Beyoncé is the most prominent recording artist alive. Is she the best? That’s a question for another time. But she is the biggest, and there is no competition. She’s the last of her late 90s/early 2000s peers standing. Britney Spears retired after years of harrowing exploitation. NE-YO is recording leftovers from Dr. Luke, the producer infamous for being Kesha‘s alleged rapist. Jennifer Lopez is now a celebrity above all. Usher and Justin Timberlake have lost their luster due to controversies regarding lawsuits from fans/sexual partners (the former) and examinations of the queasy systems/actions that propelled them to fame (the latter). Others, like Christina Aguilera and Brandy, simply couldn’t keep up with the changing pop landscape. In a commencement speech, Chance the Rapper confidently proclaimed that Beyoncé had surpassed the late King of Pop, Michael Jackson.
For context, let’s recap the artist’s journey from Star Search contestant to Queen Bey: Beyoncé started performing in the hip-hop group Girl’s Tyme with childhood friends, which evolved into Destiny’s Child. Her solo albums under the management of her father were accessible, inoffensive, genuinely fun mixes of classic R&B (“Me, Myself and I”) and bouncy pop (“Sweet Dreams”), which allowed her to develop a wildly passionate and, at times, overzealous fanbase: the Beyhive. After splitting from her dadager, Beyoncé released the masterful 4. Still, it wasn’t until her next release that she made a statement with the surprise drop of her experimental, self-titled visual album. She shut out the press, and access to her became a prized rarity. Then came the Jay-Z cheating scandal, and with it Lemonade, a culture-shifting exploration of Southern black womanhood and rage following marital infidelity, and eventually forgiveness and renewed love and partnership with Everything is Love, released with her husband.
Lemonade featured the US Billboard Hot 100 top ten single “Formation,” a celebration of Beyoncé’s black and Creole heritage, which is fully displayed in the lyrics and video, which includes a call-out to police brutality. This marked a shift in the artist’s image and public perception, notably parodied in the Saturday Night Live sketch “The Day Beyoncé Turned Black.”
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Black pride and history have remained the most relevant focus of Beyoncé’s recording career and artistic statement, as seen by her most recent albums, Renaissance, and Cowboy Carter. The former was a reminder to audiences that house music and other (sub)genres in the dance music sphere originated in black (and queer) spaces. The latter challenged the perception that country is “white music” simply by existing, truth be told, but it also shone a light on the overlooked reality that instruments created by slaves helped birth country and that black musicians had as much of a role in shaping it as white ones.
Beyoncé Has Outlasted Her Competition to Become a Symbol of Black Feminism
Having said this, the truth is that the Beyoncé of 2024 is not just the biggest recording artist alive. She is beyond pop stardom, beyond being a (very lucrative) brand. She’s a symbol. In every superhero story, you have a character, be it the hero or the antagonist, deciding they can’t just be whoever they are; they need to MORE, they need to be something else, whether that is to strike fear in the heart of their enemies or to protect/terrorize their city.
Beyoncé has been like that for the past decade or so of her career, truly solidifying herself as a symbol with Renaissance. The superhero analogy works quite well because she DOES have a message and a mission statement anytime she puts out an album now, and her lovers and haters will happily throw the words “hero” and “villain” around to describe her. She’s a Rorschach test for personality, if you will. Whether you love her or hate her says more about you than it says about Beyoncé’s output or public persona; it might allow strangers to guess your political leanings or your views on marriage and feminism based on the face you make when the word “Beyoncé” is uttered. She symbolizes modern black womanhood, unabashed black pride, black power, and intersectional feminism. She’s made her mark, and black identity and history are the top priorities in her work now. She’ll never make herself entirely inaccessible to white folks; she’s still a commercial recording artist, there’s still money to be made from that demographic, and Grammy voters are still primarily white. However, she’ll never need to water parts of her identity down.
Mind you, the symbolism of Beyoncé can only exist because of how inaccessible she is. Her star wouldn’t be this massive if she hadn’t separated herself from the pack, shunned traditional promo, and made it look like it was for the commoners of the pop sphere. And who are they? Everyone save Beyoncé, at least that’s how it’s meant to be perceived. It added an aura of mystery around her, even when she was deeply vulnerable in her records. Because she is the last big pop megastar with consistent critical acclaim, her silence, the image that puts her on a pedestal and asks others to bow down, is accepted.
In “Irreplaceable,” she sings, “I can have another you in a minute.” Pop culture can’t have another Beyoncé in a minute, at least not now; nobody measures up now. And so merrily we roll in Bey’s world; hence, up there on that pedestal, she feels less and less like a popstar, a person, and more and more like an idea. Intangible. Above celebrity. No other star has it.
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This is the era of relatability; see: being “one of the people,” being everyone’s best friend, and being the internet’s boyfriend. You can’t be an idea if you let the normies in your house, if all you have to say eventually leads back to you and only you. The kind of parasocial relationship many have fostered with their audience is too reliant on their being one with the crowd and too critical to their commercial success; it is hard to believe they would be able to transcend it and take on a throne of symbolism that’s not entirely micromanageable. Being “one of us” means you’re willing to expose yourself to a lot and answer for your sins, real and imagined. Being a symbol, on the other hand, saves you a lot of trouble.
That’s not to say it makes Beyoncé safe from criticism, far from it. She’s always criticized left and right by both the left and the right. So many have something to say about her artistry, popularity, merits, and even her decision to stay with Jay-Z after he cheated, but some of those discussions don’t reach the mainstream, and if they do, they don’t make as much noise as they would for others. Take Taylor Swift: a billionaire with a record-breaking number of Album of the Year Grammys who is as big a star as she is infamously litigious that press outlets do their best not to upset her so as not to lose access to her. That didn’t stop multiple publications from heavily covering deeply unflattering stories that put into question her girl power cred. See: Swift working with film director David O. Russell, who openly admitted to groping his now estranged, transgender niece’s breasts “out of curiosity.” Or Swift staunchly standing by her one-time squeeze, The 1975 singer Matty Healy, even though he unabashedly revealed his passion for Ghetto Gaggers (among other things), a porn production company known for exploitative and abusive practices whose content aims to give viewers pleasure via the highly fetishistic, racially-based degradation of its underprivileged female performers.
On the other hand, Beyoncé’s association with shady individuals is swept under the rug. Her longtime professional partnership with producer Terius “The-Dream” Nash, who has been arrested at least three times for domestic disputes involving felony assault, strangulation, reckless endangerment, and child endangerment, is never examined to draw criticism on her feminist credentials. Nor are her various collaborations with Thomas Wesley “Diplo” Pentz, whose fetishistic tendencies towards women of color and questionable attitudes towards (mostly black) young women and girls were an open secret in the industry long before the likes of rapper Azealia Banks and influencer Shelly Auguste accused him of felonies such as grooming, rape, revenge porn, intimidation, and legal vexation.
Of course, when Beyoncé’s name gets dragged into somebody else’s mess, that doesn’t get traction either. Case in point, when Auguste first came forward with her allegations against Pentz in a lengthy Twitter thread, she shared a screenshot of another woman asking the producer if he gave her an STD. Pentz’s response amounted to saying he couldn’t have possibly done that because he slept with Beyoncé. Ain’t nobody ever dreaming to reach out to Beyoncé’s representatives, or God forbid, Mrs. Carter herself, to ask for verification of Pentz’s claim, her thoughts on his entire legal situation, or whether she would work with him again.
By transforming herself into an idea, a symbol, a media figure that exists beyond celebrity, an artist who plays a game above the unwritten rules of the industry, Beyoncé has made herself not only culturally, historically, and aesthetically significant in a way that no artist of her generation has, but she’s also made herself untouchable. That is by far her most incredible achievement. Will it last forever? Only time will tell.
