"...Epiphany isn't just a name that Black people give their daughters. It's a realization, and I just had one!"
-American Dad
I remember the exact moment I realized Beyonce was going to **** you bitches' lives up.
It was a rainy Saturday afternoon — I was in the 11th grade. I was sitting in the car in the K-Mart parking lot waiting for my mother to finish buying her "personals" for that time of the month. I was reading Beyonce's 2002 VIBE cover story about her upcoming solo career. She was talking about her soon-to-be-released solo debut, her musical inspirations, and her nervousness/excitement about this new chapter in her life. As I read it, I had the oddest feeling. I felt that Beyonce's stars were about to align in a wonderful way and I found myself unexpectedly excited about what she had planned.
8 months later, the week Dangerously In Love was to be released, I was away at summer camp with no TV. All I had was a clock radio and a very slow internet connection. This was a pre-YouTube world, so I told my brother to record all of Beyonce's appearances and performances and I would watch them when I got home. (He recorded 30 seconds of the "Crazy In Love" video, 2 hours of WWE wrestling, and told me to deal.) The day Dangerously in Love was released was also the day of the BET Awards and, as luck would have it, I found an empty recreation room with a cable TV. I turned to BET and sat through an hour of high quality Black entertainment before they announced Beyonce. I vividly remember Mo'Nique introducing her as "one of the best female entertainers". I felt that was a bit presumptuous, considering she had been a successful solo star for all of a month, but I felt that she was about to live up the hype. So the horns to "Crazy in Love" start and for the next four minutes, Beyonce pulled down her bloomers and ******* from one end of the BET Awards stage to the other. When the performance was over, and I didn't clap, I didn't scream. I simply did what I would do after every Beyonce performance for the next 8 years. I got up, turned the TV off, and walked away shaking my head saying "This bitch..."
About 3 weeks into camp our parents sent us care packages and money for laundry and snacks. The YT kids used their money to buy the Harry Potter book. The Black kids bought Dangerously In Love. That summer set the tone for Beyonce, the force of nature. From reading Beyonce's VIBE interview she seemed to understand the difference between being popular and being important. Popularity sometimes leads to importance, but popularity has an expiration date. It's one thing to sell albums, singles, and ring tones, but it's another thing to create a moment around yourself and stretch it out for 9 years. To create words, music, and images that become ingrained in the minds of the general public. To have people literally terrified of your very existence. That's what she was doing, and that's what she would continue to do. Truth be known, there was a gigantic void in the industry for someone like Beyonce. As I looked at music from the year I was born up until that point (1986 to DIL) Beyonce was what was missing. We had a lot of Black female vocalists, we had a Black female dancer, and quite a few Black female personalities, but we had no Black female entertainers. There was no female Prince, or Generation Y Tina Turner. There was no unhinged, un-pre-recorded, gutbucket, go-for-broke entertainer who could give a high energy physical show without shortchanging you on live vocals and musicianship. It was very obvious that Beyonce wanted to be an old-school entertainer yet at the same time she wanted to revolutionize Black female pop in the 21st century. She didn't want to be stuffed into the R&B box just because of her roots and her skin color. It was obvious she wanted to be an all-encompassing entertainer, a stadium-headlining worldwide musical force, and a pop cultural icon. I knew she would achieve her goal, and I knew that she would be severely punished for it.
Beyonce had 3 strikes against her. She was Black, she was a female, and she actually had talent. Perhaps if she were merely a Black pretty female that couldn't sing she would have attracted a stable of underdog-rooting/personality worshiping stans, and people wouldn't have picked on her so much. But she was who she was, and she would have to deal with the consequences. The sad truth was I remember hearing about a Beyonce-hate website long before I heard about a Beyonce fan website, and the hate was only going to get worse. All races reflect their insecurities onto their celebrity idols but Black people are the only race of people that are both self-hating and self-reflexive. We are raised with a distorted sense of what it means to be "Black", "real", and a "woman" so Black pop female icons for the past 50 years have had to live up to what some people believe a "Real Black Woman" is. Because of this, there is an unspoken threshold which dictates just how a Black female artist is supposed to express her music and her sexuality. There is an unspoken line drawn which limits how far a Black female artist is supposed to go — artistically and commercially. If you cross that line you're a sell-out, a ****, or, most recently, a Satanist. We booed Whitney for being "too pop" and we've been dragging Diana for over 40 years. The irony in our hatred lies in the fact that we criticized Whitney for singing "too white" yet praised some of her peers who didn't sing at all. We say we didn't like Diana because she was a bitch, but Aretha's diva antics were just as well-documented. Our disdain for our own icons has less to do with talent or attitude, but personality and ubiquity. It had nothing to do with how well they sung or how bitchy they were when clearly we were willing to overlook vocal deficiencies and bitchiness in other singers. The problem, quite frankly, was we just didn't like them. They were beautiful, talented, polished and perfected overachievers who had the audacity to step outside how Black female artists were supposed to look, sound, and promote themselves. They had the nerve to challenge notions about how far Blacks could go in music, film, and other facets of entertainment. They showed that Blacks can be just as commercially viable (if not more so) than their White counterparts. Their success elevated Black entertainment, yet the root of the hate directed at them originated in the Black community. Because of this, I knew Miss Knowles had her work cut out for her.
A Beyonce-sponsored slayfest was about to start and history told me that the basic bitches wouldn't be able to deal. I figured that Beyonce needed a strong internet fanbase to combat the strong internet haterbase. She needed fans who truly understood who she was as an artist and entertainer. She needed stans who understood the passion and the history behind what it was she was about to do. She needed fans who knew that she was more than just a number (Hey! Hey! Hey!). She needed stans who understood that her career was not going to be a game of checkers. In order to become legendary, every move you make has to serve a larger purpose; so Beyonce would need a group of fans who were open-minded enough to see the bigger picture. Even if they didn't understand a decision that she made, Beyonce's fans would have faith that anything that she decided to do would be for the integrity and longevity of her career. I set about looking for a group of like-minded Beyonce fans who would help spread the good word of Beysus. I assumed that because Beyonce was going to be better than the majority of her peers, then it stood to reason that Beyonce fans would be better than other fans. I assumed that Beyonce stans would be as sharply gifted as the woman they stanned for. I couldn't wait to interact with Beyonce stans. It's like when you see a good movie or read good book, you can't wait to discuss it with other people. I had that same kind of excitement. Yes, Beyonce stans were going to be intelligent, level-headed, objective, patient, logical, and most of all unconditionally supportive of their idol, and we would all live happily ever after.
Read the Rest Here:
http://wigcrypt.blogspot.com/2011/07/epiphany.html
