Visionary Black Power

'You know you that bitch when you cause all this conversation'.

By making a well-timed and astute marketing move - dropping the music video for "Formation" a day before promoting the song with a controversial Super Bowl performance - Beyoncé has made this lyric prophetic. Bill Gates was puzzled and surprised by the inclusion of his name ('I just might be a black Bill Gates in the making'), while the American police force has objected to the video's 'anti-law enforcement' imagery and tribute to the Black Panthers. "Formation" has also inspired an SNL skit titled 'The Day Beyoncé Turned Black' and several questionable covers by white singers.

Before "***Flawless (ft. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie)", Beyoncé's celebrity was mostly apolitical. Her best-known hits - "Crazy in Love", "Single Ladies" and "Irreplaceable" - did not stray from the well-trodden themes of personal struggles with love, heartbreak and marriage. With tracks like "If I Were a Boy" and "Run the World (Girls)", Beyoncé took on a more political slant as her music expanded explorations of personal female independence to the role of women (and female sexuality) within society. 

"Formation", however, is explicitly about white-black race politics in America and Beyoncé's own African-American Texan roots. As CNN's Lisa Respers France notes, Beyoncé's femininity and celebrity has diverted attention away from her race: "she is one of those stars of color who -- until now -- has been beyond race for the mainstream audience". The song's opening verse thus serves as a stark reminder of her genetic and cultural 'blackness':

'My daddy Alabama, Momma LouisianaYou mix that negro with that Creole make a Texas bamaI like my baby heir with baby hair and afrosI like my negro nose with Jackson Five nostrilsEarned all this money but they never take the country out meI got a hot sauce in my bag, swag'

The Daily Beast's Kevin Fallon has desribed the song as "a black power anthem for the masses", noting its release during Black History Month and the music video's visual references to Katrina-struck New Orleans, the #BlackLivesMatter movement, Martin Luther King Jr., and police brutality against African-Americans. He hailed the track as a "powerful, gritty, and unapologetic a message [...] a booming meditation on black identity, the validity and transience of a person’s roots and history, and the crushing interplay between power and helplessness, agency, and victimization".

Writing for Noisey, Dr Naila Keleta-Mae (a professor of Theatre and Performance at the University of Waterloo) argues that "Formation" is a "notably complex meditation on female blackness, the United States of America, and capitalism", and provides a compelling analysis of the racially-charged choreography: 

"In “Formation,” black women’s bodies are literally choreographed into lines and borders that permit them to physically be both inside and outside of a multitude of vantage points. And what that choreography reveals is the embodiment of a particular kind of 21st Century black feminist freedom in the United States of America; one that is ambitious, spiritual, decisive, sexual, capitalist, loving, and communal."

As Pitchfork's Britt Julius notes, the track's political lyricism is made all the more convicing by its instrumental density and reliance on Houston trap:

"Mike WiLL Made-It's production perfectly underlines each of Bey’s lyrics. The unnerving synth highlights each snap of a phrase (“I like my negro nose with Jackson 5 nostrils” and “I like my baby’s hair with baby hair and an Afro”) like a yellow highlighter, marking the bits and pieces of the song one will refer to when examining the Beyoncé canon as a whole. Like a low rumbling siren that never truly crests to a final loud blare, the song bounces just under the surface. This effect returns as Bey repeats that first verse—"My daddy Alabama/ Momma Louisiana"—as if to make sure listeners are considering the content."

"Formation" thus succeeds on multiple levels: as intellectually-stimulating political commentary, as a substantive and trend-forward song, as a step forward in Beyoncé's musical career, as a progressive social activist message that advances the civil rights interests of African Americans while, as The Guardian's Syreeta McFadden notes, acknowledging "the labor of black women as soldiers and leaders in social justice movements, even though popular culture has been more interested in the role of men and of male performing artists". 

The track's limitation, however, may be in its inability to render poetic justice to the lyric "best revenge is your paper". If "Formation" serves as a rallying cry for African-American capitalist aspirations, it has yet to translate its aesthetic success to commercial success (as Rihanna rather 'shadily' noted via Twitter). Beyoncé and Jay Z may stand head and shoulders over most Americans with their combined estimated net worth of $ 1.1 Billion, but Bill Gates - the richest man on earth - is estimated to be worth $76.6 Billion. Oprah Winfrey is the only African-American individual to make the top 1000 billionaires in the US for now - and financial success is similarly elusive to a large segment of middle class and working class African-Americans (Jay Z's Tidal also hasn't been 'slaying' Spotify, Pandora or Apple Music). "Formation" will not spontaneously generate unprecedented African-American social mobility, but it may help erode the institutionalized oppression, racism and sexism that stand in the way of black exceptionalism.