Beyoncé’s “Formation”

Fig. 1: Beyoncé above the rising floodwaters of Katrina.

Beyoncé’s “Formation” is, like many music videos, made up of an intensely varied collection of rapidly edited scenes, but it insists on the connectivity of its parts, which move in choreographed solidarity. Symmetrically composed shots of Beyoncé, accompanied by suited black men, are dynamized by the sweeping of the camera across the tableau; the opulent, crimson interior of what looks to be a plantation house is undercut by the rhythmical bouncing of disruptive black bodies; and Beyoncé is shown laying on top of a police car, beset by rising floodwaters and capsizing rapidly. Elsewhere, a black child disarms the police through dance, and this scene leads into a shot of a graffiti tag demanding that the police “stop shooting us.” Reactionary media outlets were especially incensed by the Super Bowl performance following the video’s debut, which featured afros, stylized bandoliers, and black leather attire commensurate with some elements of the visual grammar of Black Power.

The popular reaction to the video and live performance has centered on how these objects transform Beyoncé’s star-image. A Saturday Night Live segment parodied white fans’ responses to the assertive blackness of “Formation” as incredulous to the point of mass hysteria, as though blackness undermines the racially transcendent femininity which animates the singer’s international appeal. Beyoncé’s videos espouse feminine resilience and empowerment much more loudly than race, from the inversion of the break-up genre on “Irreplaceable” to emblazoning the word “FEMINIST” as the backdrop to a MTV awards performance.

In Resilience and Melancholy, Robin James argues that Beyoncé’s music video, “Video Phone,” resituates the violence of the male gaze within a contemporary framework of perseverance and overcoming, where painful experiences anticipate increased strength. James asserts that the video’s most salient representation of this overcoming is rendered as Beyoncé’s domination of a black male avatar bearing the look in a move that “affirms her inclusion within multi-racial white supremacist patriarchy.”[1] If there was any confusion about Beyoncé’s affiliation with her racial identity, “Formation” seeks not only to clarify her proximity to it, but also to make that identification less linear by highlighting a wide range of voices, styles, and experiences beyond those which rhyme with the most recognizable templates of black wealth and normativity.

“Formation” opens with a sample of Messy Mya—a figure in the New Orleans comedy scene who was murdered at the age of 22—asking a question that can be heard in several ways. The misrecognitions stimulated by Mya’s voice—its ghosts, one might say—are, as Zandria Robinson points out, generative for thinking about what the song and video make visible. Mya’s voice has a deterritorializing effect, invoking the nebulous aura of the comedian’s murder to “[propel us] into the life and death, future-present-past the video conjures” in its multidirectional assemblage of New Orleans.[2] To that end, the sample has been construed to have said a number of things, from “What happened at the New ‘Wilin’s?” to “What happened after New Orleans?” These ambivalences forge interpretative tributaries into the song and its video at the confluence of space, place, and time. On the one hand, “Formation” is an anthemic declaration of black southern pride, investing the heterogeneous cultural identity of the black American South in the scene of New Orleans: still submerged, still haunted, yet thriving resiliently.

On the other hand, the speculative-time that unfolds “after New Orleans” suggests that there are multiple futures and pasts that spring forth from the devastation of Katrina. If Katrina continues in the physical space of Beyoncé’s New-New Orleans, what we are left with is not a melancholic sense of the cyclical, but the defiant character of a place that exists in the future because it has outlived an event which was made to signify the end-times. Here, “survival” is less concerned with living today than what becomes thinkable on the horizons of the next life—what Sun Ra once named “the other side of time” which comes into view when time has officially, if not actually, ended.

Fig. 2: Technologies of identity-making in the everyday.

“Formation” calls for an ambivalent course of coordinated political action, drawing on the “gear” of black hairstyle and dress as cultural technologies for building a new consciousness in the territories of the everyday. Different black hairstyles are depicted in the video, from the “nappy hair” and “afros” extolled in its chorus, to the extensions, perms, and cornrows that we see across its various scenes. These black styles are represented in a nonjudgmental way, celebrated as shades of the black quotidian impressed upon the exigencies of Katrina. As Kobena Mercer claims in “Black Hair/Style Politics,” the styling of black hair is notable for the differences it produces rather than as a way to measure co-optation, and Beyoncé avoids the trap of assigning political priority to “natural” styles or iconographic modes of dress: the video sees nothing irreconcilable about Givenchy, 90’s jean-jackets, dainty umbrellas, and a preacher’s gold-tooth. By drawing our attention to these styles, Beyoncé calls for a horizontal sense of togetherness in “the absence of an organized direction of black political discourse” where “the logic of style manifest[s] across cultural surfaces in everyday life [to] reinforce the terms of shared experience.”[3] As such, the portrayal of black culture in “Formation” is not only driven by a message of pride; rather, we see the circuitry of a black “cosmic” everyday—both fraught and blasé, aristocratic and grassroots—as the precondition for reframing the contemporary milieu of black political action.

Fig. 3: Black dance initiates a mimetic exchange between body and state.

Author Biography

Kevin Ball is a PhD student in Film and Media Studies at Wayne State University. His research interests include afrofuturist media with an emphasis on audiovisual representations of time and progress.

Notes

1. Robin James, Resilience and Melancholy (Zero Books, 2015), 114.

2. Zandria Robinson, “We Slay: Part I,” New South Negress, accessed March 27, 2016: http://newsouthnegress.com/southernslayings.

3. Kobena Mercer, Welcome to the Jungle (New York & London: Routledge, 1994), 119.