ATRL Contributor
Member Since: 9/3/2012
Posts: 29,405
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Quote:
Beyoncé is a success as a pop star but a failure as an artist, which makes the rabidity of her enormous fan base, the “BeyHive,” a bit saddening. Perhaps Beyoncé’s cultic following is a product of our time. Certainly, the fetishisation of the insubstantial takes many forms, Beyoncé-worship perhaps the most obvious. She is a pop star for people who refuse to think. Maybe that is why, when she reaches for profundity, she stumbles. “Halo,” which often closes out her shows, is cited as her greatest achievement. But, like her voice, it is thin, reedy and unsatisfying: a spectacle of pomp, signifying nothing.
It’s a song whose lyrics are about stripping down walls and showing the real person inside, but musically speaking it’s the most superficial and manipulative record she’s ever released. Everything Beyoncé does is predictable, but “Halo” is the most predictable, timorous, trashy anthem of the last two decades. Its climax serves up empty ineffability, like a bad Philip Larkin poem. It is, like so much of what Knowles-Carter does, trying too hard.
Real artists don’t have to tell you to bow down, and, when they speak, they bring something fresh. But when Beyoncé demeans herself with attempts to “do politics,” such as her terrible mini-essay on gender equality, which an Oberlin freshman would have been embarrassed by, it’s simply another way for her to scream: “Please love me.” Everyone wants to be loved, but Beyoncé scales new heights of desperation in demanding reverence while providing no emotional sustenance or intellectual nourishment to her subjects. If she were capable of humour, we might have written off her “FEMINIST” statement as a clever provocation. But she is probably the least funny, least cerebral star in the cosmos, so we can’t.
http://www.breitbart.com/Breitbart-L...t-like-Beyonce
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woah
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