Six critics on the visual album rooted in her \u201cLion King\u201d-inspired record \u201cThe Gift,\u201d a grand statement of African-diaspora pride and creative power.<\/b>
\nWhen Beyonc\u00e9 took a speaking role as Nala \u2014 the eventual queen \u2014 in the 2019 remake of \u201cThe Lion King,\u201d she decided to delve beyond Disney\u2019s Hollywood version of Africa. She added a new, gospel-charged song, \u201cSpirit,\u201d to the film\u2019s soundtrack, and gathered an international coalition, featuring up-and-coming African songwriters and producers, to join her on a full-length album, \u201cThe Lion King: The Gift.\u201d Now she has turned songs from the album into a film of her own, working with various directors as she did on her visual albums \u201cBeyonc\u00e9\u201d and \u201cLemonade.\u201d Here, critics for The New York Times discuss the imagery and implications of \u201cBlack Is King.\u201d Let\u2019s take a moment, shall we, to appreciate that beauty will make you tolerate anything, including waking up at the crack of dawn to behold it. Very little compares to the rising sun. Often not much tops Beyonc\u00e9 and the extremes sometimes required to experience her (canceling an evening, dropping everything, getting filthy at Coachella). \u201cBlack Is King\u201d is rather humane. You simply drag yourself from bed, head to Disney+, and the beauty begins. Well past the halfway point, Beyonc\u00e9 is just facing Kelly Rowland, serenading her, beaming at her. The sincerity is so intense, Rowland has to avert her eyes. She\u2019s girlishly overcome. The sunrise is too much. Not for me. Most of this film ripples with that kind of love \u2014 of people, of bodies, of the elements, of self, of stuff. (Someone involved really loved the death car from the great \u201cHoly Motors\u201d; a tricked-out homage rides here, too.) My usual qualm with the Beyonc\u00e9 visual experience applies to this one: The people who\u2019ve edited it don\u2019t allow us to savor a single shot for longer than a few seconds. It adheres to ancient music-video ideas of chaos, incoherence and looks. Steadiness was part of the thrill of her at Coachella. The stagecraft transfixed the cameras; the editing deferred to motion. What if the songs here were wedded to full-blown set pieces, in addition to kaleidoscopic exuberance? That, I suppose, would make the project a musical. And that\u2019s not what this wants to be. But I\u2019m greedy. When I see a handful of dancers and Beyonc\u00e9 awash in so much whiteness that all the other color comes from skin and flowers, I just want five minutes of that. Tableaux do exist here, minced as they are. (That brown-on-white passage is from \u201cNile.\u201d) The strongest come during \u201cMy Power,\u201d and \u201cMood 4 Eva.\u201d The latter finds itself on somebody\u2019s estate and features the Knowles-Carters a-floss and a-flex. There\u2019s a real Baz Luhrmann zaniness working here, from the synchronized, Esther Williams pool party (everybody side-dives in except our star) to the manic instant grins that Beyonc\u00e9, the movie\u2019s wee boy-prince and her mother, Tina Knowles-Lawson, flash. You could sense that those were good afternoons for everybody. It hits the spot. \u201cBeyonc\u00e9\u201d and \u201cLemonade\u201d were triple-impact shocks (new music, new images, new ideas). \u201cBlack Is King\u201d extends more than innovates. It\u2019s playing. Beauty is a reason this film exists. The interstitial language that Beyonc\u00e9 recites hails, just as it did in \u201cLemonade,\u201d in part, from the earthen poetry of Warsan Shire. \u201cWe were beauty before they knew what beauty was\u201d and \u201cyour skin is not only dark\u201d are two of the recital\u2019s most exhilarating lines. They offer the beauty of correction. They approach another of the film\u2019s strengths: rebuke \u2014 of, in its title and closing sequence, the gospel opportunism in Kanye West\u2019s film \u201cJesus Is King.\u201d And, perhaps, of \u201cThe Lion King.\u201d What else is this but a restoration of flesh and blood to cartoon landscapes? There are references to Julie Dash and David Hammons and appearances by the musician Moonchild Sanelly, the model Adut Akech and the dancehall star Shatta Wale: a motherland connection. Many a notable Black American has managed amazement in Africa: Malcolm X, James Brown and Muhammad Ali, Nina Simone, her ashes. Beyonc\u00e9\u2019s trip feels like a search for confirmation: a living myth roving terrain where myths were made. \u201cThe Lion King: The Gift,\u201d Beyonc\u00e9\u2019s companion album to the \u201cLion King\u201d soundtrack, was a grand statement of African-diaspora unity, pride and creative power. It presented modern African voices and contemporary African sounds \u2014 among the most kinetic productions in pop \u2014 not as exotic guests of their American collaborators, but as equals reinforcing each other, an international brotherhood and sisterhood. \u201cBlack Is King,\u201d Beyonc\u00e9\u2019s visual album built on that album\u2019s songs, goes even further. The deluxe version of \u201cThe Lion King: The Gift\u201d only slightly extends the original album; its major addition is two versions (one with marching band-style horns) of \u201cBlack Parade,\u201d a song that addresses current Black Lives Matter protests and much more. The deluxe version also, mercifully, eliminates the original album\u2019s snippets of \u201cLion King\u201d dialogue. There\u2019s still some \u201cLion King\u201d material in the \u201cBlack Is King\u201d visual album to detail some of its messages, along with bits of lectures that equate kingship with responsible manhood. Beyonc\u00e9 also recites Warsan Shire\u2019s poetry to insist on Africa\u2019s ancestral legacies and the glories of Black beauty. Other transitions use African traditional music from Smithsonian Folkways recordings, tacitly suggesting the continuity of old and new. And now and then, there are glimpses within the music, like a magnificent, purple-suited choir joining Beyonc\u00e9 to sing \u201cSpirit\u201d a cappella. Beyonc\u00e9 is unquestionably the star of \u201cBlack Is King.\u201d She\u2019s presented as a panoply of archetypes \u2014 mother, boss, clubgoer, biker, queen \u2014 with an apparently infinite wardrobe that draws on ancient African iconography alongside extravagant haute couture. She places herself in glorious open landscapes, a mansion, a gritty warehouse and a leopard-patterned Rolls-Royce. But she shares the screen with African and Black American faces: dancers, tribal elders, city hustlers, judges in wigs and robes, hoop-skirted debutantes and their beaus. And she willingly lets herself be upstaged by African collaborators whose faces her American fans may not yet have seen, like Busiswa from South Africa, Salatiel from Cameroon and Yemi Alade, Tekno and Mr Eazi from Nigeria. It puts her pan-African solidarity incontrovertibly onscreen. To describe the amount of fashion on display in \u201cBlack Is King\u201d as an \u201cextravaganza\u201d or a \u201cfeast\u201d or any of the other words used generally to convey exciting haute-runway content doesn\u2019t even begin to come close to the reality of the production. \u201cOverwhelming\u201d might be more like it. Beyonc\u00e9 contains multitudes when it comes to artistic collaboration, and when it comes to designers, too. They span the famous and the little-known, as well as the globe. An incomplete list of brands represented, for example, would include Valentino couture (cheetah-print bodysuit); Erdem (rose-festooned giant flounce tea dress); Burberry (cowhide cow print); Thierry Mugler (rainbow printed jersey draped minidress); Molly Goddard (explosive fuchsia tulle confection); and Marine Serre (moon-print bodysuit). Also newish names such as the London-based Michaela Stark (denim corset and puddling jeans), the Ivory Coast-based Loza Mal\u00e9ombho (graphic print gold-buttoned jacket) and the Tel Aviv-based Alon Livn\u00e9 (white crocheted gown). Also \u2014 well. You get the idea. There\u2019s not even one look per song; more like dozens. Especially when you include the dancers and special guests like Naomi Campbell and Adut Akech. I started taking notes and then gave up and just abandoned myself to the visual excess. It\u2019s dazzling, but also carefully calculated. Because what so much muchness means is that no single designer ever reaches critical mass; blink and you miss them as one more lavish creation strobes into the next. All of them exist to serve the vision of one woman; to elevate the imagery of Beyonc\u00e9, rather than their own. As a result you are left with fleeting impressions rather than the remembrance of any specific garment past: the tropes of majesty, Africa, the natural world, the power shoulder, and the goddess, stretching from the Nile to Versailles to Vegas. They tap into our aesthetic memory archive via jewel tones, billowing robes, drapes of diamant\u00e9 and pearls. Via taffeta, silk and tulle; fringe and cleavage and animal print. Via piles of accessories: rhinestone sunglasses and gleaming, wearable circles of life. Sorry, bangles and hoop earrings. It\u2019s a highly effective strategy in a world where artists tend to link up with a single brand to define and redefine their public styles (Ariana Grande and Versace; Elton John and Gucci), and one Beyonc\u00e9 has been honing over the last decade. She spreads her beneficence and beauty around, which has the effect of both reinforcing her position as the ultimate cultural tastemaker and rendering her subjects abjectly grateful for her patronage. It also serves to concentrate all the power in her own hands, making the garments into tools to reinforce her message. Or part of it, anyway. What the clothes in \u201cBlack Is King\u201d do not do, though, unlike the rest of the film, is reimagine or reclaim the narrative of fashion as written by Black designers; many of the brands involved are run by white creatives. Perhaps it\u2019s because the movie was made before George Floyd\u2019s death transformed the summer, but in her Instagram statement on the work, Beyonc\u00e9 has directly connected the film to the moment. Which makes the fashion credits, fabulous as they are, seem like the rare oversight on her part and that of her stylist and costume designer, Zerina Akers. Perhaps that\u2019s unfair; she does, after all, amalgamate them into a world of her own making. But while Black may be king, this project and all its trappings position its auteur, as the voice-over says in the film, as the \u201cdivine archetype.\u201d In that context, she raised the stakes herself. A little over an hour into \u201cBlack Is King,\u201d Beyonc\u00e9, with tears in her eyes, places a baby boy, wrapped in a blanket, up a river inside a reed basket. Unlike the m\u00e9lange of sounds \u2014 Afropop, dancehall, hip-hop, and soul \u2014 that I\u2019d heard up to this point, the accompanying ballad, \u201cOtherside\u201d was such a sonic break from the high-tempo energy that I paused the stream several times. I was moved by this scene of maternal sacrifice, for even though I knew the plot of \u201cThe Lion King,\u201d I found myself hoping that this baby would survive the currents of the rushing river. This is because that baby was never just a baby, and this story was never really simply the human version of Simba\u2019s journey into manhood, much less kingship. On the surface, this river bed scene is an update of that Old Testament story in which Jochebed, the mother of Moses, placed him in the Nile River to protect him from being killed. But, the waters here also invoke the Middle Passage, with each ripple break recalling the fateful journey in which New World slavery, and America itself, was born. Moses has always loomed large among African-Americans seeking freedom. It is why Harriet Tubman sang the spiritual \u201cGo Down, Moses\u201d as a code to identify herself to those enslaved people who wanted to go with her to the Promised Land. And while \u201cBlack Is King\u201d shares those 19th-century aspirations of equality and Black dignity, it, in our age of Black Lives Matter, knows it has to resort to mythmaking since racial justice remains as firm as the shifting sands that backdrop so much of this visual album. A few years before he sailed from Brooklyn for West Africa in 1923, the young African-American writer Langston Hughes penned \u201cThe Negro Speaks of Rivers,\u201d an 11-line poem that traverses the Euphrates, the Nile and the Mississippi River, and ends up in New Orleans. And Beyonc\u00e9 would one day feature that city in \u201cLemonade,\u201d her film from 2016. Much will be debated about whether \u201cBlack Is King\u201d is an African-American fantasy of Africa, or a homage to those contemporary artists from Nigeria, Ghana, South Africa, Cameroon and Mali with whom she collaborated, or whether the \u201cother side\u201d is the New World or a prodigal return of the descendants of the enslaved to the Old World. I saw her rivers, like Hughes\u2019s, as somewhere in between. Ancient. Dusky. But also decidedly modern, and fuchsia, teal and gold. An in-between space that is the hyphen, and the Diaspora, one that Black people have had to continually create as resistance, and community. As Beyonc\u00e9 says in one scene, \u201cThis is how we journey \u2014 far \u2014 and can still find something like home.\u201d It\u2019s been a long road for me and Beyonc\u00e9: We\u2019re now 20 years from the day I leeched \u201cBills, Bills, Bills\u201d from Napster. But this new film is the kitschiest thing she\u2019s done in a while, and in \u201cBlack Is King\u201d her evident passion for African art keeps getting drowned in an ocean of melodrama. Ms. Knowles-Carter, and even more her husband, often showcase contemporary art in their videos as markers of their cultural and economic clout, and in the sequence devoted to \u201cMood 4 Eva,\u201d a Jay-and-Bey duet with samples from the great Malian diva Oumou Sangar\u00e9, the walls of a hacienda are hung with a large portrait of Black models by the American artist Derrick Adams, and another in the manner of the British painter Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. I caught multiple direct quotations of the French fashion photographer Jean-Paul Goude \u2014 most overtly his cover art for Grace Jones\u2019s \u201cIsland Life,\u201d remade by multiple dancers here in the film\u2019s best sequence, for the gqom banger \u201cMy Power.\u201d Other sequences seem to channel (to be generous) or crib (to be less so) the work of contemporary African artists. The Ethiopian photographer A\u00efda Muluneh is a clear influence on several tableaux of African models posing in bright colors with painted faces. The film\u2019s recurrent character of a topless, green-painted dancer seems to be borrowed from the Nigerian artist Jelili Atiku, whose 2018 procession \u201cFestival of the Earth\u201d brought performers slicked with green to the streets of Sicily. The cinematography, throughout, is of a notably lower standard than the careful lensing of her self-titled visual album and, especially, \u201cLemonade.\u201d The beachfront posing in \u201cBigger,\u201d the opening number, feels uncannily like a perfume ad. Traditional African art, or imitations of it, gets screen time too. Backup dancers in \u201cFind Your Way Back\u201d sport kanaga masks topped with crossbars, worn by the Dogon people of Mali; \u201cJa Ara E\u201d features a spirit in a full-body raffia costume, familiar from Mende masquerades. And there\u2019s a knowing flash of a catalog of Yoruba masks and sculpture by Robert Farris Thompson, the influential historian of West African art. Late in \u201cBlack Is King\u201d comes a maudlin apotheosis: The Simba stand-in, sporting a leopard-print dinner jacket, arises to heaven inside Johannesburg\u2019s apartheid-era Ponte Tower. It\u2019s a sequence stripped of history, and confirms that we are nowhere near any contemporary African city; we are in a cartoon fairyland, still rooted in source material appropriate, per Disney, for children 6 years and older. At least, then, there is Beyonc\u00e9\u2019s endless string of citations, a rope ladder for those fans of hers ready to graduate into artistic adulthood. The choreographic feat of \u201cBlack Is King\u201d isn\u2019t in its flashes of dancing, exuberant as they are. Those fleeting infusions of footwork and swirling arms leave behind rich afterimages, but what drives this lavish visual spectacle is its rush of bodies and how the whole thing moves: from swift changes of scenery, which are frequent yet never frenzied, to boldly spare moments of stillness. One seemingly quiet moment that made me gasp? An overhead shot during \u201cBrown Skin Girl,\u201d in which dancers playing debutantes etch a diagonal line across the screen. The angle gives their voluminous ball gowns the look of tutus and turns their white gloves into wings as they slowly arch back. Opening their arms, they are transformed into beautiful Black swans. Later in the number, they return, reaching their gloved hands into the center of a circle. \u201cKeep dancing\/They can\u2019t control you,\u201d Beyonc\u00e9 sings. It\u2019s simply put, yet so empowering. In this celebration of the Black body, there is music worthy of a thousand dances (and, judging by the credits,11 choreographers). In \u201cAlready\u201d (performed by Beyonc\u00e9, Shatta Wale and Major Lazer), we see the body on a pedestal, with sculptural moments that range from emphatic to dreamy as women stand on wooden crates. Like Beyonc\u00e9, they wear unitards that make it seem as if their bodies are covered in scales; finding a hypnotic groove, they shift their weight from side to side with elbows as bent as their knees. They also pause in arresting, stationary balancing poses, whether kneeling or with a leg extended high to the side; when Beyonc\u00e9 bends backward, the others wrap around her body like a pile of tangled snakes. In another scene, dancers from the DWP Academy in Ghana perform a driving unison line dance with the intense, passionate Dancegod Lloyd front and center. It points to the mix of African and American that Beyonc\u00e9 seems intent on getting right. But she also looks at her own history. In the fantastic and fantastical \u201cMood 4 Eva,\u201d she and Jay-Z stand before a painting, just like they did in their video for \u201cApes**t,\u201d set at the Louvre; here, instead of the Mona Lisa it\u2019s a rendering of Beyonc\u00e9 in Madonna and Child. Within the song\u2019s scene is another clever twist: a Busby Berkeley-inspired synchronized swimming number led by Black bodies. In that underwater dance, they slip sideways into the water like jewels. Of course, Beyonc\u00e9 rises from the center \u2014 the most powerful body of all. Her dancing is luminous throughout \u201cBlack Is King.\u201d I love the contrast of how peaceful she remains as her hands perform a dazzling dance with one wrist flitting over the other in \u201cFind Your Way Back\u201d and how, seconds later, her body follows, bowing and rippling to the sweeping rhythm. In the majestic \u201cMy Power,\u201d she pushes with force yet not without freedom. She never holds back, but this time it\u2019s different: It\u2019s as if she\u2019s trying to move beyond her body, and that brings a line from Childish Gambino\u2019s bridge in \u201cMood\u201d to life. She dances with ancestors in her step.<\/p>\n