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A Little Sweat Ain't Never Hurt Nobody
Beyoncé "Get Me Bodied" - There are many probable factors that can help to explain why Beyoncé Knowles is not widely recognized as being among the most brilliant and creative songwriters of her generation - her gender, age, race, genre, fame/success, the fact that her work is primarily collaborative - but it's unfair, condescending, and indicative of obnoxious ingrained preconceptions about songwriting. From the beginning of Destiny's Child on up through "Crazy In Love" and "Check On It," Knowles has racked up an impressive catalog of songs (many of them smash hits) that combine foward-thinking arrangements, fierce vocalization, and lyrics that frankly navigate the dynamics of heterosexual relationships in the context of late capitalism. A large number of her best songs sound like contract negotiations, and it's not meant to be ironic, it's just how many of us live now, and the remainder of her catalog tends to deal with the ways we suffer or thrive when we treat love and sex like deals to be brokered. Knowles' lyrics are especially fascinating given the fact that she's most definitely not coming from a leftist position, and so her ambivalent, occasionally highly contradictory or hypocritical stances on materialism, ambition, and feminism end up mirroring the conflicts of an enormous number of American women. Intentionally or not, Knowles' music portrays the personal effects of being a hard working, ambitious person in a culture with irrational priorities.
B-Day, her strongest and most thematically consistent album to date, finds Knowles at an inevitable low ebb, essentially the point when she realizes that living life according to a meticulous plan that looks great on paper is not exactly ideal in practice. If you read the record as a narrative, the arc is clear - she becomes serious with a man who matches her drive and high end taste (one of the few moments of emotional prosperity on B-Day comes in a duet with Jay-Z in which they offer to "upgrade" one another with expensive makeovers as part of their courtship, and though it's well-meaning and somewhat enthusiastic, the track seems cold and stiff as though the music is fully aware that this is more of a business transaction than an emotional exchange), but he eventually cheats on her and she has to spend the rest of the record attempting to stay strong and reconstruct her self-esteem in spite of intense doubt and resentment. We've seen this story before, but Knowles' execution is compelling. Her songs convey bitterness, paranoia, confusion, rage, vulnerability, ego, and desperation, often in subtle combinations that avoid simplistic broad strokes, even when the music is as bold and harsh as on the current single "Ring The Alarm."
In context, "Get Me Bodied" is the lull before the storm, the period of avoidance and denial before the bottom drops out. She goes out for a night of dancing, approaching the entire scenario with the calculation of a military strike, and seeks to get away from her problems on the dance floor while pleading "I wanna be myself tonight" as though she's asking herself for permission to cut loose. As the beats jump and pop, Beyoncé carries the minimal arrangement with her vocals, which shout, soar, swoop, and reach a peak in its final third that ranks among the most exciting sections of any song that I've heard in 2006. (Click here to buy it from Amazon.)
Elsewhere: My new Hit Refresh column is up on the ASAP site and it features selections from J Dilla, First Nation, and Jandek.
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