Why Do Girls Love Beyoncé?: How One Woman Commands The World
Hear ye! Hear ye! All hail the queen!
Queen Bey…we know that she’s talented, beautiful, and intelligent, but so are a number of other female entertainers. So why is the world so infatuated with Bey? I mean, I don’t deny that she’s amazing. I’m a proud member of the Beyhive and I’ll go to bat to defend her honor against anyone who dares to speak negatively about her, but why does it seem like Beyoncé can stop the world with a single command?
Well, as a Black woman I can tell you, Beyoncé makes me proud to be a Black woman unapologetically. She’s sweet like honey, but lightening in a bottle all at once. She’s humble, yet confident. She’s fierce, yet reserved. She’s beautiful, yet imperfect. She commands your attention whenever she enters a room or steps foot onto a stage. In fact, she doesn’t even need to make a sound for her to capture your attention. In 2014 Beyoncé dropped her self-titled album Beyoncé, without a hint of marketing and people purchased and streamed without hesitation. WHAT!? I had the whole album downloaded by 12:08 AM.
You know why Beyoncé is that alluring? Because she’s mysterious. She rarely gives interviews and her social media posts are very calculated; she follows no one and doesn’t respond…ever. This gives you an idea of the amount of power she possesses, a power that provides her with a remarkable amount of influence. The only other woman in modern day history that I can think of that has that kind of hold over the world is Oprah. I mean, if Oprah tells me to buy something, I willingly and wholeheartedly trust her opinion that it’s the most amazing thing ever. If Beyoncé tells me that I need to buy her album that she’s quietly dropped like a blessing upon the Earth, I’m buying it, no questions asked. TAKE THESE COINS SIS!
But Bey has also earned these coins and accolades. She’s one of the hardest working entertainers, period. In everything she does, she surpasses expectations. Beyoncé wasn’t just an album. It was a visual album complete with a video representation of every song. The amount of detail given to each visual was done to have you understand what each song portrayed through her perspective and left little room for interpretation. After all, she’s an artist and she’s sensitive about her shit right? She didn’t just give you a collection of songs, she gave you a art. Fast forward to the amazingness (yep, I'm making that a word) of Lemonade and I almost can’t even…
That album was made to celebrate Black women. To celebrate our culture, our collective beauty, our diversity, and our struggles. Black women have been making lemonade out of lemons since our inception upon this Earth. Bey understood that.
Now, people who are not Beyoncé fans don’t understand the unwavering adoration of the Beyhive. I can totally get that. I mean, her fans follow her in an almost cult-like, god-like fashion, worshiping her as she can do no wrong. And I agree that that’s a bit disturbing and weird. She’s human, not divine. But for Black women, it’s not necessarily that she’s just this amazing person, it’s what she represents that makes us love her.
Beyoncé is a Black woman. Let me say this again for the people in the back. BEYONCÉ IS A BLACK WOMAN! Throughout history, Black women have been placed at the bottom of the social barrel. Our ancestors were taught that we were and would never be good enough. We were the laborers, the mistresses, the breeders of slavery. We were the maids, the nannies, the seamstresses of Jim Crow. Even now we’re commonly seen as the welfare queens, the gold-diggers, or the side chicks. The politics of respectability taught us that we’ve always had to be smarter, faster, better than the rest to get a portion of respect. For far too long society has been telling us that our skin’s too dark, our hair’s too nappy, and that our bodies are a playground for politics, often hyper sexualized. And while I know that we have come a long way, that Black women have been changing the game for years from Katherine Johnson, Dorothy Vaughan, and Mary Jackson, the brave and brilliant leaders from NASA to the amazing actresses that play them, Taraji P. Hensen, Octavia Spencer, and Janelle Monáe, the fact remains that we still have a long way to go in how the world views us as enough.
None of us would be the women that we are if it wasn’t for the all of the Black women that have come before us, including Bey. Beyoncé encompasses everything that a Black woman is. We are not aspiring to be her, we are obsessively proud because she is us! She’s beautiful, intelligent, talented, humble, fierce, multifaceted, generous, chic, confident, a boss and a total baddie. What’s amazing is that the world recognizes that and praises her for it. Her name has become a verb and she has become the standard. To Beyoncé something is to be the absolute best at it, to tackle the hell out of a challenge and not break a sweat, to boss up on someone and act unbothered afterward because you know it better be and will be handled. Black girls love Beyoncé because she is a reflection of our best self. She gives her all in everything she does and she combats the images of the servant roles we once played on a global scale. The only thing Queen Bey is serving up is Black Girl Magic and we can’t get enough of her because of it.
Keep inspiring Bey!
XOXO - Mechelle