The Pop Star and Her Audience

A mid-week take on the discourse surrounding Beyonce's new album 'Cowboy Carter'

Beyoncé’s Instagram

There’s been lots of chatter about Beyonce’s new album Cowboy Carter since she posted new images on Instagram earlier this week. Conversations only intensified when she posted another image, this time appearing nude, wrapped in a sash bearing the words "act ii Beyincé" (her mother’s French maiden name) across her body, while posing with long braids holding a lit cigar.

By evoking the imagery of The Statue of Liberty, a gift from France to the United States, Beyoncé conveys that she too is gift inscribed with her family name, from which her given name also originates.

This fusion of USA iconography with familial references has incited vastly different reactions across the Internet and the entertainment industry. Indeed, the interplay between Beyoncé and her audience, and how her art is received, offers much to dissect.

As someone deeply engaged in studying, teaching, and writing about popular culture, I’ll start by saying this: I love pop music.

Its ability to reflect social life, its role in shaping cultural and political discourse, the ways it blends sounds and lyrics and traditions, and pays homage to other performers, eras, and genres—I find it all fascinating.

I'm also drawn to cosplay for its playfulness as a form of performance art.

Thus, I approach this take with the perspective of both a critic and a fan, and with a sincere understanding of the performer's plight.

Beyoncé’s Instagram

---

The Tension

Pop stars, like Beyoncé, navigate a delicate tension between pleasing their audience and maintaining control over their image and artistry. They often avoid direct confrontation with their audience to prevent resenting them, which could harm their careers and what they love to do. This can sometimes lead to a perception of pandering and a fleeting, "flavor of the month" aesthetic. At the same time, however; audiences demand a great deal from pop stars, expecting them to embody social and cultural ideals while also being open to critique.

The pop star has to be everybody’s type (even Beyoncé herself knows this). To the fan, she’s the archetype. To the critic, she’s a site of inquiry. But she can also engage more directly with critique, if she so chooses.

The pop star, in other words, has agency.

Beyoncé possess this conundrum, often frustrating her audience in the process. She can feel like everything to everyone and nothing to anyone. Her meticulously managed public persona and curated expressions can leave audiences feeling uncertain about her intentions, especially amid her accumulating wealth in a world facing overwhelming challenges.

At the core of this dynamic is the issue of control – both in terms of the artist's desire to shape their image and the audience's influence over how that image is received and remembered. The pop star wants to control her audience because the audience sustains the discursive space where her persona and her art live. Her legacy also exists in this contentious place. I suspect Beyoncé is mindful of this tension.

Yet, there will always be a push and pull—call it a wretched dance—between the pop star and her audience. This dynamic between Beyoncé and the audience is especially complicated by her status as one of the most recognized Black women in the world. Her art is intertwined with history and politics, making it difficult for audiences to separate the artist from her work. She is often read as her art.

This might also be why the idea of separating the artist from the art becomes less and less convincing to a critical audience.

Photo bt Andrew White. May 2023.

The Dance

As an Aquarius, I understand the desire for control, particularly in performance. I’m also a teacher and an artist. I understand the performer’s desire to appease an audience that always expects something from her. But maintaining a boundary between performer and audience is also important.

Unlike the Aquarius-teacher-artist, however; the highly visible pop star confronts the unique challenge of her legacy perpetually being reshaped by audience reception.

That’s the rub for many pop stars: They find themselves ensnared by the audience, unable to escape the confines of the performance.

The audience also faces a conundrum in that they are constantly remaking a pop star that also mystifies them.

Both are trapped in a wretched dance of expectations.

Beyoncé’s Instagram

As consumers of popular culture, audiences must grapple with the extent to which Beyonce’s persona is enough. How do we engage with the persona and the art, and what’s the dealbreaker?

For me, I toggled between celebrating, accepting, and calling in Beyoncé public persona, along with her art. I know she loves her craft—and her symbols, but that’s all I know.

For now, that’ll have to be enough.

Postscript: Bey and Me

Silence becomes the currency of power by delineating the margins or what we perceive and through a sleight of hand wherein behaviors undertaken in the service of self-interest appear instead as inevitable and devoid of human agency, Achino-Loeb, 2006.

I’m a fan and a critic of Beyoncé in the tradition of Stuart Hall. I read her public persona and her art as cultural texts according to dominant, negotiated, and oppositional modes. Hall’s framework helps me make sense of how Beyoncé as an artist affirms, undermines, and out right rejects the status quo through her craft. Hall also keeps me in my discursive lane and away from psychoanalyzing a public figure I don’t know personally.

While I celebrate and engage with Beyoncé's public persona and art, I also recognize questions raised by skeptical audiences:

Why is Beyoncé so private?

Why is she robotic?

Whose interest is she serving?

Who is she really?

To that I can only respond: Who, in their right mind, would willingly expose themselves to a world that can destroy them?

Beyoncé and I are 1981 babies raised by momma bears and present fathers who coached us and cheered us on. Our fathers prepared us for the world while our mothers protected us from it. As a Black girl growing up in the 1980s and 1990s, the idea of privacy and control was informed by the rise of neoliberalism. Along the backdrop of prosperity slogans from crooked politicians, I also saw people close to me lose their jobs and die too soon. I was taught to keep the family’s business close and keep everyone else guessing. If shit ever hit the fan, people outside of my circle would never be the wiser.

I wonder if Beyoncé was taught the same.

Cosplaying Beyonce’s Homecoming performance for Halloween in 2019.

And like many Black girls in America, we learn very early tactics for asserting control in a society that often denies it to Black people around us. But there’s consequences.

We know we lose something when we dream rather than resist. We understand the risks of sharing too much of ourselves with a fickle world. So, we retreat to what we know best: our craft.

I’m eager to hear what Beyoncé does with this album, born from feelings of exclusion in an industry she has long dominated. I’m looking forward to seeing how she engages the fullness of critical performance beyond an elusive persona. I’ll be listening for how she merges forms and genres to tell stories people need to hear right now.

It’s a heavy lift, I know. But when the times call on artists—popular and obscure, it’s important we have something to say, especially those of us who’ve been taught to retreat to our craft when confronted with risk. And I don’t mean doing this to appease audiences or demystify critics, but rather to demonstrate that art, particularly in times of immense upheaval, amounts to more than the currency of our silence.

Here’s hoping Beyoncé rises to the occasion.

I’ll be sharing my review of Cowboy Carter soon, so please be sure to subscribe to my free newsletter United Takes of Tara and let me know your thoughts!

👉🏽taralconley.substack.com

---