Wednesday, March 1, 2017

Lemonade

As a piece of music and art, I thoroughly enjoyed the Queen Bee’s visual album “Lemonade”.  There is no debating that it is a masterpiece.  Every bit of detail was very well thought out which is why it is no shocker that the final song in the visual album “Lemonade” won a Grammy for Best Music Video.  

My takeaway from the visual album was that Beyonce was presenting a string of music video’s that told a story.  This story being the one of the black women in America.  She starts the album in a red hoodie and singing (like she is the whole album) but then she quickly switches scenes to what appears to be a slave.  From then on, the album follows the story of a black women in america and even more specifically, their fashion and the harsh realities they faced.  Hopefully by now most of us know that black women did not have the easiest life in early America.  They were slaved, over-worked, raped and much much more.  Life did not get much easier until more than 100 years into American history.  As beyonce gets toward the end of the album is where I start to have a lot of disagreements with some of the images she portrays and their messages and meanings.  By the end of the album, Beyonce still shows the harsh realities of the black women and even more, the black community as whole.  But they are not the ones I was expecting.  The one specific scene that I had a problem with was the one of of black kids with their hands up with white riot cops surrounding them.  This is obviously a direct reference to the “Hands up Don’t Shoot Movement” which is utterly ridiculous.  Why? Because it is solely based on a lie.  Michael Brown was not shot in the back with his hands up but rather while struggling to take a gun out of the holster of a police officer.  Beyonce again bashes the police when she is drowning with her back on top of a police car. My take away was that the police cannot protect the black community.  Which is just a completely ridiculous statement.  Yes, there is no denying that there have been unjust shooting of black men by police but there is also no denying that there has been unjust shooting of men from every race.  What Beyonce should be focusing on is the extreme amount of black on black crime or maybe why does a black child have the lowest chance of being brought up without a father.  The idea that young black people are targeted by white police officers is just simply false in almost every case.  According to a study at John Jay college, a young white man is more likely to be shot than a young black man in a confrontation with police.  So these claims are just not statistically correct.  

All in all, I liked the album.I may have disagreed with some of the scenes, but I still enjoyed it.

No comments:

Post a Comment

What do you think about this issue?

Note: Only a member of this blog may post a comment.