METAPHOR-PHOSIS
I barely need to mist any more praise over the fevered magnificence of Beyonce's Lemonade. After a while it all just becomes hot breath. Here's what we already know: It is an album universally applauded as a daring evisceration of an artist's own marital dysfunction, lauded as an inspired act of curation, designated a landmark for black women. It braids together celebrated British-Somali literature and the Voudou-infused gothic of the deep south. It is an album that floods ephemerally with cultural outrage and the fury of betrayal. But an album that ultimately, affectingly, locates it's strength in forgiveness.
It's genuine, ornate, stunning. And what makes the ideas contained in this album so devastatingly erudite is how one narrative casts a perfect and telling shadow of another...
Out of the Darkness
The shape of Lemonade is one of reassembly, a process that ends, rather than begins, with Formation. This process, as well as a tale of gravid personal geography, is one of cultural and political dislocation. About inhabiting a self borne out of, and in spite of, circumstance. The album's visual inclusions of Malcolm X's vehement words and the mothers of Mike Brown, Trayvon Martin and Eric Garner don't merely swirl in the same palette as Beyonce's personal rage. Just as the ethereal, venomous landscape of the deep south is not included incidentally but because they're what Ashley Ray-Harris—in an article from the AV Club—acutely describes as "the birthplace of black female pain." Cultural outrage traces the outline of personal outrage—jilted love and its requisite healing becomes something brutal and amniotic—a symbol for something larger than itself.
Human Chemistry
“Metaphor” has its roots sunk in the Greek pherein—“to carry,” and meta—“beyond”. And bad relationships do a lot of heavy lifting. They're rich and universally identifiable. And not necessarily always romantic. One of the most memorable relationships was penned by Mary Shelley in 1818 between an obsessed scientist and the hideous being he created out of scavenged body parts and mysterious chemicals. As much as the relationship between man and monster is ostensibly one defined by obsession and steeped in rich gothic horror, it casts a larger shadow—to which the subtitle to Shelley's original verson ('The Modern Prometheus') alludes. According to Greek mythology, Prometheus gave humans fire and suffered eternally for this kindness. The relationship between inventor and his creature tells a similar story about the risk of innovation, about the idea of dangerous knowledge. Frankenstein's monster is essentially tabla rasa—a blank slate, innocence embodied. Whereas Frankenstein himself personifies the ruthless pursuit of knowledge and the ultimately corrosive effect this obsession has on innocence.
And Shelley wasn't alone in her concern about the destructive nature of obsession. Herman Melville's classic Moby Dick also illustrates the obsession of Captain Ahab while hunting for the 'white whale' Moby Dick. But again, the relationship between man and mysterious beast is also said to represent the limits of human knowledge, that despite the storm of scientific innovation at the time, some things will remain unknowable.
Meet Me at the Crossroads after the World is Over
But the romantic relationship may still be the most powerful symbol of all, if only for its universality. It is ultimately relatable. We can imagine our way into these stories without even trying. It's why stories like Richard Yates' Revolutionary Road remain so powerful. Where Frank and April's mingling of suburban anesthesia and restless ambition captured the existential unravelling of an entire post-war generation. It's the story told at a crossroads—a kind of weighing of opinion that often features in dystopian fiction. Like in Aldous Huxley's Brave New World, where the characters of John and Lenina represent respectively the polar extremes of chaste 'past values' and 'future values' of pure, corrosive pleasure—each taken to their terminal conclusion. Bernard, the main protagonist in Huxley's hellish, chemically-propelled paradise is the unsettled collision of the two extremes. And just one of the terrifying examples of science fiction transforming before our eyes into science fact.
Hell Hath No Fury
Dystopian literature has a moralistic shadow to it's interpersonal metaphors. But never as strident as the symbolic relationships in mythology. And if the generational passage and translation of mythological texts hasn't altered their messages too radically then I'd be right in assuming that Zeus was a giant chariot-surfing, thunder-chucking dick. He was the one who punished Prometheus forever for giving the earth fire (see above). He was also known for his 'erotic escapades' which basically saw him fuck his way through the heavens and then through the female population of earth, which explains the infestation of demigod offspring in Greek mythology. Hera, Zeus' wife, was especially not cool with this and found exquisite ways to torture the humans Zeus continued to sleep with. There's almost no end to the shitty things Zeus did. But there was one Zeus x Hera moment that really represented the larger societal harm of infidelity. It was one particular infidelity with a mortal called Io, who Zeus actually began (allegedly) to develop some non-physiological feelings for. Hera swoops in, and Zeus quickly turns Io into a cow to quickly hide what he's been doing. Zeus casually kicks the dirt with his sandal and claims its a cow for sacrifice, and Hera twigs. So she takes the cow, and locks it up, planning to eat it, guarding it with Argus, her beloved giant who had one hundred eyes all over his body. So Zeus sends his son (his son!) Hermes to go get her back. Long story short, Argus is killed, Io runs as far away from Zeus as was possible (Egypt, at the time) and Hera is grief-stricken and still stuck with a deceptive, philandering megalomaniac for a husband. Noone, the greater lesson reads, wins.
Not so in Lemonade—there is infidelity, grief and ferocity but there's also forgiveness, transparency and celebration of the ungilded self. Beyonce isn't the only one who wins.
-Paul Cumming
Simile is a weekly series by Cool Accidents fave/regular Paul Cumming aka Wax Volcanic that unravels current moments in music and follows the threads to some strange and strangely familiar places.