They are not the first, however, to draw from Western art and art history or to use recognizable art locations to make a statement about access and power. Courtesy: the artistsīy packaging and selling their version of blackness, black bodies, and black culture, the Carters have asserted their right (and, by extension, the right of all black people) to do so while at the same time exploiting to their advantage the very culture that has, for so long, excluded people like them. Perhaps most important and timely is that ‘Apeshit’ is a video that begs contemplation in the context of recent incidents (the case in April of two black men arrested at a Philadelphia Starbucks for ‘trespassing’ while waiting for a business meeting comes to mind) in which the presence of black bodies in public spaces has raised paranoid fears among some white people about dark bodies and their claim to those spaces.īeyoncé and Jay-Z, ‘Apeshit’, 2018, film still. It’s about arrival and survival through declaration of one’s hard-earned position in society. It is about establishing a new order in which black bodies seize and command cultural and physical spaces from which they have traditionally been excluded and are typically marginalized. To be sure, ‘Apeshit’ is all about bodies – an orchestrated contrast of energetically writhing and animated black physiques set against frozen white forms of the past. The video is an unapologetic visual and sonic manifesto about spaces, power, and control. ‘Apeshit’ is an arresting, and I would even go so far as to say brilliant video for what it does and does not do for what it reveals and conceals for the ways in which it meaningfully appropriates, exploits, and reinterprets Western paintings and sculptures as a way to chart and celebrate the Carters’s public and commercial success, and black bodies in an artistic canon inextricably linked to histories of colonialism. The video begins with fragments and close-ups of European paintings from the Louvre, a hallowed cultural space where masterpieces of European culture and civilization are housed, where imperial and colonial might through conquest and acquisition are put on grand display. For Beyoncé and her husband Jay-Z, the measured exploitation of these things through high art and popular culture is best witnessed in ‘Apeshit,’ a track and accompanying 6-minute video from their first joint album called Everything is Love. Celebration is therapeutic, too.Spanning the terrain from high art to popular culture and everything in-between, the complexity of race, gender, and culture continues to dog us. Yes “APESHIT” is a club-ready “banger” on which a wealthy couple celebrates their success and status, but it is also a celebration of enduring love, black love, and black excellence. When Jay chimes in with his homonyms, zoological references, and shots at the Grammys and the NFL, it’s not to steal the show, it’s to set the stage for her to show off her dexterity and hype up his wife. Rapping her verses and singing the chorus and pre-chorus with Quavo ad libbing, Bey’s delivery is flawless: “Poppin’, I’m poppin’/My bitches are poppin’/We go to the dealer and cop it all/Sippin’ my favorite alcohol/Got me so lit I need Tylenol/All of my people I free ’em all.” Whether she’s bragging about buying her man a jet or politely telling their detractors to “get off my dick”-over Pharrell’s high-energy 808 and synth production-she is always confident and authoritative, the one in control. “APESHIT” is credited to the Carters collectively, but it’s really Beyoncé’s song.
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