Artists like Beyonce can feel so heavily embedded into popular culture that it feels like their work couldn't possibly be a thought-out critique. However, I reckon we should give it a chance. Let's take a look at her video for her latest single, Why Don't You Love Me, in relation to Destiny's Child's Independent Woman.
An Independent Woman's checklist
Own career? Check!
Fabulous wardrobe? Check!
Nice pad? Check!
Buzzing social life? Check!
A man who loves and needs you? erm.... not quite?!
So Beyonce's most recent song is quite a belter, full of emotion and the anger I suspect lots women have identified with. It's about doing all she can to 'make' herself 'so damn easy to love', yet feeling frustrated that these efforts seem to have no effect on her partner. So, how does she go about making herself easy to love? She asks the listener to 'check her credentials': 'beauty', 'class','style' and 'ass'. Today, realistically, these assets can be bought, and she implies this, using the word 'make', to indicate the construction involved in this version of have-it-all femininity. This, remember, is the femininity she sang about so ardently in Independent Woman eleven years ago, a song which became iconic, almost as a manifesto for my generation.
In these eleven years, I think, as a society, we're starting to see the holes in this manifesto, mainly because most of the Independent Woman identity that Destiny's Child helped construct comes through 'these diamonds that I bought', 'the shoes I'm rockin' and 'the clothes I'm wearing'. In the telephone scene for the video for Why Don't You Love Me, Beyonce wears a huge ring on every finger, OTT underwear and shoes, face overtly covered in makeup and hair stiff with hairspray. She's literally caked in consumption, almost a caricature of the personas she's adopted in previous videos. The character she plays is the probably most angry and frustrated we've ever seen of her video personas.
So the video and song both point out that the problem comes when we've got our own disposable income, we've ticked all the boxes, yet this STILL doesn't equate to fulfillment. The advertising and PR industries have thrived off the old 'you buy this and you'll be more attractive to others' concept for almost a century. Once it became common for women to have a disposable income, they became a key demographic to target, and hence this feeling that buying stuff, treatments and gym memberships etc, will make us more attractive, and more easy to love.
Cracking down deeper into what the song's getting at, it becomes apparent that the desire to buy this stuff with our new and exciting disposable incomes is all a bit flawed really. See Girard's Cycle of Mimetic Desire theory for more info... where he explains how desire comes from external forces, and that advertising exploits this. We're tricked into thinking buying stuff will make us more lovable. The anger in the song is the anger that comes when we don't get the emotional fulfillment that years of advertising, pr and media have promised us at a deep, and often subconscious level.
What we're left with is the anguish that many women have felt when efforts to reach a mythical level of perfection don't amount to real happiness we were promised.
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Amazing blog post, Cat.
ReplyDeleteI totally agree with you, as you probably expected. When I first saw this video I was a bit pissed off at the fact that Beyonce has always been a 'I don't need a man' kind of singer (let's ignore the whole long term relationship with Jay-Z thing for a minute). This video -for me, anyway- was annoying because I thought she'd finally caved and became like so many of the other female artists, craving male attention.
However, after watching it a few times, I do think it's a very clever video, a bit of a piss take, if you will. The whole smiling sweetly and fluttering her eyelashes thing, it's all just surface. The huge rings she wears, and like you said, the masses of make up, she really is caked in consumption.
Oh Beyonce, you're a lot smarter than many people watching this video will realise <3
Problem is with it, and with so much other popular yet 'subversive' stuff (AKA Lady Gaga), these performers are so caught up in the capitalist system, eg. product placement etc, clothing lines etc, that their work will generally be perceived like that, whether or not it has a different message to it. Lady Gaga, and to some extent, Beyonce, alot revolution a place in the system. With capitalism, even the revolution gets eaten up, eventually becoming part of it. Avril Lavigne's a really good example of that, where she makes punk values and fashion a consumer item, accessible to everyone.
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