Abstract
How does social critique work in popular culture? The critical capacity of popular culture has both been categorically denied and emphatically affirmed. In the spirit of the pragmatic sociology of critique, this chapter makes no such assumptions but instead asks how social critique in popular culture actually works. To this end, we analyse Beyoncé Knowles’ Formation (2016). We argue that the success of social critique in popular culture depends on whether it adheres to specific rules of legitimate representation. According to our analysis, legitimate representation requires a dialectic of both distinction and identification between the critic and the victims of the denounced injustice. We illustrate how Formation invests in this dialectic by means of various manoeuvres and systematic switching between different orders of worth. In doing so, Formation cautiously pre-empts potential counter-critiques—which ultimately limits its critical capacity.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
- 2.
Mario Woods was fatally shot by police officers in 2015. The sign was handed to the dancers by two organisers of BLM, who also made and circulated a video of the scene. BLM is a social justice movement that took off after the acquittal of a neighbourhood watch volunteer who lethally shot teenager Trayvon Martin in 2012 (Ransby 2018, 29–46).
- 3.
This critique has as an approving and a disapproving version as well. For example, the former states that “Beyoncé has rewritten [the Super Bowl] as a moment of political ascent” (Caramanica et al. 2016, see also Ellen 2016), whereas the latter ascertains that “the performance didn’t feel purely like an act of subversion” (Battan 2016), that it is “Beyoncé’s bid to be an artist without losing her commercial appeal” by which “politics quickly becomes a mere signifier in the show, instead of a point of interest or debate” (Als 2016), and even that “Beyoncé waited until black politics was so undeniably commercial that she could make a market out of it” (Guo 2016; see also hooks 2016).
- 4.
With this example, we assume that the rules of legitimate social critique, as investigated in this chapter, not only apply to pop culture in the narrow sense—as a subdivision of the sphere of the arts—but to other cultural productions as well (in this case: advertising). We thus follow Urs Stäheli (2003), who, using Luhmannian concepts, defines popular culture in a wider sense, that is, as a specific mode of communication that appears in many spheres of society.
- 5.
Regarding the legitimacy of Beyoncé’sFormation as a social critique, we thus rely on the judgement of her audience, who deem it legitimate. However, note that other scholars have assessed Beyoncé’slegitimacy as a social critic by examining her self-representation, intentions, and former actions. For an overview, albeit primarily concerning Beyoncé’s representation of (black) feminist causes, see Djavadzadeh (2017).
- 6.
Our sequential analysis follows the methodological paradigm of objective hermeneutics by Ulrich Oevermann (for an English introduction, see Maiwald 2005 and Wernet 2014). Note that, for clarity, this chapter does not strictly reproduce the sequences of our empirical analysis, which was conducted according to the music video’s temporal order (see Table 3.1 in the Appendix). While the temporal order is still mirrored in the text, some of the arguments are organised alongside substantial results.
- 7.
- 8.
- 9.
While we focus on the analysis of the music video itself, the model could also be used to complementarily analyse different receptions of the song, which we touch on only briefly.
- 10.
For a chronological overview of Formation’s critiques, justifications, and pre-emptions of counter-critique, see Table 3.1 in the Appendix.
- 11.
For an English summary, see Boltanski (2012, 207–219).
- 12.
As Napier et al. (2006, 58) describe this coupling pointedly: “The predominant media images in the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina […] depict a social rather than a natural disaster; thousands of poor, mainly Black citizens were left homeless by the storm and stranded for days before receiving food, water, or transportation. The catastrophic hurricane and the unprecedented response failure made headlines across the globe.”
- 13.
Note that not all visuals refer to discrimination. As discussed below, lots of them include proud and joyful demonstrations of African American culture as well (e.g. church service, hair salons).
- 14.
This even holds for the omnipresent term “slay”, which is repeated twenty-nine times throughout the song. Even though the word would, in its original meaning (i.e. “to kill”), allow to express a call to arms (especially when used in the plural future tense), it is mainly used to speak to Beyoncé’ssuccess (i.e. “killing it”). Indeed, the singer seems to have influenced the current meaning of the word, which reads rather unspecific. As she addressed the crowd at the premiere of her Formation tour before playing Formation: “If you came to slay tonight say ‘I slay’,” Beyoncé began. “If you slay every day say ‘I slay’. If you came to have a good time say ‘I slay.’ If you’re proud of where you come from say ‘I slay’. Are y’all gonna celebrate with me tonight? Say ‘I slay’” (Bartleet 2016).
- 15.
Systemic discrimination of African Americans is not addressed in the lyrics sung by Beyoncé but referenced by other speakers, such as Messy Mya. Yet, as we will show below, the lyrics sung by Beyoncé are not totally devoid of critical content per se since they indirectly address gender issues (in the form of accounts of empowerment, see also Emerson 2002, 129).
- 16.
Note that this argument could not be made if Beyoncé’s status were justified in reference to her talent as an artist. And indeed, references to her worth in terms of the world of inspiration are completely lacking on the lyrical level.
- 17.
That the audience will not accept false equivalences or naïveté concerning suffering became also evident in the issue around the Pepsi commercial. Immediately after the commercial was released, Martin Luther King’s daughter Bernice King posted a photo of her father being pushed by police and commented mockingly on Twitter: “If only Daddy would have known about the power of #Pepsi.”
- 18.
As Alcoff (1991, 22) puts it: “If I speak only for myself it may appear that I am immune from criticism because I am not making any claims that describe others or prescribe actions. If I am only speaking for myself I have no responsibility for being true to your experience or needs”.
- 19.
Note that implicating its own frame (e.g. displaying a flickering screen or the play-mode) is also an artistic means that allows a work of art to highlight, and play with, the difference between fiction and reality (Luhmann 2000, 101).
- 20.
It is only in the context of Formation that Messy Mya appears to be addressing the collective cause. In his original video, the citation refers to a personal quarrel at a stand-up show (Mya 2010).
- 21.
Note that capitalising on others’ greatness is a common manoeuvre in public denunciations. While in the Le Monde study, it is used to achieve official status, Beyoncé uses this strategy to anchor “her identity to a specific spatial location” and to achieve “hip hop authenticity and street credibility” (Durham 2012, 42).
- 22.
Of course, importing cultural material tends to be problematic on both the normative and the legal fronts—and indeed, since publishing Formation, Beyoncé faced multiple lawsuits claiming copyright infringement. However, note that Formation’s citations are widely regarded as legitimate on a normative level. Fan comments critique the fact that the material was not paid for, not that it was used.
- 23.
According to Morgan Jouvenet (2006, 77, 197–200), demonstrating that rappers ‘stay the same’ despite their success is a typical artistic resource as well as a market strategy to maintain their ‘authenticity’.
References
Adorno, Theodor. 1975, Autumn. Culture Industry Reconsidered. Trans. Anson G. Rabinbach. New German Critique 6: 12–19.
———. 2005. Television as Ideology. In Critical Models. Interventions and Catchwords, Trans. Henry W. Pickford, 59–70. New York: Columbia University Press.
Alcoff, Linda. 1991–92. The Problem of Speaking for Others. Cultural Critique 20 (Winter): 5–32.
Bakhtin, Mikhail M. 1984. Rabelais and His World, Trans. Hélène Iswolsky. Bloomington: Indiana University Press.
Boltanski, Luc. 2012. Love and Justice as Competences. Three Essays on the Sociology of Action, Trans. Catherine Porter. Cambridge: Polity Press.
———. 2013. On Critique: A Sociology of Emancipation, Trans. Gregory Elliott. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Boltanski, Luc, and Laurent Thévenot. 2000. The Reality of Moral Expectations: A Sociology of Situated Judgment. Philosophical Explorations 3 (3): 208–231.
———. 2006. On Justification. Economies of Worth, Trans. Catherine Porter. Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Boltanski, Luc, Yann Darré, and Marie-Ange Schiltz. 1984. La dénonciation. In Actes de la recherche en sciences sociales 51: 3–40.
Djavadzadeh, Keivan. Autumn 2017. The Beyoncé Wars: le Black feminism, Beyoncé et le féminisme hip-hop. Le Temps des Médias 29 (2): 159–176.
Dovi, Suzanne. 2002. Preferable Descriptive Representatives: Will Just Any Woman, Black, or Latino Do? The American Political Science Review 96 (4): 729–743.
Durham, Aisha. 2012. “Check On it.” Beyoncé, Southern Booty, and Black Femininities in Music Video. Feminist Media Studies 12 (1): 35–49.
Emerson, Rana A. 2002. “Where My Girls At?”: Negotiating Black Womanhood in Music Videos. Gender and Society 16 (1): 115–135.
Fiske, John. 1989. Understanding Popular Culture. London and New York: Routledge.
Heintz, Bettina. 2010. Numerische Differenz. Überlegungen zu einer Soziologie der (qualitativen) Vergleichs. Zeitschrift für Soziologie 39 (3): 162–181.
Jouvenet, Morgan. 2006. Rap, techno, électro. Le musicien entre travail artistique et critique sociale. Paris: Maison des Sciences de l’Homme.
Luhmann, Niklas. 2000. Art as a Social System, Trans. Eva M. Knodt. Stanford: Stanford University Press.
Maiwald, Kai-Olaf. 2005. Competence and Praxis: Sequential Analysis in German Sociology. Forum: Qualitative Social Research 6 (3). Art. 31.
Mansbridge, Jane. August 1999. Should Blacks Represent Blacks and Women Represent Woman? A Contingent ‘Yes’. The Journal of Politics 61 (3): 628–657.
Napier, Jamie L., Anesu N. Mandisodza, Susan M. Andersen, and John T. Jost. 2006. System Justification in Responding to the Poor and Displaced in the Aftermath of Hurricane Katrina. Analyses of Social Issues and Public Policy 6 (1): 57–73.
Pitkin, Hanna Fenichel. 1967. The Concept of Representation. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Ransby, Barbara. 2018. Making All Black Lives Matter. Reimagining Freedom in the Twenty-First Century. Oakland: University of California Press.
Stäheli, Urs. 2003. The Popular in the Political System. Cultural Studies 17 (2): 275–299.
Wernet, Andreas. 2014. Hermeneutics and Objective Hermeneutics. In The Sage Handbook of Qualitative Data Analysis, ed. Uwe Flick, 234–246. London: Sage Publications.
Media
Als, Hilton. 2016. Beywatch. Beyoncé’s Reformation. New Yorker, May 30. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2016/05/30/beyonces-lemonade.
Bartleet, Larry. 2016. 7 Ways Beyoncé Nailed The Opening Night of Her Formation Tour. NME, April 28. https://www.nme.com/blogs/nme-blogs/7-ways-beyonc-nailed-the-opening-night-of-her-formation-tour-8867.
Battan, Carrie. 2016. Beyoncé Sacks the Super Bowl Halftime Show. New Yorker, February 8. https://www.newyorker.com/culture/cultural-comment/beyonce-sacks-the-super-bowl-halftime-show.
Bogost, Ian. 2017. Pepsi’s New Ad Is a Total Success. Atlantic, April 5. https://www.theatlantic.com/technology/archive/2017/04/pepsi-ad-success/522021/.
Caramanica, Jon, Wesley Morris, and Jenna Wortham. 2016. Beyoncé in ‘Formation’: Entertainer, Activist, Both? New York Times, February 6. https://www.nytimes.com/2016/02/07/arts/music/beyonce-formation-super-bowl-video.html.
Ellen, Barbara. 2016. Beyoncé: The Superstar Who Brought Black Power to the Super Bowl. Guardian, February 14. https://www.theguardian.com/music/2016/feb/14/beyonce-profile-black-power-super-bowl-civil-rights
Fallon, Kevin. 2016. Beyonce’s ‘Formation’: A Fiery Black Power Anthem and Call to Arms. Daily Beast, February 6. https://www.thedailybeast.com/beyonces-formation-a-fiery-black-power-anthem-and-call-to-arms.
Friedman, Nathaniel. 2017. A Pepsi Commercial’s Lesson for Advertisers. New York Times, April 6. https://www.nytimes.com/2017/04/06/opinion/a-pepsi-commercials-lesson-for-advertisers.html.
Guo, Jeff. 2016. The Strange Contradiction in Beyonce’s New Song ‘Formation’. Independent, February 10. https://www.independent.co.uk/arts-entertainment/music/beyonce-formation-video-song-super-bowl-a6864551.html.
Holpuch, Amanda. 2016. Rudy Giuliani: I’ve Saved More Black Lives Than Beyoncé. Guardian, August 20. https://www.theguardian.com/us-news/2016/aug/30/rudy-giuliani-beyonce-black-lives-vmas.
hooks, bell. 2016. Moving Beyond Pain. bell hooks Institute, May 9. http://www.bellhooksinstitute.com/blog/2016/5/9/moving-beyond-pain.
Kornhaber, Spencer. 2016. Beyoncé’s Radical Halftime Statement. Guardian, February 8. https://www.theatlantic.com/entertainment/archive/2016/02/halftime-coldplay-beyonce-bruno-mars-formation/460404/.
Lahren, Tomi. 2016. Beyonce and the Black Panthers. The Blaze, February 11. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p2O5MGpfKTc.
Moore, Suzanne. 2016. Black Pride at the Super Bowl? Beyoncé Embodies a New Political Moment. Guardian, February 8. https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/feb/08/black-pride-beyonce-super-bowl-50.
Mya, Messy. 2010. Booking The Hoes From New Wildin. YouTube. August 20. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=daKqgdcypTE.
Links
Beyoncé. Formation. Accessed 8 Feb 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=WDZJPJV__bQ.
Genius. Formation. Beyoncé. Accessed 3 Mar 2016. https://genius.com/Beyonce-formation-lyrics.
NFL. Beyoncé & Bruno Mars Crash the Pepsi Super Bowl 50 Halftime Show | NFL. Accessed 8 Feb 2016. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SDPITj1wlkg&t=3s.
RIAA. PAL Standards. Accessed 13 Oct 2017. https://www.riaa.com/resources-learning/pal-standards/.
Acknowledgements
The authors thank Anna Sommer and Daniel Künzler for their expertise in African and African American culture, the editors for their thorough reviews, and Pranathi Diwakar and Ewgenia Baraboj for their diligent copyediting.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Corresponding author
Editor information
Editors and Affiliations
Appendix
Appendix
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2020 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Waibel, D., Schäfer, R. (2020). A Star Down-to-Earth: On Social Critique in Popular Culture. In: Glauser, A., Holder, P., Mazzurana, T., Moeschler, O., Rolle, V., Schultheis, F. (eds) The Sociology of Arts and Markets. Sociology of the Arts. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39013-6_3
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-39013-6_3
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-030-39012-9
Online ISBN: 978-3-030-39013-6
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)