Dissect - S6E4 - Sorry by Beyoncé

Episode Date: May 12, 2020

We continue our serialized analysis of Beyoncé’s Lemonade by dissecting its fourth chapter “Apathy,” which features the song “Sorry.” The inside of the Madewood Plantation big house in Louisiana becomes the backdrop for Beyoncé’s apathetic dismissal of her partner. A visual guide for this episode can be found at dissectpodcast.com. Follow us on social media @dissectpodcast. Learn more about your ad choices. Visit podcastchoices.com/adchoices

From Spotify Studios, this is Dissect, long-form musical analysis, broken into short, digestible episodes. I'm Cole Kushna. And I'm Titi Shodia. Today, we continue our serialized analysis of Lemonade by Beyonce. On our last episode, we dissected the chapter, Anger, which features the song, Don't Hurt Yourself. There we found Beyonce unleashing her rage, reclaiming her agency, and forcefully demanding the respect of her partner through a series of threats and ultimatums. Ultimately, we understood the destruction of Beyonce's rage to be the necessary flood that eventually leads to rebuilding, though it's currently unclear whether that rebuild will include our partner. With this in mind, we continue into the album's next chapter, the subject of our episode today, Apathy.

Apathy opens with an eerie music box rendition of Swan Lake by Russian composer Peter Tchaikovsky. Swan Lake is a classical ballet centered around the heroine Odette, a maiden cursed by an evil. sorcerer to take the form of a swan by day and a woman by night. The curse can only be broken when a man pledges his undying love to her. Only then will Odette and her fellow swan maidens become free. When Odette meets a prince and they fall in love, it looks as though the curse may finally be broken. However, the evil sorcerer once again intervenes by disguising his daughter Odil as Odette. Believing that Odil is Odette, the prince mistakenly falls in love with Odil. and announces his intention to marry her.

The real Odette, heartbroken at this betrayal, throws herself off a cliff. In a demonstration of his love, the prince jumps after her and falls to his death. It's in this moment that the curse is broken and her fellow maidens are freed. Odette and the prince are then reunited in heaven. Beyonce's plight and lemonade

resembles Odette's story of love and betrayal in Swan Lake. Both are tasked with breaking a curse, not only to free themselves, but a broader group of women. While Odette must break the curse that robbed her fellow maidens of their human form, Beyonce must break the curse of their lingering effects of slavery that result in the denigration of black women and their families. As Dr. Kira Gaunt explains in her piece, Beyonce's Lemonade is smashing, quote,

Odette must live as a swan beside an enchanted lake created from her mother's tears, and lemonade, the tears of Beyonce's black female ancestors, and only at night may she return to the human form. In the ballet, the princess can only be freed by a man who loves none but her. Beyoncé's film is her attempt at restoring black women to their human form, unquote. As the Swan Lake Suite plays, two rows of black women seated in a school bus sway back and forth. Their faces and bodies are covered in body art of Yurba influence,

calling back to Beyonce's embodiment of the Yerba Arisha Oshan and Denial. These painted white symbols are the work of Nigerian artist Laulu Shambanjo, who calls them the sacred art of the Ori. In Yorba religion, the Orii represents one's spiritual head, a force that guides one soul. The Orisha are the embodiment of the Ori. According to Shambonjo, when he paints his muses, quote, it's cathartic for both me and my muse. We connect our minds, bodies, and souls on a higher level. I paint their spirit and soul from that connection. It breathed life into both of us.

Shambonjo's muses skin becomes a canvas on which he conveys their innermost being. The life-giving power of his artwork is a powerful reassertion of agency and interiority for black women otherwise objectified by white patriarchal society. This is the first of many examples of taking back agency we'll see throughout this chapter. The bus setting also evokes the segregation. of the Jim Crow era, where African Americans were relegated to the back of city buses. We also think of the bus boycotts and freedom rides of the civil rights movement. Like Fort McComb in intuition, the interior of the bus carries connotations of both repression

and rebellion, of enslavement and the fight for freedom. As the women's sway inside the bus, Beyonce begins to recite a spoken word piece adapted from Warsaw Shire. So what are you going to say at my funeral? now that you've killed me. Here lies the body of the love of my life whose heart I broke without a gun to my head.

Here lies the mother of my children both living and dead. Beyonce sarcastically imagines her hypothetical death, likening her partner's infidelity to murder. Her question, What are you going to say at my funeral now that you've killed me,

intends to draw attention to the absurdity of his actions? For her partner to break her heart without a gun to his head, means that he freely chose to break his marriage vow. No one forced him to. That said, at this point in the visual album, Beyonce is processing her grief, and thus not ready to genuinely inquire about the true reasons for his betrayal. At this moment, it seems more important for her to reassert her own self in the face of her mistreatment. She continues saying, Here lies the mother of my children, both living and dead. This line can be interpreted two ways. first the phrase living and dead applies to Beyonce herself, the mother of his children.

In this way, Beyonce recognizes that while she might go on living after this betrayal, she suffers the death of her marriage, family, and the things that made life worth living. As such, she lives a living death. In the second reading, Beyonce may be referring to her children as living and dead. In the past, Beyonce has opened up about at least one miscarriage she had prior to the birth of her daughter, Blue Ivy. Jay-Z notably addresses the miscarriages they've had in his song 444, his most direct response to Lemonade. Jay-Z not only mourns the death of Beyonce's innocence but also the death of their unborns, but also the death of their unborn children. While we would hesitate to speculate on these highly personal health matters, it does appear that,

artistically speaking, the carters have chosen to represent the death of these stillborns as the result of his abandonment of their family. This reference to unborn children holds significance beyond Beyonce's personal narrative. In her piece, Pull the Sorrow from Between My Leger, Dr. Lakeisha Simmons analyzes lemonade as a reflection on reproductive loss. Simmons interprets the dancers on the bus as representing the dead and unborn. quote, the school bus is a portal holding a dead mother and her dead and unborn children. All of the sounds and images conjures those children, infants, and unborn who have gone before us. Indeed, this section of lemonade acts as if awake, pointing the viewer to the bodies and spirits of the dead.

Here lies the mother of my children, both living and dead. Rest in peace, my true love, who I took for granted, most of my children. bomb pussy, who because of me sleep evaded. Her shroud is loneliness. Her God was listening. Her heaven will be a love without betrayal. Ashes to ashes, dust to side chicks. Here, Beyonce is still taking on the voice of her husband speaking at her funeral, imagining the satisfaction of hearing him admit that he took her for granted and that she alone, is his one true love. She asserts that she has, quote, the most bombed pussy, further highlighting the absurdity of her partner seeking out sex beyond their relationship. By asserting herself in this

way, she also resists the role of victim. This line is an unexpected display of power in an otherwise somber poem. Beyonce continues, her shroud is loneliness. Her God was listening. As Beyonce says her God was listening, the camera cuts to another person on the bus who's isolated from the Yoraba painted dancers. This person wears a wide brim hat that obscures their face, making their gender ambiguous. It seems this person might represent a God who listens to Beyonce, silent but present in her suffering. This is one of what will be many glimpses of hope that Beyonce's situation could be redeemed. Beyonce ends the poem, quote, her heaven will be love without betrayal. Ashes to ashes, dust to side chicks.

Beyonce describes her heaven as a love without betrayal, hoping for this sort of love in the afterlife. At this moment, she does not believe that this sort of love is possible in her current life. The final line of the poem is an adaptation of the common Christian burial phrase, ashes to ashes, dust to dust, which means that as we come from ashes, so we will return when we die. However, Beyonce flips the phrase to read Ashes to Ashes, Dust to Side Chicks. By comparing her partner's side chicks to dust, Beyonce highlights the impermanence and insignificance of these side chicks. And perhaps hence that, instead of her funeral scene, this is ultimately theirs. As Beyonce finishes her final line of the spoken word interlude, the song Sorry begins to play.

Sari was written by Deanna Gordon, Mello X, and Beyonce, and was produced by Mello X, Biont, and, in Winter Gordon. The song is built on a simple two-cord progression played on a subtle organ-like keyboard. On top of this keyboard, a synth lead plays two notes that follow the chords. A sub-synth bass fills out the low end. And finally, a driving drumbeat brings it all together. As the production of Sari is introduced, we have a shift in scenery on screen. We enter the Maidwood Plantation, one in multiple Louisiana sugar plantations featured in lemonade, since these plantations will appear and reappear throughout the film, we're going to take this opportunity to briefly explore their history.

While quote-unquote King Cotton dominated industry in much of the antebellum south, it was quote-unquote Queen Sugar, who reigned supreme in Louisiana. By the mid-1800s, Louisiana produced a quarter of the global sugar supply, a booming economy that was fueled by slave labor. Sugar farming was grueling, highly dangerous, work, with enslaved men, women, and children working around the clock during processing and harvest season. Frederick Douglass liken the prospect of working on such a plantation to a, quote, life of living death. Due to the dangers involved in sugar plantation labor, the death rates among the enslaved workers

often outpaced the birth rates. As a consequence, plantation owners force countless enslaved black women into bearing children in order to keep their workforce intact. At the lower plantation, along the Mississippi River, the headmistress purchased 30 teenage girls from a slave auction in New Orleans. After forcefully impregnating these girls, the headmistress would 10 years later refer to their children as her, quote, crop of children. The madewood plantation featured here in Sari is located near Napoleonville, Louisiana. Maidwood has been nicknamed the Queen of the Bayou, as its ornate Greek revival architecture has earned it a place as a national historic landmark.

However, the Maidwood Mansion's splendor came at the cost of brutal slave labor. Lionel Tapo Sr., the son-in-law of former madewood slave Louisa Martin, recounts stories his mother-in-law told him of beating she received and how she was forced to carry a whip to whip other enslaved people. Sugar plantations such as those featured in lemonade hold the history of the absolute horror of life for the enslaved. Places where women were subjected to torture, exhaustion, injury, malnutrition, rape, miscarriages, and the living death of slavery. However, these are also the places where black women survived,

passing on their culture orally and engaging in resistance. As we'll see, Beyonce's inclusion of plantations such as Maidwood allows her to subvert the history of the place and reclaim it as what Dr. La Keisha Simmons refers to as an impossible black place. It's with this context and understanding that we enter the Maidwood mansion as the opening moments of sorry ring out. We're greeted by tennis player Serena Williams, arguably the greatest athlete of her generation. She descends down a winding staircase, and she beckons the viewer to follow her into the parlor,

where Beyonce sits upon a throne. Serena's presence immediately commands respect. Her success in tennis is unparalleled in any other sport. To date, she has 23 singles grand slams, 14 doubles grand slams, four Olympic medals, and countless records to her name, and she's achieved all of the success while enduring the twin evils of racism and sexism that's followed her throughout her career. Writers like Jeney Desmond Harris have tracked press coverage of Serena Williams, which has ranged from dehumanizing animalistic descriptions of her, an obsessive preoccupation with her

to the point of objectification, and perpetuations of the angry black woman's stereotype when she expresses any frustration on the court. Serena discussed this scrutiny in a 2016 interview with rapper and actor common. To this day still, I just feel like I definitely was scrutinized because I was confident. You know, I was black and I was confident. And I am black and I am confident, you know. But I would say, I feel like I can be number one. Oh, no, no, you don't say that.

Well, why shouldn't I say that? In a showcase of her confidence, Serena dances in the parlor room of the Maidwood Mansion as Beyonce sits in a queen-like throne. Beyonce's pose in the throne seems to intentionally mirror Serena's Sports Person of the Year, Sports Illustrated cover of 2015. Like Beyonce, Serena sat in a throne with one leg draped over the armchair, staring directly into the camera. Dr. Lakeisha Simmons illuminates the power of Beyonce and Serena's presence in the Maidwood. mansion parlor in her piece, landscapes, memories, and history in Beyonce's lemonade. Quote, Serena Williams twirks in the very same place where an enslaved girl's job was to carry the whip of torture.

For Beyonce's lemonade, the dance in this space is an act of defiance, of claiming self and freedom. Beyonce's throne is an impossible black place. Beyonce Knowles Carter and Serena Williams' bodily freedom does not belong here, yet they have claimed it for themselves, unquote. As in previous chapters of Lemonade, Beyonce interweaves these empowering political images with deeply personal lyrics regarding her partner's infidelity. What does Beyonce have to say to her husband from atop this throne?

That's right after the break. Welcome back to dissect. Before the break, we discussed the significance of the madewood plantation as the setting for the chapter apathy. We saw how Beyonce and Serena reclaim this plantation, transforming it from a side of torture for the enslaved to a side of power for black women. And it's from this empowered throne that Beyonce performs the song Sorry, beginning with the song's hook. Beyonce performs a call and response with herself throughout the hook.

In one voice, which is slightly distorted and set back in the mix, she sings just one word, sorry. She then responds to herself in a contrasting commanding tone saying, I ain't sorry. The repetition of this back and forth starts to take the form of an inner dialogue, as if she's having to tell herself she isn't sorry over and over, letting it become a mantra. Perhaps fighting off her own instincts, she seems determined not to blame herself for his wrongdoings, nor will she apologize for her reaction to it. She also dismisses her partner saying, NWRD Naa, thus removing his significance to her and his power over her. In verse one, Beyonce describes ignoring her partner's phone calls and instead heads to a nightclub to get her mind off the situation.

Here, let's recall the chapter title, apathy. Apathy is defined as either a lack of feeling or emotion or lack of interest or concern. Knowing this, we recognize that Beyonce is attempting to communicate that she's now apathetic towards her partner in their relationship. But like the song's hook, Beyonce here is clearly. conflicted, as she continually has to say, I ain't thinking about you. An ironic contradiction of the statement. While she may be trying not to think about him, she certainly is. And so we recognize her apathy is not genuine, but is rather a feigned apathy. As such, what Beyonce presents to her partner as apathy on the surface may be more appropriately interpreted as a suppression

of her true emotions. Beyonce continues singing, Me and my ladies sit my deuce cups. I don't give a fuck chucking my deuses up. Ducey is Jay-Z's luxury brand of cognac, one of his many business ventures beyond rap. Jay-Z previously rapped about drinking duce with Beyonce in the song Drunk in Love. But now Beyonce drinks it with her ladies on a night out to spite him.

We also recognize this line as a reference to Jay-Z and Beyonce's 2013 collaborative track Part 2 on the run. Jay-Z imagines running from the police with Beyonce, with the two of them chugging Deucey together and chucking the deuce's up to law enforcement. Beyonce, of course, flips this exact scenario and sorry, except now she does so with her ladies. Clearly, it's no longer she and him versus the world. It's her versus him.

Beyonce then ends the verse, suck on my balls, pause, I've had enough. Once again, Beyonce digs at Jay-Z through his, own lyrics, this time rewriting a line from Jay's verse on Kanye West's 2010 song, Soapal. Here Jay-Z references the phrase pause, which is slang used to negate a statement that could be interpreted as a gay sexual innuendo. So when Jay says, I don't have to pause, he implies that he doesn't have to say pause because his sexuality wouldn't be questioned. He then tells his haters to fuck off, saying, all of y'all can suck my balls through my draws.

Beyonce, of course, repurposes this verse almost verbatim. Like we heard throughout Don't Hurt Yourself, she's adopting a masculine posture toward her partner, even emasculating him by telling him to suck my balls. Like we noted last episode, Beyonce employs masculine shows of strength and attempt to gain power back in a relationship. However, as the album progresses, we'll see how she comes to realize that some of these masculine power plays and survival tactics must be abandoned in order to come to a place of true healing. As Sari moves into its pre-course, Beyonce shifts her attention to her female audience.

Beyonce empowers her female audience to act defiantly toward men who have wronged them. By telling them to put up their middle fingers and wave it in the face of their betrayers, she evokes a common feature of her live performance of single ladies. In single ladies, Put your hand in his face Say, whoa, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh, oh. In single ladies, Beyonce encourages her female fans to wave their empty ring fingers in their man's face

As if to say, if you didn't want me to dance with other men, you should have put a ring on it and locked this down. Of course, in Sari, the ring finger is replaced with the middle finger, a more aggressive action that implies the severance of a relationship altogether. In this way, she asks her female fans to come together in solidarity, moving beyond the respect they demand in single ladies, to a more outright rejection of any man who violates the respect they deserve. As Sari continues into its second verse,

Beyonce continues to reject her partner's attempts at communication. Beyonce dismisses her partner's attempts to apologize, telling him it's his turn to undergo the same suffering he put her through. Now he'll watch her while in and grinding on other men with her friends at the club. She continues singing, now I'm the one that's lying, and I don't feel bad about it. It's exactly what you get. Stop interrupting my grinding.

It's unclear exactly what she's lying about. It could be her whereabouts in an attempt to make him angry. and jealous, or perhaps she's lying when she feigns apathy. In any case, she shows no remorse for lying to him, as she believes this is what he deserves after putting her through what he did. In this sense, Beyonce is advocating for retributive justice, wherein the punishment of one's crime equates to the suffering the crime caused, an eye for an eye, so to speak. But just as Beyonce will have to let go of masculine approaches to power in favor of feminine power, as the album progresses, we will also see Beyonce abandoned retributive justice for a restorative justice model.

Beyonce ends the verse. Stop interrupting my grinding. Given the song's setting of a nightclub, it appears Beyonce is telling her partner that his phone calls are literally interrupting her dancing or grinding with other men. But we also recognize the line as a forceful way of telling her partner he no longer takes priority in her life. Rather, she's thrown herself into her work, her grind. and his presence would only be a distraction for her. Up to this point in the song, Beyonce has demonstrated that she doesn't want to think about her partner.

However, her attitude shifts during the bridge into the song's outro. I pray to Lord you reveal what his truth is. After the night of clubbing with her girls, Beyonce expresses concern with her partner's whereabouts as she comes home to an empty house. Rather than apathy, she allows herself to, to feel a deep emotion, regret. She says, Today I regret the night I put that ring on. This calls back to the final moments of don't hurt

yourself. There, Beyonce threw her wedding ring off and threatened that if his behavior continues, he'll lose his wife. This moment on sorry also evokes Beyonce's 2013 song, Ring Off. The song is dedicated to her mother, Tina Knowles, and the freedom that she felt after divorcing Beyonce's father, Matthew Knowles, who is also rumored to have cheated. In Ring Off, Beyonce acknowledges that for her mother, healing was found in leaving a toxic relationship and starting anew. As such, when Beyonce regrets the night she ever put her own wedding ring on, she may imagine the kind of freedom she could enjoy if she were to leave like her mother did. However, if she does imagine this possibility, it's only briefly, as she's still drawn to understand her partner's actions.

She says, he's always got them fucking excuses. I pray to the Lord, you reveal what his truth is. Beyonce is exasperated by her partner's surface-level attempts to amend. She shows an understanding that deeper motivations must be revealed in order to salvage this relationship. She also foreshadows that a divine intervention might be required. While Beyonce craves a deeper conversation with her partner and the opportunity to uncover his truth,

she is also not quite ready for that and decides to leave. She leaves a note in the hallway for him to find when he finally returns home, saying, I ain't fucking with nobody, making clear that while she has left, she hasn't left him for someone else. Her attempts to provoke jealousy and feign apathy have failed. She's no longer clubbing in retaliation. Rather, it appears she's taking necessary space to process her emotions. As sorry continues its bridge, Beyonce sings, let's have a toast to the good life. Her tone here is somber, not the typical celebratory tone

that would generally accompany a toast. Perhaps Beyonce is toasting the good life her and her husband had prior to the revelation of his infidelity. She might also be toasting the good life she'll have without him. May also be an ironic reference to the fact that despite their good life of fame, riches, and status, they did not have the good marriage everyone believed. Like her feigned apathy, their quote-unquote good life was a facade. Beyonce continues, suicide before you see these tears come out my eyes. She once again adopts a masculine stoicism, stating she'd rather commit suicide than fully express the depth of her emotions, or allow her partner to see her cry over him. If we had any doubt that her apathy was feigned, this line confirms it completely. Clearly, she's not indifferent.

Rather, she's suppressing her emotions and attempt to disguise her sorrow, as she'd rather not let her partner glean any satisfaction from her pain. She quickly abandons her suicidal thoughts for a life of purpose in single motherhood. She sings, me and my baby, we gonna be our right. We go and live a good life. She returns to this idea of good life, this time looking forward to the future without her husband. During this outro, the visuals of the film move away from the plantation setting to a new scene of Beyonce posed as the Egyptian Queen Nefertiti. Queen Nefertiti ruled over Egypt alongside her feral husband, King Akenaten, from 1353 to 1336 BC, one of the most prosperous periods of Egyptian history. Nefertiti is known for her power and beauty, with her name meaning, the beautiful one has come.

In many depictions of Nefertiti, she wears a tall, flat-top crown, which Beyonce imitates with her braids. Nefertiti appears alongside her feral husband in many depictions, suggesting an equality in their relationship and perhaps more ruling power than traditionally afforded to feral wives. In pop culture, she has become a symbol of historical black excellence and has been referenced in the lyrics of Queen Latifah, Lauren Hill, Janelle Monet, and others. For Beyonce to embody Nefertiti calls to mind her power, beauty, and queen status. It's a direct refutation of the white patriarchy's historical dismissal of black women. If the Maidwood Mansion's nickname, the Queen of the Bayou,

encapsulates white society's privileging of profit over human life through Queen Sugar, Beyonce re-emerging as Queen Nefertiti reclaims Black Women's Place as the true queens of the American South. Beyonce continues the outro singing, Big Homie Better Grow Up. While a quote-unquote Big Homie implies a leadership role or a person others in a community look up to, Beyonce says her partner still has.

to grow up. He may have the status of being a big homie, but he's still immature in ways that prevent him from acting with integrity. He must address these immaturities if they are to stay together, and if he can deserve his title of big homie. She continues, me and my woeys about to stroll up. Wodees comes from the word ward. Both New Orleans, where much of lemonade takes place, and Beyoncé's own hometown of Houston, are divided into neighborhoods called wards. Thus, Wodees are your neighbors or those who are from your ward. Like the first half of the song, Beyonce continues to rely on her female friends or woeys for empowerment. Next, Beyonce sings, I see them boppers in the corner. They sneakin out the back door. Boppers here refers to women who go after high-profile men

for their status. Just as Beyonce questioned whether Jay-Z's side chicks would be down to ride and hold up, Beyonce here implies that the women her partner cheats with are just using him for his fame and wealth. She remains his one true love, which would love him whether he was successful or not. These final lines may be the most well-known of the entire album. Immediately after Lemonade's release, a social media frenzy formed around the question, Who is Becky with the good hair? Fans took to Twitter and Instagram with theories of Becky's true identity, with theories from fashion designer Rachel Roy

to singer Rita Oura and more. However, to focus too intently on Becky's potential real-life counterpart is to risk losing the underlying meaning here. In her essay, getting to the roots of Becky with the good hair and lemonade, Janelle Hobson contends that Becky signifies, quote, not only the other woman who poses a threat to black women's marriages and romantic partnerships, but also the other woman writ large. white womanhood as a negation of black beauty and black femininity, unquote.

This idea of Becky as a white negator of black beauty seems to originate from Sir Mixalot's 1992 song Baby Got Back. The song's intro features the following exchange between two white girls, one of which is named Becky. Oh my God, Becky, look at her butt. It is so big. They only talk to her because she looks like a total prostitute. Okay.

I mean, her butt is just so sad. We hear these beckies denigrate a black woman for embracing her black features and not adhering to white beauty standards. They also over-sexualize her and call her a prostitute, implying her only value is in her body. Their commentary reveals both jealousy and disgust. As evidenced and baby got back, beckies are shallow, ignorant of their privileged,

and deemed attractive by white patriarchal beauty standards. They are not only white, but also young, thin, blue-eyed, and hair that is long and straight. Among all the pressures to adhere to white beauty standards, having quote-unquote good hair is one of the most prominent for black women. Historically, societal pressures have discouraged black women from wearing natural hairstyles such as afros, braids, and locks in favor of styles that approximate white hair. Here's how Tyra Banks define good hair on a 2009 episode of her talk show, The Tyra Banks Show. Now, when black women talk about good hair, you hear things like hair that's not kinky or coarse or nappy. You know, when they say good hair, a lot of them are saying hair that is smooth and straight like a white girl's. And they spend thousands of dollars in countless hours using chemical relaxers and putting weaves in their hair to get it.

And I just said they a lot. I should say we. Beyonce herself is a light-skinned black woman who has at times been criticized for assimilating to white beauty standards. But Hobson contends that by calling out Becky with the good hair, Beyonce, quote, entreats us to the interiority of the pretty light-skinned woman who seems to have it all, who tried to be softer, prettier, less awake, only to have the love of her life dismiss her efforts with extramarital affairs with Becky. In a remarkable way, through hair politics, Beyonce approximates Becky with the good hair as a way to divest her of the power of whiteness and to reposition her in the service of a collective black womanhood, unquote. And so with the line, he only wants me when I'm not there. Beyonce reveals that her partner has taken her beauty for granted. Sporting a crown of braids as the beautiful and powerful Queen Nefertiti, she directs her partner to instead call Becky with the good hair, a shallow.

wrongfully elevated woman who Beyonce ultimately exposes as a side chick as insignificant as dust. Conclusions. Throughout our examination of Lemonade, we must keep in mind the feminist rallying cry, the personal is political. The idea that Beyonce's personal lyrics and images also convey a broader political or social message. Just as Beyonce rewrites Jay-Z's lyrics in order to take back the power in a relationship, She also inhabits the spaces of historical white supremacy, such as the plantation and the Jim Crow bus, in order to take back the power of those spaces for black women.

When she calls out her husband for his preoccupation with Becky with the Good Hair, she calls out America as a whole for its perpetuation of damaging racialized beauty standards. In terms of the album's narrative, the end of sorry signals a new direction for Beyonce, as she leaves her partner for a new, unknown life. Likewise, the final visual of the chapter finds a group of five black women walking out into the wilderness naked. What does this new life look like for Beyonce? Well, if we can summarize it using a single color, it looks like red.

This is 6-inch from Lemonade's next chapter, Emptiness. A chapter will examine note by note, scene by scene, next time on Dissect. Dysect is a production of Spotify Studios. Remember, you can find visual guides for each episode on dissectpodcast.com, which also includes links to any articles cited on today's episode. While you're there, be sure to check out our limited season six merchandise. Be sure to follow us on social media at Dissect Podcast.

Today's episode was written by Maggie Lacey and me. Additional analysis by Michael Bundalo and Titi Shodia. Additional research by Gail Acosta. Audio editing by Eric Bass and me. song recreations by Andrew Atlin Theme music by Birocratic Okay, thanks everyone. Talk to you next week.