YEAR 2016 POP GOT POLITICAL
Reni Eddo-lodge reflects on the bold, black activism of Beyoncé’s Lemonade and a US election that turned pop stars into protestors
BEYONCÉ IS AN EVASIVE and rare interviewee. For a long time, her fans had no way of knowing what she thought about the world. And she kept it that way, until 2016. First there was the surprise release of her single Formation. In an unapologetic video, packed with black cultural references, she couldn’t have made her thoughts on the importance of the Black Lives Matter movement any clearer. A young black boy danced, teasing, in front of a line of heavily armoured policemen. In another scene, the words ‘STOP SHOOTING US’ were spray-painted on a wall. Later, after two more police shootings of unarmed black men, Beyoncé elaborated on her website,
writing, ‘These robberies of lives make us feel helpless and hopeless but we have to believe we are fighting for the rights of the next generation.’
Lemonade dropped on 23 April. It was an intensely personal, fiercely political album, cemented by a collaboration with Kendrick Lamar, the rapper widely considered a voice of the new civil rights movement. She was condemned for it, too. Some read her support of Black Lives Matter to be an attack on the police, and the hashtag #boycottbeyonce began to trend. But that wasn’t enough to hinder the momentum she’d created. A tone had been set, and other artists followed her lead. Music, shedding its rather apolitical stance of recent years, was resurrected as a form of protest.
As protestors gathered in the streets of New York City and Los Angeles hours after the election of Donald Trump, they waved placards that read ‘not my president’, ‘pussy grabs back’, and ‘love trumps hate’. It was inevitable, after such an extraordinary and divisive election, that a Trump win would instantly provoke despair among America’s progressives. But in among the crowds of ordinary people were world-famous pop stars – Lady Gaga, Miley Cyrus – united in fury, adamant that America deserved better, and breaking down the fourth wall of unattainable celebrity.
Their appearance at the protests was only as strange as 2016 itself. When politics goes awry, we usually look to the arts for answers. A decade ago, it was unusual for any prominent entertainer to reveal their political persuasions. But 2016 was the year that politics reached breaking point, where there was little option other than to speak out. In this new landscape, the more the better.