Ama Addo
Contributing Writer
This past weekend, Beyoncé dropped the music video “Formation.” This video was just what I needed on a Saturday night: an undeniable affirmation of black (girl) magic. Loaded with African American vernacular and culture, “Formation” showcases impeccable fashion, popular black dance moves and powerful visual messages. The first words you hear in the video are “What happened after New Orleans?” while Beyoncé crouched atop a police car that, along with the homes in the shot, is halfway submerged in water. There are flashes of police lights, the black church and dark rooms with dancing shirtless men twerking. Shots of New Orleans culture, along with voiceovers from ‘The B.E.A.T.’, a documentary on queer culture and New Orleans bounce music, are continuous throughout the video, paying homage to these communities.
When B says “Earned all this money but they never take the country out me. I got hot sauce in my bag. Swag,” she means it. Beyoncé uses her heritage to show her versatile but inseparable identity in the midst of her fame. In various scenes she is dressed as an affluent Creole belle, making home in lavish plantation-style houses sometimes with other black affluently dressed women. In other scenes she is perfect and ghetto-fabulous in long, thick cornrow braids and a fur coat, dangling out the window of a blue Camino while the driver does donuts in a parking lot. The different black hairstyles in this video reject homogenous ideas of beauty amongst black women. There are braids galore, afros, straight and curly types. In doing this, Beyoncé and director Melina Matsoukas celebrate radical blackness by calling for solidarity amongst black women, hence the line “Okay, ladies, now let’s get in formation.”
Another reason why I love this video: There is blackness everywhere. All of the cast, except for the police, are various shades of brown. When she says “My daddy Alabama,” the screen cuts to a royal West African family dressed in traditional clothes on the wall of the plantation house. This deliberate alignment to connect the African American identity with that of West Africa is just a small piece of the cake. The line “I like my baby hair with baby hair and afros,” is emphasized through the shot of her daughter Blue posing inside the house, wearing (you guessed it) an afro and a white dress, accompanied by two other dark girls also wearing white dresses. The blatant messages shrugging off Eurocentric based perceptions of her daughter’s hair and aligning with Africa and Creole culture are sentiments of black pride and resistance. The scene where a black man holds up a newspaper titled The Truth with an article titled “More than a Dreamer” and a picture of Martin Luther King Jr. reaches into the past and aims to crush ideas of MLK as simply “the good negro.”
Towards the end of the video, Beyoncé aligns herself with the #BlackLivesMatter movement by showing a graffiti wall marked with “Stop Shooting Us” and a boy raising his hands in front of a line of police, with the police raising their hands as well. Eventually, the New Orleans police car sinks into the water with Beyoncé atop it, seemingly resembling a baptizing of injustice, specifically police brutality.
Beyoncé once again proves her ability to stylistically innovate her persona and send messages that people have no choice but to hear. Bridging the past slayage of Southern blacks with current fleekiness of black culture, Beyoncé fuses politics, dance, defiant blackness and the #BlackLivesMatter movement to create the work of art that is “Formation.” If you can watch this video and not “get your life,” maybe it wasn’t meant for you.