructs within “***Flawless” unapologetically claims visual, verbal, and sexual equality with men.

Image Credit: Screenshot from "Drunk in Love" video

If the early song declares her own process, the hook where she croons, “I woke up like this, I woke up like this / We flawless, ladies tell ‘em,” shifts into the inclusive “we.” All the ladies (single or not) are flawless, too. The title’s three asterisks perhaps don’t just stand in for the three-star rating Girls’ Tyme received. They also serve as an ellipsis for listeners to read into: do the asterisks acknowledge how woman’s flawlessness is always conditional, represent Beyoncé’s humility, or note her own work-in-progress as a black feminist?

Image Credit: Screenshot from "***Flawless" video

However, as I’ve been writing this blog post today, I’ve been following some of the commentary on Richard Sherman’s boasts at the NFC title game, where an amazing play on his part prevented a San Francisco 49ers touchdown. Sherman, a cornerback for the Super Bowl-bound Seattle Seahawks, declared himself “the best corner in the game” in an interview with ESPN’s Erin Andrews, and talked some trash about the 49ers’ Michael Crabtree. Many media personalities have been hand-wringing about Sherman’s “classlessness.” An intersectional reading of “***Flawless” might also point out how the title’s asterisks note the problems of African-American success: to demand your competitors to acknowledge your greatness and to “bow down” invites heavy criticism. Perhaps Beyoncé’s visual and verbal immodesty might then be true feminism: asserting equality of excellence across race and gender.