Beyoncé ready to slay. Photograph: Handout/Getty Images
Awe has always seemed like the only appropriate response to Beyoncé, a star who makes even the best of the rest look a bit amateur. She tells us over and over again that she’s number one (she woke up like this, she’s flawless, fresher than you, she slays every day) – and we sing along because they’re all unassailably true. She sounds, moves and looks like a goddess and most of us “bow down” accordingly.
But when she surprise-released Lemonade, an hour-long film presentation of her sixth studio album, there was suddenly a radical new dimension to this rhetoric of self-affirmation. Threaded with the bold and bodily poetry of British-Somali poet Warsan Shire, steeped in antebellum imagery and peopled with phalanxes of young black women, the film takes its title from footage of Hattie White, Beyoncé’s grandmother-in-law, giving a speech at her 90th birthday party. “I was served lemons,” she says slowly, melodiously. “But I made lemonade.”
