Good Booty

by Ann Powers

  The ability to divide herself into persona and person and retain an aura of health, deliberately projecting stability in a private life dominated by close family members and her longtime beau and eventual husband Jay Z, distinguished Beyoncé from her other female digital-age pop stars like Rihanna and Taylor Swift, who struggled with scandals or at least an ongoing barrage of gossip. The one who came closest to matching her example was Lady Gaga, a glam-rock-loving, punk-baptized former New York prep school girl born Stefani Germanotta, who borrowed directly from drag artists and cyberpunk in songs and videos that dwelled on the artifice of romance and the perversity of fame. Beyoncé turned to Gaga as a collaborator when the latter was at her early peak as the David Bowie of cyborgian divas. The 2010 video for “Telephone,” a duet from Gaga’s album The Fame Monster, got the most immediate attention: a nearly ten-minute-long tribute to trash-culture film, music, and fashion directed by frequent Madonna collaborator Jonas Åkerlund. Its exploitation-movie narrative involved a women’s prison, a murder spree in a diner, and its two stars playing at testy lesbian intimacy in a Chevy Silverado with the words “Pussy Wagon” airbrushed on the back.

  Their collaboration on Beyoncé’s “Video Phone” more powerfully served her project of becoming the leading pop presence in an age of avatars. The video was directed by Hype Williams, whose pioneering 1990s clips introduced high-tech Afro-Futurism to MTV. Until Gaga enters near the end, Beyoncé is the only female figure in it. Male dancers occasionally surround her, but their faces are obscured; sometimes they wear giant cameras on their heads, reduced to voyeuristic machines. As she goes through a series of porn-suggestive poses, including stripper bends, gun play, and bumps and grinds, more than a dozen variations on her signature leotard seem to change themselves, the way outfits did on paper-doll figures in the dress-up-oriented video games that girls played on their smart phones. Beyoncé fully enters into virtual reality in “Video Phone,” taking control of the fantasies others project upon her, reaching through the lens of celebrity and declaring, “I can handle you.”

  “Video Phone” was released as a single in November 2009, mere months after Apple announced sales of one million iPhone 3Gs within three days of the model’s launch. A year later, the song’s scenario of real-time intimate engagement via hand-held touchscreens became widely available through the iPhone’s FaceTime function. For decades, fans had gazed at pop stars through the screens of television or film, heard their whispers through radio, or dreamed using images carefully framed within the pages of a magazine. Now lovers could perform for each other as pop stars did for them, and become each other’s audiences in acts of disclosure only limited by data plans. Beyoncé was the ideal star for this time of pondering what personhood, and relationships, meant within high-resolution retina displays. Her evolving use of social media came to define best practices—or at least, the most effective strategies—within that realm. She and Jay Z occasionally faced scandals, including rumors of his infidelity. But they reined in the gossip, always returning to social media to ask for respectful distance from fans and in exchange offering carefully curated images or words from the world behind the transparent curtain.

  Between 2008 and 2012, when she became the top-earning woman in popular music according to Forbes, Beyoncé gave up her Sasha Fierce persona and fulfilled her conventional dream of whole womanhood, marrying Jay Z and birthing daughter Blue Ivy. When she announced that pregnancy on the MTV Video Music Awards in 2011, the news broke Twitter’s record for most tweets per second—nearly nine thousand. Ten months later, she shared photos of her child on a relatively new social media platform, Tumblr. Her use of Tumblr boosted its success, and it was eventually sold to the tech conglomerate Yahoo for $1.1 billion.23 A confidential tone, the media critic Anne-Helen Petersen wrote, is what made Beyoncé’s social media use so powerful. “Whether Beyoncé herself is ‘old-fashioned’ or even a naturally private person is really beyond the point. Her image has acquired a gloss of privacy, and in today’s media environment, saturated with celebrity disclosure, it renders her unique,” Peterson wrote.24

  Beyoncé’s Tumblr overflowed with images that embodied the phrase “far away, so close”: Beyoncé carrying Blue Ivy, both of their backs to the camera; Bey and Jay in a crowd at the music festival Coachella, the rapper wearing a bandana to hide his still instantly recognizable face. Scattered in these shots were high-fashion poses, including some of Beyoncé in superhero costumes. The Tumblr balanced exposure and concealment, becoming a work of art in itself: it felt more like a lovingly tended diary than the product of the chaotic openness of the Web. In Beyoncé’s hands, social media became a true medium: the substance through which raw material is rendered into art.

  Beyoncé’s use of social media as art hit a peak with the release of her self-titled fifth album in the wee hours of December 13, 2013. The world learned of Beyoncé via a simple post reading “Surprise!” on the photo-sharing platform Instagram, and could immediately download its fourteen tracks and accompanying videos via iTunes. Beyoncé was not the first major star to suddenly unleash an album via the Internet, but there had never been one so well orchestrated as an event. Within twenty-four hours, Beyoncé had produced 1.2 million Twitter responses, more than 25,000 Tumblr posts, 7,000 Instagram photo reactions, and, according to one search engine, 600 GIFs, or animated images, connected to Beyoncé’s name. Most important, it also sold 828,773 copies through the iTunes store in its first week. “In other words, the album has created a social media class of its own, generating a sort of ripple effect that is keeping the album front and center in the Web’s ephemeral consciousness,” wrote the media critic Jenna Wortham in the New York Times.25

  Beyoncé was uniquely qualified to create this kind of response. It contained the most experimental music Beyoncé had ever made, heavily connected to regional rap styles like the slowed-down screw music of the singer’s native Houston; it also showed the mark of her explorations of cutting-edge electronic sounds and art rock. It wasn’t meant for radio, but for more open-minded listeners who got their music searching online. While about half of its songs dealt with themes familiar to any Beyoncé fan—female empowerment and camaraderie, emotional vulnerability, the costs and pleasures of fame—the others were bluntly pornographic fantasies and confessions, far raunchier than anything Beyoncé had previously done or what most of her peers were willing to try. These songs, Beyoncé told interviewers, were inspired by thoughts she indulged during the months after her pregnancy, when actual sex was more difficult for her and Jay Z. Conjuring scenes of a sizzling hot married life, these songs penetrated the nerve of privacy, yet impeccably supported the distanced intimacy at the center of Beyoncé’s art.

  “Partition,” the album’s most successful single, is an account of sex in a limousine whose details—torn party clothes and a chauffeur averting his eyes—fused glamour and tawdriness. “Drunk in Love” became notorious for naming the position Beyoncé prefers for bathtub sex—“surfboard”—alongside an image of the couple waking up in the kitchen after a night of debauchery. “Rocket” combines explicit lines such as “let me sit this ass on you” with musings about Beyoncé’s and Jay Z’s blended personal and professional lives, culminating in the declaration, “Goddammit I’m comfortable in my skin / and you’re comfortable in my skin.” Throughout Beyoncé, the domestic scene becomes a pornographic one, a sequestered stage for sex.

  If, as one critic noted, Beyoncé was “the rudest mainstream album since Madonna’s Erotica,” it was also in some ways diametrically opposed to that work.26 While Madonna’s songs and the accompanying book Sex branded her as an extroverted explorer, engaging in random encounters, exhibitionism, and group sex, Beyoncé’s established her as the raunchy queen of an inner sanctum whose sensual electricity would serve as inspiration and guidepost to fans, but would ultimately remain Beyoncé’s and Jay Z’s alone. She was solving the problem of the celebrity sex tape, feeding the insatiable demand for public knowledge of famous people’s
lives with divulgences that satisfied but remained in her grasp. Beyond that, for the average listener or viewer, Beyoncé fought back against the assumption that to live online was to surrender any real control over one’s private life. It showed how a person could reveal herself without being violated.

  “Only a mama can do that, and only a wife can do that. That’s your strength,” the producer Pharrell declared to the singer in a promotional video for Beyoncé, reminding viewers that in these songs, Beyoncé was not merely performing sexuality but presenting it as a gift for her husband. The “mama” and “wife” behind this material reasserted her social and economic position constantly, in the luxurious settings of the videos and the emotional details of the songs, which contextualized the pornographic lines as uttered between powerful equals for whom love and partnership, not sexual performance, mattered most. “We’re so much more than pointless fixtures, Instagram pictures, consumers,” Beyoncé sang on “Rocket.” “Home is where the heart is.” And in these songs, home remained inviolable. What Beyoncé shared could be enjoyed, even embraced, but not entered by anyone except the confessor herself and her mate.

  Beyoncé also pointed toward a new way for an artist to confront the shadow world of pornography that had haunted mainstream entertainment since the nineteenth-century days of burlesque. While the album’s music abounds in juicy details, the videos tend to be more conventional, showing Beyoncé in high-fashion versions of stripper or dominatrix gear dancing or teasingly touching herself in ways anyone who’d ever watched a porn video would recognize. Others show Beyoncé and mostly female friends (and fellow dancers) in nostalgic leisure scenes: roller skating, riding the Cyclone roller coaster on Coney Island, or rehearsing moves before a mirror at home. The songs’ explicit content contrasted with these images, but combined they offered a sense of how erotic thoughts run through a woman’s mind even when she is not in the midst of an encounter. Certain songs, like the melodramatic ballad “Pretty Hurts,” also acknowledge that erotic ideals can be confining and even oppressive to women. It all adds up to an exquisitely well-balanced view of sexuality, one that elevates the pornographic through high production values, difficult choreography, and the constant reassertion of Beyoncé’s personality. Acting erotically, she actively fights against being reduced to the status of object. The insistence on sexual subjectivity, which generates sexual power, is Beyoncé’s ultimate message.

  In a much-circulated videotaped panel discussion after the album’s release, the venerable feminist writer bell hooks said that “part” of Beyoncé was “a terrorist” because, despite her ostensible frankness, she still upheld a standard of beauty and sexual allure that most women could not achieve.27 Yet if Beyoncé can be considered as a direct response to the rise of both social media and pornography online, it does seem different than most pop stars’ attempts to exploit their own attractiveness for profit. Porn has always been big business on the Internet. In 2009, however, reports began circulating that social media sites had superseded porn to become the number one reason people visited the Web. The next logical question—is the future of porn social?—was quickly answered in the affirmative with the rise of sites like Pinsex and Pornstagram, where amateurs trade explicit images while avoiding the fees commercial porn demands. Beyoncé’s favorite social platform, Tumblr, was a home for porn from the beginning. At the same time, online dating was veering toward one-night stands or afternoon hookups through mobile apps like Grindr (for gay men) and Tinder (mostly for heterosexuals). In this context, Beyoncé, with its spicy but contained fantasies of monogamous love and female self-possession, stands out as a kind of protest, conservative in some ways and determinedly centered on female self-respect. For those attempting to locate their own desires within the fast-paced, bafflingly varied, and often near-anonymous realm of online sex, Beyoncé’s assertion of strength and positive containment suggested that sex could be fully enjoyed, and even shared, online in healthy and even loving ways.

  “My first album came out when I was fifteen. I was a child,” Beyoncé said in one of the promotional videos she released in tandem with Beyoncé. “But now I’m in my thirties and those children that grew up listening to me have grown up.” Her self-described “journey” into sexually explicit content was the final step in her becoming fully adult as an artist, and as an embodiment of the soft self, fully inhabiting a mobile online world that complemented and enhanced her physical-world assertions of identity and power. In a time increasingly dominated by virtual experiences, her nimble advances and self-preserving retreats made her the queen of pop.

  BLURRING THE LINES

  Britney and Beyoncé, the cyborg and the avatar, embodied new ways of being—and being sexual—within the twenty-first-century life mix. But they didn’t emerge in a vacuum. In the 2000s, pop in general grappled with new modes of human behavior enabled by the Internet, and the moral codes, often linked to sexual behavior, that arose to accommodate them. If pop seemed to get cruder and cruder as the new century wore on, this was largely a response to the new sexual openness that online living made possible. In an atmosphere where pornography, sexual hookups, and gender switching were all available at the click of a hyperlink, pop yet again staged Americans’ conversations about the blurred lines of behavior within their most private lives. Music led the way into a new sexual mode in which every act of flirtation potentially could be shared across multiple platforms, and even in the most furtive moments of connection and climax, lovers were aware of themselves as being watched, presenting personae, acting out sexual scripts.

  At the same time, the most fundamental questions of right and wrong, evoking the biblical commandments Thou shalt not steal and Thou shalt not bear false witness, arose at the center of the pop world. Computer programs that could alter vocal sounds, especially the ubiquitous pitch-correction program Auto-Tune, threw into question the very definitions of authentic expression and identity. And the shift toward digital music distribution—the ease with which MP3 files could be illegally shared on peer-to-peer networks like Napster—caused a genuine panic within the recording industry, as ordinary citizens were tracked down and sometimes prosecuted as music thieves.

  These broader moral debates often zeroed in on sexuality. Though computerized pitch correction was everywhere in pop by the mid-2000s, a particular strain of R&B and hip-hop that originated largely in strip clubs became a primary target of critics decrying the loss of musical authenticity. At the same time, questions about the corrosive effects of music downloading mirrored concerns about the rise of online pornography; the two realms were even linked in legislation, as congressmen tried to regulate file-sharing services that facilitated the distribution of both. As the music industry changed, its veterans expressed longing for more innocent times. “You can’t watch modern stars like Britney Spears or Lady Gaga with a two-year-old,” the 1980s British hit-maker Mike Stock said during a one-man campaign against the sluttification of American pop in 2010. “Ninety-nine percent of the charts is R&B, and ninety-nine percent of that is soft-core pornography.”28

  Stock’s comments were racist, overlooking the intense sexualization of women in white-dominated subgenres like heavy metal and even his own home turf of British New Wave, where models dressed as animals cavorted in Duran Duran videos. Yet he wasn’t wrong to associate R&B (and, implicitly, its sibling, hip-hop) with the business of sex. At the beginning of the twenty-first century new musical forms were being developed in rooms where women danced and men mostly watched. There was an echo of nineteenth-century New Orleans and the ten-cents-a-dance palaces of New York in the strip clubs of what had come to be known as the Dirty South.

  “Magic City, Blue Flame, Cheetah, Diamonds of Atlanta, Follies: the way some cities are known for their restaurants or their museums or their turn-of-the-century architecture, Atlanta’s landmarks are strip clubs,” the New York Times writer Jon Caramanica reported. The first wave of influence lasted from the late 1980s through the mid-1990s; it then receded for a decade
, only to return when America’s black entertainment industry essentially relocated to Atlanta in the mid-2000s. Several elements influenced the turn back, Caramanica noted: “The city’s arrival as the center of hip-hop innovation, its rising black celebrity class and the pernicious influence of the crime syndicate BMF, which was known for its flamboyant and extravagant strip club outings. These were huge transactional scrums—rappers, dancers, criminals, bottles of alcohol, tens of thousands of dollars in the air.”29

  Strip clubs made for good places to try out new sounds because they were de facto dancing arenas. The way women moved to a track’s heavy beats and ear-catching samples told songwriters and music industry executives if it would be a hit. And, once again, new dances emerged from the clubs. As early as 2000, New York Times style reporter Julia Chaplin noted one dance called “rear-ending”—the Funky Butt of the cyber age. “Me and my friends joke that going out now is like being in an interactive strip club,” Chaplin quoted one young promoter as saying. “As he spoke at the club near Union Square, a woman with a silver thong peeking above her tight leopard-print hip-huggers pressed her backside against his leg to the rally of Jay-Z’s ‘Give It to Me.’”

  The connection between Beyoncé’s then–future husband Jay Z and strip-club culture shows how mainstream it had become as a hip-hop reference point. The Florida rapper and entrepreneur Luther “Uncle Luke” Campbell had brought strip club dancers into his videos in the late 1980s; his very public struggles with censorship culminated in a high-profile trial and acquittal in his native Florida, and his 2 Live Crew’s subsequent fame made their jiggle a national phenomenon. By 2000, New York–based video directors like Diane Martel were looking to the clubs for dancers. “The strippers are playing regular girls [in her videos],” Martel told Chaplin. “I just like to use them because they are amazing freestyle dancers.”