![]() With Lemonade she uses her clout 3 to speak out on the African American experience of discrimination and suffered injustices in the past and the present, and particularly the experience of African American women. Beyoncé’s popularity, creativity, and entrepreneurial talent enable her to influence the public discourse and weigh in on political issues. This synchronicity between performance and reception intensifies the connection between Beyoncé and her audience and thus increases her cultural power. Additionally, because of processes of digitalization and an increasing global interconnectedness, the time difference between performance, digital dissemination, and meta-discourse on social media has almost reached simultaneity. Lemonade, as a work of popular culture, is an artwork that is “not narrowly intellectual or creatively elitist and … generally though not necessarily disseminated through the mass media …, consists of the spoken and printed word, sounds, pictures, objects and artifacts” and is therefore genuinely intermedial (Browne 11). Therefore, it is vital to look at intermediality in this artwork “against the backdrop of medial networks” (Rippl 1). 4 Many reviews focus on the interrelations between the lyrics of her songs on infidelity and betrayal (.)Ģ All forms of publication of Lemonade were aimed at a global audience that watched her performances live, via internet streaming providers, or on TV.3 In 2016 she was added as 51 st on the Forbes ’ List of the world’s 50 most powerful women, a list tha (.).Through the publication of this transmedial, intramedial, and intermedial artwork, Beyoncé created a sensation that not only boosted the sales of her album but also enabled her to make a statement on contemporary political issues. The hard copy of Lemonade contains a music album with twelve songs, a booklet with production stills of every chapter of the visual album, and the visual album itself, which will be the main focus of analysis in this article. The release of the album was followed by individual singles and her Formation World Tour (between April and October 2016). The release of Lemonade on the streaming network Tidal (co-owned by Beyoncé) was accompanied by the HBO screening of a “visual album” 2 that features Beyoncé’s songs in the form of video clips which are connected through narrated passages of the poetry by the British-Somali poet Warsan Shire. This performance and the release of Lemonade took place only a few months before Donald Trump became the Republican nominee, in the midst of a presidential campaign of contested visions for the United States, bringing to the fore an increasing polarization of the American cultural and political landscape. The release of the album was preceded by her contested performance at the culturally significant Super Bowl halftime show in February 2016, where she challenged contemporary race relations by drawing aesthetically on the Black Panther movement. By doing so, the album functions as a “means of social and cultural self-understanding” (Hebel 402) and as a decisive source and a shaping force of a society’s values (Fiske 43–45). Lemonade is a work of popular art intertwining mass culture, technology, and the public discourse. It was distributed both via traditional and digital outlets. 2 The artwork Lemonade by Beyoncé will be referred to as “visual album.” This term highlights the vis (.)ġ On April 23, 2016, with no advance advertisement, Beyoncé 1 released Lemonade, a complex artwork that combines and interrelates various visual and auditory media and aesthetics.1 The artist’s name “Beyoncé” will be used in this article to refer to Beyoncé Knowles-Carter.Finally, intermediality acquires cultural-critical functions which in particular pertain to race relations and structural forms of discrimination against people of color in contemporary America. Thirdly, through intermedial references Beyoncé locates Lemonade within the cultural history of the United States and American music history in particular. Secondly, intermedial references result in a transcultural signature of the artwork. This article focuses on the visual album as intermedial artwork that can be described as a soundscape in which the intermedial constellations fulfill a number of functions: Firstly, intermedial references are a means of cohesion that are responsible for the unified character of the visual album. In 2016, Beyoncé published Lemonade, a work of art that exists in various manifestations: as a music album that includes twelve songs, as live performances (including her world tour and her appearance at the Superbowl halftime show), and as a “visual album,” an art film that consists of the music video clips for each individual song and visually and auditorily complex “chapters” which feature the poetry by Warsan Shire.
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