The eC C4 mya ean Edited by r ene Nias ttle) 4 aeLipRARY oF CONGRESS CATALOGUING-IN-PUBLICATION Data ‘Names: Trier-Bieniek, Adrienne M. Title: The Beyoncé effect : essays on sexuality, race and feminism / edited by Adrienae Trier-Bieniek. Description: Jefferson, North Carolina : McFarland & Company, 2016 | Includes bibliographical references and index. Identifiers: LCCN 2016022666 | ISBN 9780786499748 (softcover : acid free paper) © Subjects: LCSH: Beyoncé, 1981—Criticism and interpretation. | Sex in music. | Feminism and music. | Music and race. Classification: LCC ML.420.K675 B39 2016 | DDC 782.42164092—de23 LC record available at https://Iccn.loc.gov/2016022666 ISBN (print) 978-0-7864-9974-8 ISBN (ebook) 978-1-4766-2558-4 BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE © 2016 Adrienne Trier-Bieniek. All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, ‘without permission in writing from the publisher. Front cover: Beyoncé Knowles, 2011 (Photograph by Tony Duran, Parkwood Pictures Entertainment LLC) Printed in the United States of America McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640 www.mcfarlandpub.comI’m Not Myself Lately The Erosion of the Beyoncé Brand KrisTIN Liz Throughout most of Beyoncé’s career, her power has come from playing her own distinctive game. Beyoncé did Beyoncé, and it worked, In brand terms, Beyoncé was strong, meaningfully differentiated from competitors, resonant with diverse audiences, and, frankly, untouchable. This was a remarkable accomplishment in an industry where female pop stars are created and managed to be interchangeably “sexy,” short-term person-brands, not individualized or distinguished career artists (Lieb 2013). Up through the release of J Am ... Sasha Fierce, writers described Bey- oncé as polite but guarded during interviews (Petridis 2008), which kept her elegant diva/songstress brand intact and her audiences at arms length. It's possible that Beyoncé’s reputation as a classy, dignified R&B diva actually derived from all the things she didn’t say, and all of the things people pro- jected onto her from the little they actually knew about her. Beyoncé was regal, independent and elegant, an accomplished singer, dancer, and actor, whose entertainment credentials and charisma generated opportunities to perform for the Obamas numerous times. She performed Etta James’ “At Last” at the inaugural ball in 2009, the National Anthem at Barack Obame's second Presidential Inauguration in 2013, and then a 30- minute set for Michelle Obama’s 50th birthday party in 2014 (Samuels 2013; Daily Mail Reporter 2014; Saad 2014). Beyoncé didn’t worry about what con- temporaries were doing, because she didn't have to. Nobody could really compete with Beyoncé. But, as a person and a brand, which come together in the form of an integrated person-brand, Beyoncé has experienced three potentially identity- changing events in the past seven years: marrying Jay-Z, firing her father as manager, and birthing her first child, Blue Ivy Carter. Any one of these events 7s76 The Beyoncé Effect in isolation could represent an identity game-changer. But taken together, they have, at a minimum, disrupted Beyoncé's carefully cultivated commercial brand. As Beyoncé became “independent” in her personal life, marrying Jay- Zand establishing her own management company, Parkwood Entertainment, in 2008, and severing ties with her manager/father in 2011, her public persona and brand began to disintegrate (Knowles 2013). She spoke publicly about how these events empowered her, but in exchange for this stated empower- ment in her personal context, she sacrificed a considerable amount of professional coherence. Is she musical royalty (The Queen) or is she Bootyli- cious? Is she the Perfect Wife and Mother or is she a Smoking Hot Sex Machine? It’s as if her narratives are fighting with one another to establish dominance within her brand. Clearly, Beyoncé is trying to have her cake and eat it too. She has been called groundbreaking, a perfect example of feminism in our complicated modern times. But her powerful platform draws shamelessly on the safest and most conservative forms of pleasing men—playing the virgin figure, who evolves into the good mother as she ages, and the whore figure, who will do anything to please her powerful man, in part to show others that she deserves him. By walking the same impossible tightrope so many others have walked before her in order to cash in on the two most normative, lucrative, and ulti- mately disempowering ways of performing femininity publicly, Beyoncé is arguably playing it safe, not going revolutionary. Beyoncé’s male-gaze-ready performances may look a little different from her predecessors, but that’s a marketplace imperative. She needs to show audiences that she can reflect the cultural values and tastes of the moment, as other pop stars have before her. Madonna did it differently than Britney, who did it differently than Christina, who did it differently than Miley. But all had the same basic audience, and the same basic commercial interests in mind. All pursued the easiest and most effective methods to be validated, celebrated, and paid in contemporary US. culture as female performers. As Beyoncé began diverging from her classy, elegant, untouchable-in- a-good-way diva persona, and turning up her sex appeal and sexual focus on songs like “Partition” and “Cherry” she shrugged off the very meanings that made her distinctive. With Sasha Fierce, Beyoncé appeared to be executing a strategy of multivocality—or speaking to different target markets using dif- ferent voices or personas to broaden her appeal (Fournier, Solomon, and Englis 2008). But somewhere along the way, she began sacrificing her core brand values, and at this point Beyoncés expanded and incoherent brand meanings are at war with one another, resulting in a highly confused, and confusing, brand. Since 2013, Beyoncé has been blurring “Beyoncé the person” into and out of the Beyoncé brand with impunity. This is not advisable, unless there’sI'm Not Myself Lately (Lieb) 77 a sound strategy and sound boundaries embedded in the approach of expand- ing a brand’s meanings (e.g., you are trying to replace outdated or undesirable meanings with newer, better ones). Erratic boundary blurring between the person and the person brand can have catastrophic consequences. (When a brand gets confusing, people check out of it, and the brand loses followers and revenue.) Person brands should be personal, but not too personal. Person Brand and Celebrity Brands ~ In personifying brands, those engineering and positioning them must make them be likable; have a voice; exhibit diversity; be memorable; experi- ence conflict; and appear deviant, but not too deviant (Rindova, Pollock, and Hayward 2007). These tactics were initially suggested for businesses wanting to personify or celebratize their brands (even before the companies-are- people movement) but certainly apply directly to person brands, which func- tion as business empires unto themselves, Beyoncé and her legions of handlers have orchestrated these steps several times in her solo career, changing the specifics of her messaging and dress to reflect the cultural climate of the time (e.g. moving from glittery gowns and diva posturing to leotards, leather and hyper-sexualized routines), Other academics have focused more exclusively on person-brand development cycles, indicating that the person (here Bey- oncé): births a brand; inserts herself into the brand; becomes equal to the brand; becomes greater than the brand, and ultimately becomes less than the brand (Fournier and Herman 2006). In 2013, Beyoncé was larger than her brand, but two years later, Beyoncé is less than her brand, a slew of discon- nected hashtags and contradictory rhetorical moments that fail to sum to anything coherent or meaningful. She went for broke in 2013 playing every pop star game in the book—good girl, temptress, whore, diva, exotic, and provocateur, among others—simultaneously, presumably to garner mass appeal. Beyoncé capitalized on this approach in the short-term, but short- changed herself in the long term by trading away what made her special, dif- ferent, like no other pop star. In brand terms, and in terms of a long-term career view, this was reckless, not wise. Marital Brand Meanings and Related Brand Erosion As stated earlier, the beginning of Beyoncé’s brand experimentation was T Am .., Sasha Fierce in 2008. On this effort, Beyoncé split her brand into two distinct characters, her so-called real self, the timeless-but-potentially-78 The Beyoncé Effect boring married, straight, domesticated Beyoncé, and her emerging bad-girl, leotard-wearing persona, Sasha Fierce. It’s vital to note that Jay-Z—whom Beyoncé married six months before revealing her Sasha Fierce side—may have influenced Beyoncé’ transition into more bootylicious—a term created by Beyoncé that now resides in the Oxford English Dictionary—edgier ter- ritory. (In some ways, Beyoncé’s marriage enabled her to be more risqué with out consequence—as a married woman, her antics read as performances for Jay). As an entrepreneur, rapper, producer, and songwriter, Jay-Z is a powerful brand in his own right, embodying the myth of the American dream, with his rags-to-riches story of cocaine dealer-turned rapper-turned-Def Jam- label president (A&E Television Networks 2014; Jay Z on His Rags-to-Riches Story 2014). One documentary noted: “To some, the urban savvy rapper, known for his lyrics about crime and drinking pricey champagne, was an unlikely match for the R&B churchgoing southern girl” (Kennedy 2013). Beyoncé gained new brand meanings through her marriage to Jay-Z, in part for becoming a “wife? which carries heavy social connotations, and in part from marrying the crafty entertainment mogul whose victories include founding Rocawear and discovering Rihanna, Jay-Z provided Beyoncé with a dash of street credibility, while she provided him with associations of class and elegance. Together, they built a family brand—Bey-Z for the purposes of this essay—which many aspired to, admiring the couple’s good looks, prodigious power, and bottomless bank accounts. As Beyoncé became a cross- capitalized music industry entrepreneur herself—founding Parkwood Enter- tainment in the same year she married Jay-Z and revealed Sasha Fierce-—her brand began to encompass power and influence, autonomy, and entrepre- neurship. As her relationship with Jay-Z intensified, and her business empire expanded, her relationship with her father/ business manager disintegrated. This “break-up” resulted in new associations for the Beyoncé brand, making it more sympathetic, introducing meanings of vulnerability to it for the first time. Then, with the birth of Blue Ivy Carter in 2012, the Beyoncé brand acquired new associations—such as compassion and accessibility—related to motherhood. She also began migrating her brand toward her husband’s, in terms of dress, swagger, style, and performance. Complicated People Versus Complicated Brands From a personal psychological perspective, Beyoncé’s growing brand complexity may be a good thing. Living inside of cultural scripts is difficult for anyone, and exponentially more difficult for pop stars, who feel intense pressure to meet industry and audience expectations. The music industryT'm Not Myself Lately (Lieb) 79 guides stars to live inside of elaborately constructed narratives designed to sell culturally desirable stories. This often ends badly, especially for women of color, whose popular music scripts are even more restrictive and regulatory than those penned for white peers, sometimes with devastating consequences (e.g, Whitney Houston). The cultural scripts of the music industry are mostly written for white people by white people, with a single/monolithic white beauty ideal and standard of behavior in mind. As impossible as they are for white women to perform, they are even more difficult for women of color to enact convincingly because of the ways in which they're predicated on looking white (Lieb 2013). Overarching Brand Themes, Multivocality, and Meaning Management Some might speculate that since Sasha Fierce, Beyoncé has been delib- erately using different voices to connect more engagingly and convincingly with diverse audiences, Brands used to speak with unified voices, commu- nicating the same qualities in the same words consistently, to maximize brand awareness and brand strength while minimizing brand confusion. This worked with mass markets, but became less effective as a fragmented media landscape gave rise to niche marketing, which requited more nuanced com- munication, Multivocality works best when there is a dominant voice that runs throughout all conversations, what I call an “overarching brand theme” (Lieb 2013, 14). This theme remains consistent, but the communication of it varies by audience. The trick for professionals using multivocality as a strategy is to engineey brands that are open enough to encourage the audience's mean- ingful co-creation with them, but established enough to carry some essential, unassailable meanings that persist regardless of target market. Without an overarching brand theme, the brand doesn't really stand for anything-it has no meaning at its core, Without a center, brands speaking to audiences in different voices can confuse and confound audiences, especially if the voices and messages are interpreted as contradictory, or schizophrenic, as they ulti- mately become on Beyoncé, which will be discussed later in this essay. Multivocality (Fournier, Solomon, and Englis 2008) is so common many of us use it unwittingly, even in our personal communications. Most people use at least slightly different words, tones, and approaches when they address different groups of people (e.g., parents, kids, colleagues, romantic partners, strangers). The same is true with commercial brands, such as Beyoncé, with respect to cultural environments—she plays up different elements of her brand to reinforce certain meanings at certain points in time—and downplays others to move away from meanings that may not be as beneficial. For exam-