For me, there are two ways to look at Beyonce’s career. On one hand, she is a singer who has had incredible success in writing some of the most successful pop tunes of the past 20 years. Her confidence really shines in her music, booming through the desert at her famous Coachella gig with so much energy that it made solar power obsolete. She is someone so singular in her accomplishments that it’s simultaneously easy to hyperbolize her as “Queen Bey” and find it a bit obnoxious. She is a dominant figure who courts attention with every new project, which is quite an accomplishment in an age where attention spans are constantly shrinking.
Then there’s Beyonce the artist. While you can argue that they’re intertwined, I argue that looking at her music videos is to see what her true legacy will be. Starting with her phenomenal feature-length music video compilation Lemonade (2016), she has single-handedly revolutionized the modern conception of how we perceive media. She may have not invented the art form, but what she did was personalize it by exploring the Black identity through these powerful and symbolic images. It’s like visiting an art museum, where every second is so packed with detail that you need to let it sit with you, staring at it for a long time to fully appreciate its message.
Though where Lemonade was a personal look at her own life through images related to her life and the Black identity (please listen to the recent season of Dissect if you wish to learn more), Black Is King (2020) feels dropped from another cosmos. Time and place is an abstract concept where this comes from. The editing thrusts the viewer through the endless barrage of images, forcing them to be dazzled by every new sight. The costumes are provocative. The music swirls with a fused style that pulls from the past and future of African sounds, forming this strange unity that is awe-inspiring. Over 80 minutes, Black Is King holds onto the viewer and finds Beyonce being like “If you thought that was trippy, wait until you see this.”
If there’s any odd detail, it’s the one that totally escaped me until the near end. When I noticed that I had seen the “Spirit” music video over a year ago, I realized why this seemed so strange. It also explained why despite being shamelessly avant-garde it could become a cornerstone of Disney+. I had seen “Spirit” in relation to The Lion King (2019), which starred Beyonce as Nala.
Without derailing this piece entirely, it’s difficult to love Black Is King because of The Lion King. I had forgotten about her album “The Lion King: The Gift,” so it felt especially strange to hear these interludes featuring clips from that movie, notably from James Earl Jones’ Mufasa character. It becomes more difficult for those (like me) who found the film to be a cynical low point in Disney’s live-action reboot trend. It did everything wrong, serving more as an exercise in how photorealism actually can hurt a movie.
Which makes it incredible that Black Is King does an incredible job of barely justifying this backdoor project. In the nature of the “one for you, one for me” Hollywood system, Beyonce did the unthinkable by making The Lion King into a collection of scraps that she can chop and screw into her own bigger vision. While at times it may be jarring to hear Disney clips in an otherwise bold and original work, it kind of works as a greater subtext about what is going on.
The whole package is overwhelming, and what makes it more incredible is that despite being forever tied to The Lion King, it transposes the themes of the film into something more contemporary. The music videos fly through the atmosphere, finding the most gorgeous angles to shoot Beyonce as she serves as a guiding beacon for a child, doing everything to find his place in the world. There are endless moments of symbolism and African beauty that experts will likely do a better job of explaining.
Still, it grabs you, mixing African tribal imagery alongside a more American capitalist perspective. There are moments where the protagonist is guided from these wild dance numbers into scenes where he’s living in a lush environment. It’s a fantasy, but one that’s so deserving of this excess. It’s one of the rare times when a Black celebrity of power has used it to promote something positive through abstraction. It’s clear that Beyonce has studied these art forms, even borrowing different film stock to create a story that exists through these different eras.
Much like Lemonade, the only thing that matters about the story is the moment in which the viewer exists. The desire to understand this world is natural, and it reflects the ultimate goal here. Whereas Lemonade feels distinctly American, Black Is King is somewhere deeper in the Black DNA, existing through different cultures and continents, even pulling from spiritual forces outside of Earth. It’s as much about the images that have been projected by the media as well as subverting them with defiant originality, twisting ideas of wealth and happiness into something that mainstream media, especially Disney, hasn’t really reflected.
We’re living in an Afro-futuristic time where Black excellence is finally being allowed to be represented. Beyonce has never released an album that feels so sonically rich, full of unexpected turns as the energy fluctuates. She doesn’t dress for the white eye, wearing these skin suits rich with vibrant tapestries while atop cars lined with neon lights. It’s all so attractive and new, making up for a lost time. Beyonce clearly uses directors who have their own vision, playing with the scope that ranges from African realism to abstract sets that are cutouts and cartoons.
At the center is Beyonce, splicing in talking points that make the whole picture stronger. As much as the title references a need for Black culture to be given control over their own identity, it’s also a study of what that means. As much as this is a tale of affirmation, it’s a cautionary tale that explores the different ways that a king can misuse their power. It comes through images of beauty pageants, where Black women are pitted against each other in forms of beauty. Even in moments of celebration, it’s important to not get lost in the pettiness, recognizing that a leader is someone who has the power to bring out the positivity in their community.
It’s what makes Beyonce in particular a successful artist. She is so accomplished in presenting a vision that is her own. Where many could arguably sell out their identity in order to gain a couple more million dollars, she has only become more interesting with each new passing project. She is a pioneer who is pushing the depiction of Black culture in American media forward in exciting ways, forcing everyone else to try and keep up with her message. She doesn’t care if you don’t get it. What she hopes is that you stop and listen, taking time to understand why what she’s saying is important, worthy of being studied by scholars.
In a time where most Disney entertainment sides with more of the same, it feels amazing to see Beyonce out there with a gang of collaborators creating art that could only be achieved by somebody with a budget and platform that she can afford. It makes it more beautiful to know that images of tribal chiefs dancing to drums in the desert aren’t images that will be ignored. This exercise has the potential to encourage new generations of artists, making them more ambitious and interesting.
It is difficult to explain the experience of watching Black Is King. You just have to go in and prepare for a journey into the mind-expanding potential that art has to offer. Much like Black Panther (2018) before, what makes this journey exciting is that it starts a conversation that has been largely ignored, where culture is coming to terms with its own identity on a world stage, where African and American identities are constantly at odds with each other and the art in Black Is King never ignores that. It may not always present a diverse and full picture, but does it need to? This is a fantasy and one that has shameless and breathtaking theatrics.
More than anything, it establishes what the modern music video could be. Twice now Beyonce has created films out of her music that has become their own works of art, needing to be analyzed and understood on a deeper level. You need to spend time with it and understand the profundity of the personal intertwining with the social in such a way that it speaks more to Beyonce as an artist than what she’s already shown us as a musician. If anything, she’s rambunctious as a singer, having done all that she could in the audio medium. The world could learn from her by making these personal homages to yourself, making art that deserves to be projected into The Louvre, broken down frame by frame, and create textbooks over what they mean.
While I don’t love Black Is King as much as Lemonade, what it achieves only makes me respect her more. I may not always understand it, but the willingness to listen and try to understand what these moments mean is her ultimate achievement. It’s a weird exercise that has the potential to open gateways to more traditional art and music, forcing us to understand the Black identity on a level that mainstream media has failed to capture for decades and centuries. It feels like we’re at a crossroads, where Beyonce has stopped caring about being a mainstream phenomenon and is more an orator for what art should be.
I think that we should listen. Even if it may be abstract and confusing at times, the experience of pressing play is something meditative. To find yourself deep into Black Is King and recognizing a profundity that works on an instinctual level, that makes you move with every fiber of your soul, is the ultimate achievement. It’s as much about what you think about its message as it is how it makes you feel. What it makes you feel is energized, wanting to coexist in this form of blissful harmony. That is what makes this a brilliant exercise. It may be imperfect, but you can’t leave it without some part of it becoming part of your soul. Beyonce has made the very definition of timeless art, and it’s our job to sit with it for as long as we need to.
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