Beyonce: "If I Were a Boy / Single Ladies"

As if spurred on by the ruby-encrusted tanks and go-go Challenger disasters of her little sister’s “I Decided” video, Beyonce Knowles has returned with a video at once sedate, deeply conventional and utterly baffling, and its shade haunts all who view it. While Solange’s subversion of the video form was textually complex while being awesomely awesome, Beyonce’s efforts creep. This shit is dead-serious and deranged. Rather than broadcast the depth of the video’s strangeness right from the outset, like “I Decided”’s cherry-blasts of colors and time-warp outfits, “If I Were a Boy” comes on slow, clean close-ups and spoken word introduction and in soft black and white and in soft white clothes. The video’s two-ness is subtle, skirting along against itself, a skipping stone across the lake of the viewer’s attention: this vast titular hypothetical situation. What if? If Beyonce were a boy would her man cook her breakfast? Would her cop uniform still have darts? Would Jean Claude Van Damme still want to be her partner? The ostensible point is: no, but what the fuck is she talking about? Why would she want to be a boy? She’s Beyonce! She’s the exact opposite of a boy! We start wondering not only what it would be like if Beyonce were a boy, but why Beyonce is making us wonder what it would be like if Beyonce were a boy, and this is where things spiral out of control. It grows stranger still—ambitiously halting, B and puppy-dog bf stare at each other, literally saying “What?” to each other while the viewers say “What?” to themselves. Are they mirroring us? Are they teaching us about the gender struggle? In what manner? (Use specific examples from the text.)

I mean, I get it: I get that she’s saying boys act dumb. Maybe the point is just underwhelming compared to the ostentaciousness of its delivery. But then the video flips, if you’re watching it on TV, into “Single Ladies,” wherein Beyonce has a bionic arm and demands marriage, although not from Jay-Z because that narrative doesn’t fit, so ostensibly she’s now a stand-in for other single ladies, ones who aren’t married to cultural landmarks. Here all the perverse logic of the meditative “If I Were a Boy” video slaps about like thigh flesh, a gender clash meted out in pouty lips and leotards—although delivered with all the vehemence of someone that looks like Beyonce Knowles and is married to Jay-Z. That both tracks are plainly awful is rendered irrelevant in the face of these brain-melting videos. One is left wondering who hasn’t been left in the dust aesthetically, intellectually, athletically by the end of this double-header, who could possibly remain that she might empower. The answer is the sainted molecules vibrating in her wake, and nothing else at all.