Furious facade

Opinion

Hey there, time traveller!
This article was published 28/04/2016 (2912 days ago), so information in it may no longer be current.

Let me just start by saying I don’t care whether Jay Z is stepping out on Beyoncé.

That’s between them.

I still found Lemonade, Beyoncé’s new “visual album,” mesmerizing. Widely viewed as Bey’s denunciation of her husband’s lowdown cheating ways, this multimedia infidelity megaproject is both epic and intimate. Ultimately, it doesn’t matter if the album’s emotional journey — which moves from despairing denial to scathing anger to willed reconciliation — is factual. It just feels true.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=okGJ-Fto36Q

That’s one of the reasons Lemonade is currently burning up the Internet — and prompting furious followup speculations about the real-life players.

Beyoncé may be one of the most dazzling cogs in the celebrity-industrial complex, but she manages to keep herself pretty private. She’s mostly silent on social media. She’s cagey about tell-all interviews. She’s highly visible without revealing much.

So here she is in Lemonade, which fuses music with spoken-word interludes and uncanny imagery for an hour-long dream state of extreme emotion and naked pain.

Beyoncé is smashing muscle cars with a baseball bat. She’s exulting in screw-you threats. She’s screaming, sweating, taunting, flaunting and raging in what looks like a pure, unmediated gush of jealousy, hurt and anger.

Finally, fans are saying. The real Beyoncé.

Well, sort of. Lemonade plays like straight-up autobiography, but it’s painstakingly created art. A months-long, multimillion-dollar, collaborative conceptual project, the visual album is highly controlled and carefully wrought. Beyoncé’s picture of the wronged wife trying to hold her family together despite her tomcatting spouse is emotionally loaded and incredibly compelling. It can also be viewed as another fabulous elaboration of her exquisitely constructed public self.

Almost since Jay Z and Beyoncé got together, the power couple has been the inevitable target of infidelity chatter. In Lemonade, Beyonce transforms tabloid gossip into musical gold. The notorious perfectionist cannily directs the narrative of her marriage, making tawdry innuendo into something larger, sadder, strangely beautiful. If there are going to be cheating rumours, Lemonade proclaims, they will be on Bey’s terms.

Not everyone likes these terms. But many of the criticisms of Lemonade as an unseemly airing of dirty laundry seem to come down to gender. Men are more apt to confess to cheating than being cheated on, but they often spin sexual sagas into literature, music and art. When women do the same thing, they are called out for being narcissistic, self-indulgent, confessional, messy.

Beyoncé is many things in Lemonade, but she ain’t messy. Even when she’s wrecking cars, she’s wearing couture. Even when she’s screaming, she’s in control.

And it’s worth noting that Bey writes herself a (cautiously) happy ending. Though most of the responses to Lemonade focus on the angry accusations and righteous takedowns, the album also moves toward healing, suggesting that the couple has come through a storm of suffering to a deeper, truer union. For all the rage hurled at Jay Z in the visual album’s first half, the man himself is featured in the second.

In one key scene, Beyoncé, wearing glasses and a regular-person sweater, is seen tenderly caressing her husband. The whole setup seems to telegraph utter truthfulness, but it’s just as artificial as the surreal sequences that surround it.

The real-world followup to the album’s narrative could involve Jay Z and Beyoncé announcing a second honeymoon or issuing a terse divorce announcement. Neither event would be surprising.

Every marriage is essentially a mystery to everyone except the two people involved — and hell, sometimes even to them.

Does Lemonade finally allow us access to the real Beyoncé and her real relationship with Jay Z? Probably not. But I’m content to watch the fabulously built fake.

alison.gillmor@freepress.mb.ca