| |
Celeb News: Huffington Post drags Beyoncé
Member Since: 8/11/2012
Posts: 5,375
|
Huffington Post drags Beyoncé
Quote:
Nobody is perfect, but Beyonce's next public move was a bad one. She lost the feminist game she was playing in one fell swoop.
Beyonce and her husband, Jay-Z, performed their duet Drunk in Love at the Grammys on Sunday. When Beyonce released her new album in December last year, the song came under fire for Jay-Z's lyric "I'm Ike Turner, turn up/Baby know I don't play/Now eat the cake, Anna Mae", a reference to a moment of domestic abuse displayed in the Tina Turner biopic What's Love Got To Do With It when Ike forced Tina (who was born Anna Mae) to eat cake by shoving it into her face, and proceeded to assault an employee who tried to help her.
In an unprecedented feminist move, Bang, a London-based radio station removed the lyric from the song before playing it, stating that the lyrics:
imitate a scene of severe domestic violence... displaying promotion of domestic violence against women. In this light Bang [refuses] to play the song lyrics from henceforth on our station.
I foolishly assumed, then, that in their performance at the Grammy Awards an all-repenting Jay-Z would have removed the offending lyric at his newly fiercely feminist wife's behest. He's an award winning rapper, after all; how hard could it possibly be for him to come up with three different verses that didn't reference a relationship that featured rape and brutal domestic violence?
Apparently, it would be really difficult. So difficult, in fact, that Jay-Z would proceed to rap the lyric onstage beside his wife to an audience of 28.5 million. And what's more? His wife, fresh from sampling the speech 'We Should All Be Feminists' by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, stood next to him. She beamed as the line approached. And then... She sang it with him.
Screw that. Screw the glamourisation of a marriage that required a wife to have corrective rhinoplasty to realign a nose beaten to a pulp over a period of years; of a wife who decided, in 1968, that suicide was her only refuge; of a husband so delusional that in his own memoirs, he stated, "Sure... There have been times when I punched her to the ground without thinking. But I have never beat her."
Beyonce: when you smile affectionately and sing along with that lyric, you are propagating a cycle of humiliation, of rape, of violence that is still horrifically real for women all over the world. The fact that Tina Turner broke the cycle by no means makes it acceptable for you to try to make her situation a sexy one.
Know why? Because just like Tina, to this day, 85% of raped women know their attackers. Because, although Tina reportedly narrowly avoided death, on average two women a week are still murdered by their partners. Because domestic abuse is an enormous societal problem.
And already, your huge influence has further normalised this; already, on Twitter, your fans are 'lol'ing at the lyric. The saddest part about this is that they know what it means. They're tweeting things like, "Eat the cake anna mae?" ... jay z is clearly beating on that hoe." About you. And they think it's funny. They're putting up giggly emoticons. They're saying it is #Boss. It is not #Boss. It is violence against women.
Your body confidence, your empowerment, is admirable, and really does have a place in the beautiful, evolving feminist fight that we find ourselves in. However, it is not about picking and choosing your moments; not at this level. Trivialising domestic violence, standing by your man whilst he makes Anna Mae's cake sound like something you want to eat, is not OK.
|
full article: http://www.huffingtonpost.co.uk/elli...b_4676557.html
|
|
|
|
Member Since: 11/23/2011
Posts: 46,048
|
|
|
|
|
Member Since: 8/31/2012
Posts: 13,110
|
|
|
|
|
Member Since: 8/22/2011
Posts: 18,944
|
|
|
|
|
Member Since: 8/18/2013
Posts: 3,164
|
|
|
|
|
Member Since: 3/21/2012
Posts: 55,134
|
ouch  i liked her perfomance a lot. she doesnt care anymore so the press shoudnt either ...
|
|
|
|
Member Since: 8/19/2013
Posts: 2,069
|
at least it's not about her outfit choices
|
|
|
|
Member Since: 8/28/2012
Posts: 34,863
|
|
|
|
|
Member Since: 8/19/2013
Posts: 7,152
|
The people that ran in here 
-
I really dont get the anna mae part, it taints the song completely unnecessary
|
|
|
|
Member Since: 11/8/2011
Posts: 3,529
|
Not gonna lie, that line Jay-Z uses always creeps me out. It's just weird.
|
|
|
|
Member Since: 1/2/2014
Posts: 1,906
|
oh please....at this point everyone knows the song is about enjoying sex and being sexual during marriage....anything else after that is desperate reaching trying to use the Bey's name for headlines. Goodbye.
|
|
|
|
Member Since: 8/22/2009
Posts: 50,646
|
Quote:
|
standing by your man whilst he makes Anna Mae's cake sound like something you want to eat, is not OK.
|
Oh she gets it at the end of her article? He was referencing rimming, not domestic abuse.
|
|
|
|
Member Since: 8/25/2012
Posts: 30,317
|
It's not really a drag, it's merely the truth. It's gross and she should have known better and really... I cringed when she sang along with him. Big no, no.
|
|
|
|
Member Since: 1/1/2014
Posts: 2,656
|
|
|
|
|
Member Since: 8/17/2013
Posts: 15,907
|
LASH HA
|
|
|
|
Member Since: 4/25/2011
Posts: 7,482
|
I didn't know what that line was about until someone posted about it on here and now I'm just...
|
|
|
|
Member Since: 6/4/2010
Posts: 38,919
|
People still going on about this cake when it was just an exaggerated scene for the movie only and never actually happened in Tina's real life.
|
|
|
|
Member Since: 7/16/2010
Posts: 43,593
|
Even more free promo for the album of 2013 BEYONCÉ 
|
|
|
|
Member Since: 8/23/2010
Posts: 16,089
|
Jay Z is talking about sex, nothing else. But they can keep trying. Not only that put that "Eat the cake" scene never happened in Tina's life, she and her hubby said that when the movie was released, hence why hip hop artist have been using it a lot in their songs. This same issue has been rehashed over and over again since the album got out, they have been going all out on this since the XO's "controversy" didn't stick.
|
|
|
|
ATRL Contributor
Member Since: 8/19/2013
Posts: 18,655
|
I get what they're saying but at the same time it's like, the line isn't used in that context, there are plenty of songs whose lyrics are extremely far more worse than that one line, and on top of it all, if he would have replaced the line then he would have been ridiculed even more than he already is for it so quite frankly at the end of the day, no one is going to be happy so just deal with it and move on. 
|
|
|
|
|
|
