OUT OF THE RUINS
ON “UPGRADE U” BEYONCÉ SINGS, “I CAN DO FOR YOU what Martin did for the people / Ran by the men, but the women keep the tempo.” Once again, she’s stressing that building a better world takes centering Black women, while also never forgetting the ways Black women especially have received less recognition for participating in and creating revolutionary movements over time. From Sojourner Truth to Ida B. Wells, who brought national attention to the epidemic of lynching as a journalist and activist from the 1890s through the first decades of the 1900s. From Ella Baker, a community organizer who worked tirelessly behind the scenes for Martin Luther King Jr. touting a radical vision of what democracy could be, to Patrisse Cullors, Opal Tometi, and Alicia Garza, three queer-identified Black women who founded Black Lives Matter as a decentralized movement-building network in response to the racist murder of Trayvon Martin. Students consider all these women, in addition to so many more, over the semester. They’ve all kept the world moving in various ways. Though charismatic men often get more public attention, Black women have indeed kept the tempo. Without a steady tempo, a song devolves into noise.
At this point in the course, after chasing ghosts through the past and discussing attitudes and systems that continue to haunt the present, it’s time to pivot more explicitly toward the future. What might Beyoncé’s new world, built out of the ashes, look like? How does Beyoncé imagine the future? The videos for “Run the World (Girls)” from 4 and “Superpower” from BEYONCÉ take viewers directly into those futures—postapocalyptic landscapes, worlds where everything has burned but resilient groups of people are still navigating the changes. Dystopias not without their own problems, they serve as Beyoncé’s blueprints for better, more equitable worlds. Octavia E. Butler guided students back and forth through the past and present while they looked at Lemonade and some of Beyoncé’s other work, and they return to Octavia E. Butler to approach the future.
Butler’s Parable of the Sower transports the reader into its own near-future dystopia, eerily reminiscent of the current United States. The book is constructed as journal entries by Lauren Olamina, a young Black girl in Southern California, as society crumbles in real time and she’s thrust into more and more chaos and violence. The gated community where she lives burns to the ground, her family is killed or unaccounted for, and she’s forced to strike out on her own. She begins a journey north, trying to escape a newly elected fascist US government (set in the 2020s, though published in 1993, and literally including a president who utilizes the slogan “Make America Great Again”), but also in an attempt to build community around a new religion she has created called Earthseed. She’s looking for a tribe of people with common beliefs to construct a new nation. The central tenet of Earthseed is not a god to worship, but the philosophical concept of Change itself. Every action and interaction creates and facilitates change, so submission to and adaptation in the face of change become the ultimate goals for survival. Everyone is shaped by change and, in turn, by listening to and honoring change, can be part of a generative spiral.
One of the central problems for Olamina is that her religion eschews the notion of leaders and hierarchy, yet as its founder, trying to proselytize and amass followers, she must, at least initially, take on something of a leadership role to spread her gospel. The entire process mirrors Beyoncé’s own leaderless formations that require her to first teach viewers the steps. It also mirrors the decentralized nature of Ella Baker’s community organizing and the Black Lives Matter movement. Olamina’s other major hurdle is her hyperempathy disorder: an invention by Butler that afflicts certain members of society, where an individual who witnesses another’s pain physically, viscerally shares it as if it were their own. She also shares pleasure, but pain is in near-constant circulation in Butler’s future. Interestingly, an exaggerated empathy doesn’t make Lauren more compassionate and understanding. It toughens her and sharpens her edges for her own protection, and the protection of others afflicted by the same syndrome that might be in proximity to her pain. A sacrifice in service to a less harmful time.
Lauren Olamina is trying to make sense of a future that the US today is hurtling toward with lightning speed. Her blueprint for a better world is Earthseed, but Parable of the Sower itself, as Olamina’s journal crafted by Butler, is a kind of blueprint for the reader too. Butler published a sequel, Parable of the Talents, in 1999, which features the later years of Olamina’s life, but her early days in Sower speak most powerfully to Beyoncé’s visual world building, especially in connection with “Superpower.” Students put Lauren Olamina into conversation with Beyoncé as both navigate their own dystopian landscapes, and they funnel connections and discrepancies all back through other real-life visions and movement building by Black women over time. A continuum. A trajectory. Through the analysis, they’re encouraged to hold critical conversations about their own dreams and hopes for what that future will look like too—while Beyoncé keeps the tempo.
One Nation under Beyoncé
“Run the World (Girls)” opens with people filing in and out of the frame, militaristic, rapid-fire, over a soundtrack of chanting voices. A call to arms. Beyoncé rides up on a rearing dark horse—the symbol of the underdog in any fight. Viewers are immediately transported to battle in the middle of a desert. Fire, concrete, debris, a crumbling highway overpass, all mark a dystopian future; a different version of the world with alternative possibilities. Beyoncé received criticism for lyrics detached from reality when the song was initially released. Some said the song lied to young girls, implied that girls could run the world without any recognition of the obstacles that sexism and inequality legitimately pose. But that’s exactly the point—the song is a vision of the future, not an exposition on the present. It’s a reconstruction of a world after fire where men might no longer have a monopoly on power. A fact the video makes clear. In my experience, students always cite the song and video as hopeful, not overreaching or disingenuous. Beyoncé also signaled the nature of the song as command, not description, in an epic Billboard Music Awards performance. Before the music kicked in, she shouted, “Men have been given the chance to the rule the world, but ladies, our revolution has begun. Let’s build a nation. Women everywhere—run the world!” and immediately snapped into formation with a stage full of female dancers.
Building on the prior work she’s done to deconstruct gender categories and binaries, “girls,” in the lyrics and in the title, marks a political identity tied to an understanding and willingness to dismantle power, not a strict gender delineation, similar to Cheryl Clarke’s ideological conceptualization of “lesbianism.” Beyoncé is laying the groundwork for identifications across differences (but not erasing those differences) that are organized around a common politics of affiliation. In the 1997 article “Punks, Bulldaggers, and Welfare Queens: The Radical Potential of Queer Politics?”, political scientist Cathy Cohen imagines “a politics where one’s relation to power, and not some homogenized identity, is privileged in determining one’s political comrades.” Placed in conversation with Beyoncé, Cohen creates space for “girls” to be decidedly queer as well. Sasha Fierce may be “dead” by 2011, but her politics live on in “girls.” Cohen’s demand to organize around “the nonnormative and marginal position of punks, bulldaggers, and welfare queens, for example, [as] the basis for progressive transformative coalition work” is similar to the outcasts from society that organize in political coalition with Beyoncé and her “girls” in the video.
There are not just those who identify as or are stereotypically perceived to be women with Beyoncé’s group. The camera shows two young men who also dance with her, border crossers flanking Beyoncé on either side but never in the center of the frame. They’re actually the entire basis of the choreography for the whole song too, highlighted in Life Is But a Dream in scenes that showed the rehearsal process for “Run the World” and told pieces of the young men’s story. Beyoncé first saw Mario Abel Buce (known as Kwela) and Xavier Manuel Campione (known as Xavitto), collectively known as the Tofo Tofo Dance Group, on YouTube, and fell in love with their movement. Her team searched for them for five months, because neither she nor any of her choreographers could recreate the steps. They flew Kwela and Xavitto in to teach the dancers and be featured in the video. Tofo means “body shaking” in a local Maputo dialect, the area of Mozambique from which the men hail. The dance style itself is called pantsula, set to Kwaito music (similar to house music); it originated in South Africa, where it was popularized as a means of resistance to apartheid in the 1980s—comparable to voguing and ballroom culture for queer folks of color, or hip hop and break dancing for Black and Latinx communities in the United States during the same period.
The Tofo Tofo Dance Group challenges any strict gender definitions, not only through their presence, but through the ways their movement has been incorporated as ammunition, locked and loaded throughout, by Beyoncé’s entire army. They aren’t the only border crossers, either. In a portrait-like shot, a male lion sprawls alongside Beyoncé’s group. She uses hyenas, leashed by heavy chains to her grip, in another scene, to further deconstruct traditional gender roles and power. Hyena packs are led by females, who typically distract prey as the rest of the pack circles and traps. And hyenas are vital in most African ecosystems, although they are often devalued and seen as useless. Some species of hyena even feign death when attacked by predators, so as to be left alone, rather than advance on opponents. A blurred mix of passivity and action, stereotypically feminine and masculine traits, led by women. Hyenas are also commonly thought to be scavengers, recyclers of leftover carcasses. Despite the fact that they do hunt and kill much of their prey, the scavenging myth persists because they regularly chase much bigger lions and lionesses away from their own kills. Hyenas are fearless, scrappy, cunning, and in many ways feminist. They represent much of what Beyoncé is incorporating into this new political world.
Undone gender lines and upset power, then, are also politics that queerly unite Beyoncé’s tribe. Add to that a critique of whiteness. While the two armies assemble in the opening shots, the camera briefly jump-cuts to a white woman tied to a cross. As religious symbols, crosses represent sacrifice of the highest order. Here, the sacrifice is not literal or individual, as the white woman appears later in the video and in subsequent videos, but symbolic and collective, in order to define the new nation under construction. It doesn’t mean that white women—or white people in general, since girls isn’t strictly gendered anymore—are not welcome; it means white participation and coalition is dependent on decentering whiteness as a politics by interrogating the construct of whiteness’s connection to power. While Beyoncé invokes feminist principles and empowerment, the sacrifice also denounces white feminism—a mainstream version of single-issue feminism that sees the plight of women as monolithic, and usually prizes white women’s experiences as universal, at the expense of interrogating intersecting oppressions. The very opposite of Kimberlé Crenshaw’s intersectionality and of Black and other women of color feminisms.
Geography also becomes important, and tied to the political work of the white woman on the cross. There are some African elements referenced, and many read the setting as just a general placeholder for a postapocalyptic world, but one single road sign, shown for only a split second, names the actual location: just outside Tbilisi, the capital city of Georgia. Modern-day Georgia exists in the direct vicinity of the Caucasus Mountains—from which the category Caucasian takes its name—and is the very location out of which the history of whiteness as a racial category was born. In The History of White People, Nell Irvin Painter traces how whiteness emerged as a racial classification: never quite nailed down, always shifting and malleable, for the purposes of exerting power over others. Though many white people believe the category has existed as static throughout history, Painter exposes it as a fiction with no concrete referent—a category that has shifted drastically over time. The first so-called Caucasians weren’t even white as society understands the label today. Historically, geography was used as the primary way to classify people—not the color of their skin or any modern “scientific” notions of race and racial difference. Racial classification systems have always only been implemented in ways that were already biased, anyway, and not to be objectively trusted. There is visible racial diversity among Beyoncé’s “girls,” but her new nation rejects the premise of the divisions and differences racial classification systems have wrought. She uses geography to mark whiteness writ large as a necessary sacrifice.
Beyoncé is also building her new nation out of the ashes of capitalism, or, at the very least, trying to imagine something more equitable. But she continues to reference money, just like in “Diva” and “6 Inch,” to highlight its heretofore unequal distribution. Questioning money’s role is another central tenet of her constitution. Socialist systems use money, of course, but they value work differently, leading to a reorganization and ideally more collective distribution of wealth. In the middle of each verse, before declaring that her persuasion (not just in the sense of influence, but her kind of people, politically) can build a nation, Beyoncé playfully jokes with the occupying army, using stereotypically feminine sexual wiles to seduce them. But her seduction is about proximity, infiltrating enemy territory to deliver the real message: “F—you, pay me!” While the recorded version opts for the sanitized “eff” over the full obscenity, the demand for payment comes through loud and clear. As she voices that demand for the first time in the video, the camera zooms in rapidly to a tight shot of her contorted face and raised middle finger—a visual fuck you to accompany the more polite lyric. In Beyoncé’s world, money doesn’t work the same way, and “pay me” might also be considered reparations, as opposed to capitalist greed. What is she going to do with money in the middle of the desert, anyway? (Though, of course, it’s also trenchant critique of wage inequality in the United States’ present.)
So, fuck you and pay what you owe. Immediately, the scene cuts to Beyoncé punching her fist to the sky, which signals a giant explosion of an abandoned car behind her. Like in “Diva,” she’s blowing up the constraints and inequalities named variously through “girls” and her expansion of the category, whiteness, and money. The entirety of Beyoncé’s tribe also unifies through that same fist in the air, shared choreography. The gesture is commonly recognized as a Black Power salute. Used prominently during the 1960s and 1970s and associated with the Black Power movement, it’s often read as confrontational. It’s meant to defy and challenge inequality. A famous moment at the 1968 Olympics, when African American athletes Tommie Smith and John Carlos saluted the American flag with this gesture from the medal podium, was recorded for history. Their protest ultimately resulted in their expulsion from the Games. It was decried as inappropriate and even vulgar by some. Beyoncé’s group offers this same salute together over the closing lines of the song, fusing the already queer political category of “girls,” a denunciation of whiteness, and a recalibration of money and capitalism with an affirmation of Black protest. It all becomes part of this new nation’s origin story and foundation, rather than functioning simply as reactionary responses to a previous (current) system.
Even the music of “Run the World” itself rises from ashes, repurposed and subverted. Beyoncé uses a sample of Major Lazer’s “Pon de Floor” as the backbone of her entire song, a sonic scavenging by the hyenas featured earlier. The first explicit indication that it’s not, in fact, Major Lazer playing is the word “girls” echoing over the top of the beat. Major Lazer’s original song and video can easily be read as misogynistic objectification of women set to a catchy, appropriated dancehall beat. Listeners or viewers familiar with that original can’t help but note the juxtaposition of diametrically opposed subject matter over identical sounds. “Run the World” rises from the ashes of “Pon de Floor” as an altogether different kind of phoenix, replaying Beyoncé’s entire political strategy: a new nation figuratively and sonically reconstructed from the ruins of an unacceptable system. She’s hoping her version will highlight and avoid the mistakes of the past. More foreshadowing of the kintsugi bowl from Lemonade. Like Tina Turner’s Aunty Entity from Mad Max Beyond Thunderdome—who viewers are hard-pressed not to see referenced and reflected in Beyoncé’s “Run the World” desert dystopia—sings, “Out of the ruins / Out from the wreckage / Can’t make the same mistakes this time.”
The video closes on Beyoncé’s group uniformly advancing on the line of demarcation created by men in riot gear. Inches from one man’s face, Beyoncé reaches out and snatches a badge from his pocket. Literally snatches his power. Once she does, her side of the fight immediately freezes in a new formation. Many of them mid salute, a traditional military salute this time rather than the Black Power salute already performed. It’s possible to read that ending as Beyoncé ultimately deferring to the traditional stereotypes and power that she just spent the entire song challenging. But don’t forget that Beyoncé has already subverted and reworked the power dynamics—this is her world, not that of this alleged military. They’re a vestige of the past. Students consistently categorize the gesture as confrontational when asked, and I have to agree. Her salute is much more likely a sign of disrespect, given it mocks rules she doesn’t subscribe to. Another middle finger. Another fuck you. Endless power devoured and redistributed among the girls. That final shot subsequently ties “Run the World” to another dystopian setting from her next album that ends in an almost identical scene.
Tough Love
Fast forward to Beyoncé’s next postapocalyptic experiment. “Superpower” begins in an underground, more metropolitan setting than that featured in “Run the World”—cement walls, dumpsters, more debris. The ruins of one of the most recognizable paeans to captialism and consumerism. The action ultimately moves from a parking garage through a deserted and destroyed shopping mall. Surveillance camera footage names the time and location: Los Angeles, California, 7:33, though Beyoncé’s future takes place in no specific year. She appears at the far end of the shot, and heels striking cement echo with each step as she approaches the camera. Her clothing looks torn, battle worn. Conspicuously, she sports a balaclava with only her eyes, nose, and mouth showing. Before the song begins, she adjusts the balaclava to further hide her face, covering her mouth. As she’s not visibly performing the lyrics, attention is directed back to the visuals and action. In “Run the World,” a collective fell into formation against an occupying army—a hyena pack fighting together. In “Superpower,” Beyoncé enters alone and gradually builds her misfit tribe, many of whom, noticeably, are the same dancers from “Run the World.”
Styling, particularly the balaclavas and facial coverings mixed with an overall punk aesthetic, invokes what has come to be known as antifa (originally Antifaschistische Aktion in Germany), a loosely decentralized and informal network of groups sharing a militant politics opposed to fascism in all its forms. Antifa is sometimes defined by members’ willingness to engage in more violent forms of protest, and a tendency to mask and anonymize themselves so as not to be recognized by the state. Not as prominent at the time of the video’s release in 2013, antifa notoriety has surged since the intense right-wing backlash of the 2016 election. In the United States, anti-fascist action dates back to the 1920s, but today’s antifa stems directly from Anti-Racist Action networks that came out of punk movements of the 1980s. The aesthetic of “Superpower” both anticipates and validates this kind of radical politics, which also shares similarities with Cathy Cohen’s shift from strictly identity-based coalitions to strategy-based ones.
The way Beyoncé calls in additional members and slowly builds her following directly links the action of “Superpower” back to Octavia E. Butler’s Parable of the Sower and Lauren Olamina’s own congregation. The slow procession through the abandoned structure could easily be a scene directly from the novel. Where Beyoncé may have been channeling Tina Turner’s Aunty Entity in “Run the World,” she’s Lauren Olamina in “Superpower” for sure. And Olamina’s hyper-empathy is part of the narrative too. Hyperempathy doesn’t easily translate into simply more empathy, more compassion, more love as a solution. It causes her to be more critical of simple emotional connection. In “Superpower,” Beyoncé et al. rally around love as a possible corrective to a problem. It’s featured prominently in the lyrics and scrawled on makeshift flags and banners, graffitied throughout. But it’s not simply love for love’s sake. It’s inflected with a critical hyperempathy. Love doesn’t erase all oppression overnight. It might offer a slight salve interpersonally, but it’s not an end in and of itself. “Superpower” is fundamentally a love song, illuminating how people are stronger together than apart, but the caveat is that the individuals who are stronger together must first be strong on their own, and continue to be. Love can amplify strength that already exists, perhaps exponentially, but it doesn’t automatically do so. It has to be critically sharpened and charged into something else: tough love.
Tough love isn’t the absence of conflict or pain. Or even the absence of violence. Beyoncé’s ethics of tough love actually creates space for violent outbursts too, as shown throughout the video and through an antifa parallel. The two ideas have never been mutually exclusive, despite the attempts by those in power to pit one against the other. During the civil rights movement Martin Luther King Jr. and groups like the Southern Christian Leadership Conference advocated a kind of nonviolent protest, while Malcolm X and the Black Panthers encouraged Black folks to arm themselves for protection. But they weren’t in direct opposition—that’s a divisive misconception still propagated today, often by white people. They shared more in common than American history wants highlighted. Ijeoma Oluo speaks to this fallacy, and white America’s investement in controlling the narrative through disingenuously ascribing value and credence to nonviolence above all else, in So You Want to Talk About Race. “What Martin Luther King Jr. and Malcolm X fought for was the same: freedom from oppression. At times they used different words and different tactics, but it was their goal that was the threat,” she states. Both King and X were assassinated, and those assassinations took place just as each of them began highlighting the similarities in their positions, joining forces, focusing on their common goal.
Ella Baker, still keeping the tempo, also merged the two positions in her own work, even while closely aligned with King and nonviolent protest organizationally. Historian Barbara Ransby’s account of Baker’s life, Ella Baker and the Black Freedom Movement: A Radical Democratic Vision, details how Baker celebrated and supported the importance of nonviolent protest wholeheartedly, but also stressed her personal decision to not preclude violent re-action as part of her own overall survival strategy. Ransby states, “For her, nonviolence and self-defense were tactical choices, not matters of principle,” and as such required context and more careful, critical deliberation on multiple levels. In short, Baker was a realist. And that’s the heart of Beyoncé’s “tough love”—merging seemingly contradictory positions for both strategy and survival, while not conceding either side. Holding reality and ideals in tension. Nina Simone, upon meeting King, whose tactics she greatly admired, also famously and shamelessly announced, “I am not nonviolent,” to which he’s said to have warmly taken her hand. In “Superpower,” Beyoncé is blending complex histories and sometimes contradictory views under the umbrella of tough love as critical force, one that pushes her to carefully advocate for and create better worlds. Honoring emotion as affliction, gift, and tool at once; a lesson taken from from Olamina’s hyperempathy. Years before it was even released, Beyoncé extended the Carters’ 2018 album title as a postapocalytic pledge: everything is tough love.
This interrogation of tough love takes place in a video with eerie, uncanny similarities to present racial unrest in cities across America. Though it predates protests in Baltimore and Ferguson, Missouri, it clearly doesn’t predate racial unrest generally. Which is even scarier. Because Beyoncé, like Octavia E. Butler, is able to conjure such realistic visions under the guise of dystopian fictions that they come to fruition in a few short years. Less than a year, in Beyoncé’s case. Images in “Superpower” sadly evoke the very same scenes witnessed in August 2014 following Michael Brown’s murder in Ferguson, which reinvigorated Black Lives Matter protests by beaming the literal aftermath of his murder into homes around the world on multiple news networks—something that hadn’t happened directly following Trayvon Martin’s murder, for which the hashtag had first been used. Michael Brown’s body lay in the street for over four hours after he was killed. At one point in “Superpower,” Beyoncé bends over a body lying prone on the ground amidst chaos—not dead, but at first seeming to be—in an anticipation of that exact scene. She puts her head to the man’s chest and lifts him up, embraces him with his head to her chest in a reciprocal gesture. Viewed post-2014, Beyoncé might even be seen here as breathing life back into premature deaths that haven’t happened yet, but that she knows will come, given US history—a move she highlights more explicitly in Lemonade. She resurrected ghosts in “Formation”; she anticipates ghosts in “Superpower.”
Not only does the video invoke contemporary racial unrest in America, it joins historical rebellions and uprisings across time. The surveillance footage places the action of the video in Los Angeles, California—the site of a momentous racial uprising in 1992 after Rodney King was brutally beaten by LAPD officers the year before; though the incident was caught on film, the officers were acquitted of all charges. That acquittal sent the city of Los Angeles, especially its Black residents, into a justified rage. Considered warranted civil disobedience from one perspective and unruly riots from the perspective of the powerful, the uprising lasted over six days, as citizens grappled with how the verdict could have been possible after such a brutal, unprovoked attack had been recorded. It’s the same question many ask today when police murder Black people, are caught on tape, and rarely, if ever, face consequences. Eric Garner and Philando Castile stand as prime examples. Other cities where these murders occur and go unpunished are fused to the action through the greater Los Angeles reference. And it’s not the only specific city directly layered into the song either.
“Superpower” is built on vocal arpeggios, sung by Frank Ocean (cowriter of the song, though he doesn’t appear in the video) as bass line, over which the melody is sung. They exist as classic throwback to doo-wop and Motown styles funneled through Ocean’s own contemporary vibe. Motown, Berry Gordy’s record label and an entire genre of music, was created in Detroit, Michigan—also the location of large-scale revolts around race, both in 1943 and again in 1967. In 1943 a three-day riot found white folks actively attacking Black people as the culmination of extreme racist tension in the area (tension that continues to this day). Black residents were rightfully angry about explicit discrimination, a shortage of affordable housing, police brutality, and a host of other issues. Speaking out about their anger drew white ire and ultimately violence. The 1967 uprising involved the police raid of an unlicensed bar in one of the poorest Black neighborhoods in Detroit. Though many white people participated in the 1967 uprising as well, and it wasn’t as specifically polarized as the LA riots, the revolt itself initially erupted in response to more unjustified police brutality against Black people.
Mapping references to all this violence further into the margins, it’s not just Black and Brown bodies brutalized by police regularly. Historically and contemporaneously, LGBTQ+ folks have been squarely in law enforcement’s crosshairs—especially queer and trans people of color who face oppression on multiple fronts and garner the least attention. Marsha P. Johnson, Sylvia Rivera, Miss Major Griffin-Gracy, and other trans women of color initiated and led the uprising at the Stonewall Inn, a New York City gay bar, in 1969, after one too many police raids, probably the most famous revolt against anti-queer police brutality. Three years earlier, the Compton’s Cafeteria riot in the Tenderloin district of San Francisco found many trans women of color fighting back against years of police brutality they had endured. Today, homeless LGBTQ+ kids, a disproportionate number of whom are also people of color, are at direct risk of being targeted by police in major urban areas. Even when police aren’t actively targeting LGBTQ+ people, they are rarely investigating violence against them. In 2017 alone, at least twenty-nine transgender people were murdered (actual numbers are most certainly higher, as murders go unreported, or trans people are misgendered in death, skewing statistics), making it the deadliest year for trans people on record—an ongoing trend that Laverne Cox has called a “state of emergency.” All these references to violence and brutality against queer bodies also bleed into the song through Frank Ocean’s writing and vocals. He publicly came out as not strictly heterosexual in 2012 in a Tumblr post, and in lyrics on his album channel ORANGE; he eschews labels overall, but has had relationships with both men and women.
Beyoncé is using a veracious and voracious tough love to name and expose all these various threads of violence against bodies that don’t fit US norms throughout “Superpower.” And she’s noting that history repeats, that change never comes fast enough. The music of “Superpower” moves painstakingly slowly. Even students that love the song admit that it drags, even more so in the video. They get frustrated with the pacing. It clocks in at nearly five and a half minutes. Watching “Superpower” feels like slogging through eternity when compared to a typical upbeat barely three-minute pop song. But it’s replicating history and the entire US political process: s … l … o … w. The system moves at a snail’s pace by design, a built-in protective measure and failsafe for power. The system itself prevents progress, allowing the status quo to continue unchecked as long as possible. The desire for a tempo increase mirrors a demand for more from the system. And we know Beyoncé is running the tempo, so the lag is clearly intentional. The video is filmed in slow motion too. It incorporates sonic dissonance as artistic misdirection—viewers see violent explosions, but hear only the soothing but slow melody—reflecting how some are able to ignore political realities to remain comfortable. The video catches the audience in a dissonant lag that replicates the political position of privilege, comfort, and inaction. Beyoncé is creating frustration to incite action.
She runs the tempo in “Superpower” to highlight an overall failure of the US political process. The song culminates with the closing refrain of “Yes we can,” over and over again. A simple hopeful phrase, but one now universally associated with the campaign of Barack Obama when he historically won the presidency in 2008, the first Black man to do so. Obama didn’t fix America by any stretch of the imagination. He enacted and furthered harmful neoliberal policies and engaged in violent imperialist actions, like every other US president. Just because one is not the worst doesn’t make them the best. Yes, America can and did elect the nation’s first Black president, a watershed moment for representation, but ultimately, what changed? His election, through no fault of his own, even fomented conservative and white supremacist rage exponentially over his eight-year tenure. It exposed the true racist underbelly of the United States that usually stays hidden, and emboldened racists to create a reactionary movement to retake the country they thought was theirs, culminating in the 2016 election and its aftermath, literally bringing to life the fascist government elected in Butler’s Parable of the Sower.
Earthseed states, “The only lasting truth is Change,” and the results of the 2016 election were certainly an abrasive change for those hoping to build a kinder, more equitable world. But Earthseed also says one must submit to change in order to shape it, redirect it into a future. Simple submission to post-2016 American reality is unwise, but perhaps placing the seismic shift of the election in context, and understanding the ways that moment is connected to longer histories, will better allow people to wield tough love in order to shape the next chapter. It’s no silver lining, but maybe a tiny consolation: The enemy was more clearly exposed and lines more clearly drawn, just like the two sides that clearly assemble at the end of both “Run the World” and “Superpower.” Beyoncé’s “Yes we can” is surely a nod to the historic election of Obama, but it doesn’t have to exist solely as an endorsement of the system that elected him or all his choices in office. It’s an illustration and reminder of the system’s failure too. Especially given what came next; what will now forever shamefully mark the next phase of American history. But, yes, keep going. Yes, do things differently.
The final moments of “Superpower” return to police in an almost exact reenactment of the final scene in “Run the World.” Equally confrontational, but comprised of one key difference. In “Run the World,” Beyoncé’s girls were advanced upon; in “Superpower,” they advance. After amassing a collective army over the slow minutes of the video, they encounter a police barricade, but stop a few yards away to create their own alternative barrier. They pause as a collective … and then they charge. Still in slow motion, but a moment that breaks the monotony and pace of everything before. There’s no salute this time, just aggression. The slow motion highlights the determination, defiance, and anger contorted on the faces of Beyoncé’s group: Mouths are open, lips snarled, eyes boiling over with fury. Just as they reach that line of demarcation, the entire advancing army, running at full speed, stops dead in their tracks, inches from the visors of the riot police. They pause. And the audience, no doubt, takes a deeper breath.
Beyoncé stands next to an unidentified man. He’s now wearing the balaclava she cast aside over the course of the video. Maybe he’s disguised to be another unidentifiable stand-in for the viewer, like in “Partition” and “Jealous.” But here, he’s quickly roped into impending collective action. Beyoncé exchanges a meaningful glance with him—plotting next moves, devising strategy. The shot then zooms in on Beyoncé’s hand reaching toward his. Fingers interlace. They join together, charging superpower in real time while preparing to charge forward. Gazes revert directly back at police and the video abruptly ends. When the last arpeggio hits its lowest note, the camera cuts to black and the bottom falls out of the song. But Beyoncé’s eyes, the eyes of everyone assembled alongside her, leave little room for doubt. Conceding to this military power is not an option, damn the consequences. The charge will, must, continue. Earlier lyrics referenced even gravity and physics being unable to quell Beyoncé’s charge; “The laws of the world never stopped us none.” So, full speed ahead. Carrying tough love as a critical strategy, carrying visions of the future ahead with the charge. Submitting to and shaping change on the fly. And the seething fire in Beyoncé’s eyes in that very last moment—not just angry, but resigned to rage—also points critically forward to the slow burn of resentment as its own potential superpower.