Both through song and visuals, we see Beyoncé toasting up all sorts of caviar dreams and champagne wishes, including the following: being surrounded by butlers and maids unapologetically riding private jets and being draped in diamonds, furs and exclusive and hard-to-pronounce labels. However, more notable, is how much of the Beyoncé visual album becomes a pageantry of opulence and extravagance. As mentioned by many casual listeners, there is the misappropriation of Ike and Tina Turner domestic abuse by Jay Z, which adds a bitter pill to the lovemaking in “Drunk in Love.” And there’s the groan-inducing factor in “Partition” while watching Beyoncé, a black woman, dancing around in a cage with leopard spotted lights all over her body.
However, there are other themes on the album, which often run counter to those ideas as well. She is also about sexual liberation, control and self-ownership, which all are the backbones of most feminist ideologies. The Beyoncé we see on the visual album is about power. While “Drunk in Love,” which features a bikini clad Beyoncé on the beach, holding a trophy, seductively twerking and singing about animalistic, raw and often frank love making with her adoring husband Jay Z, almost becomes the antithesis to the silent, stiff and emotionless display of female sexuality in the recently released “Bound 2” video by Kanye West. The in-your-face raunchiness of “Partition,” “Blow” and “Haunted” spits in the face of what we chiefly believe to be an appropriate display of a woman’s sexuality (i.e. The electronic-infused ballad “Pretty Hurts,” which is basically Beyoncé’s ode to the pressures of perfection and trying to abide by – and uphold – a narrow standard of beauty, would make a perfect musical accompaniment to David Redmon and Ashley Sabin’s Girl Model, a documentary about preteen impoverished girls who often are treated like endless disposable supply for the modeling industry pipeline between Siberia, Japan, and the U.S. There is little denying the fem-positive themes in the music and overall persona of the Beyoncé visual album. 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. Because I am female I am expected to aspire to marriage. I am expected to make my life choices always keeping in mind that marriage is the most important. A marriage can be a source of joy and love and mutual support. But why do we teach girls to aspire to marriage and we don’t teach boys the same? We raise girls to see each other as competitors not for jobs or for accomplishments, which I think can be a good thing. But for the attention of men. We teach girls that they cannot be sexual beings in the way that boys are. Feminist: A person who believes in the economic, social and political equality of the sexes. But here is what was sampled in the song: Adichie’s talk is a 30 minute listen (and well worth the time if you ask me), and couldn’t fit on the track as a whole. In an April 2013 Tedx Talk, Adichie spoke about everyday sexism and what feminism means to her.
Without a doubt, the most intriguing song on the surprise Beyonc é visual album has to be “Flawless.” After leaking a snippet of the original song, “Bow Down/I Been On,” earlier this year – and causing quite a stir among many women, including both self-identified and non-identified feminists alike who objected to some of its hyper-aggressive lyricism – has been re-imagined and remixed with the words of famed Nigerian author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie.
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