#beyonce.com

OMG!

I purposefully kept quiet after 4:44 was released. Not because I didn’t have strong thoughts or feelings about it, but because I wanted to see the general reactions in my internet community before I threw in my two cents. The first knee-jerk reactions I saw were exactly what I expected – the album was reduced to the title track and Jay Z’s admissions of infidelity were used as confirmation of a long-standing trope of “he doesn’t deserve to be married to Beyoncé” (part of which, if we’re honest with ourselves, has some of its roots in anti-Black racism and classism, but that’s an entirely different conversation). These ranged from simple “I told you so's" in the face of mutterings that Lemonade wasn’t about the personal tribulations of the Carters, to jokes about Blue Ivy penning scalding diss tracks against her father. These, I saw coming.

Everything in shaka, everything in faka.

What I didn’t see coming was the backlash of very real anger at the track. I thought it might have been somewhat assuaged when the Footnotes videos were slowly released, fleshing each track out from an individual’s narrative into a larger conversation with multiple men of color, mostly Black men, in the entertainment industry.

The Footnotes on 4:44 saw them candidly discussing wrongdoings towards partners and family members, their process of learning to identify it, and them baring their feelings as they began to realize much of their self-sabotage. I saw it as brilliant, even in the wake of the very unfortunate and poorly timed rumours of Jesse Williams allegedly dating his white Grey’s Anatomy co-star after he’d said that he’d had to deal with “think pieces that I somehow threw a thirteen-year relationship, like the most painful experience I’ve had in my life with a person I’ve loved with all of my heart, that I threw a person and my family in the trash because a girl I worked with was cute”. But, even with this clash of narratives, I found it intensely personal and touching and a step in the right direction for emotional growth and wellness for Black men.

Happier times.

My sentiments weren’t generally shared.

Instead, I saw comments that interpreted the song and the following discourse about it relating to personal experiences, as more or less of a masturbatory exercise in male bonding over female pain. It was received as a man believing that the process of naming his faults and crimes was enough to absolve him of them, an influential celebrity giving the men who looked up to him another excuse to believe that they could be washed off their veritable sins just by speaking them.

I hadn’t seen it that way, but what fascinated and somewhat perplexed me was that I couldn’t understand why. Granted, I didn’t believe these reactions any less valid or grounded in reality, but I was having a very hard time identifying where I split off from this thought process. I couldn’t simply chalk it up to being a fan – there is no instance in which cheating or emotional abuses, are okay, even (and especially) from someone I admire. But the arguments felt one-dimensional to me, more based on reactions to misconstrued messages that other men had received due to a lack of nuance.

I finally managed to find clarity in a long conversation about the album with my best friend Gerald, a Black male I’ve been close with for nearly a decade. As someone I trusted, had prayed and cried with, respected, and loved, I was ready to go to battle with him over the messages once geeking out over the production value and wordplay was out of the way. He shared some of my slightly frustrated confusion, but it hit me in the middle of our conversation. I was saying that I thought that some of the problem others found in the album was that there was an admission of guilt without explicit reconciliation, to which Gerald replied, “but we got that in Lemonade.”

And it all clicked.

There were three big, fundamental problems that separated my own view of 4:44 from the views I had seen.

The first was that the narratives that were created by 4:44 and Lemonade were ones that echoed a painful reality in the Black community that many women were honestly fed up with – a man messes up, does serious emotional and psychological damage to a woman he was meant to love, apologizes, and then the woman is tasked with the process of reconciliation.

This is what you get when you use the narratives of these two projects alone. 4:44 comes clean about Jay Z’s cheating, his inability or unwillingness to be emotionally and sometimes physically available, and his litany of other wrongdoings, and then weaves it together with a refrain of “I apologize”. Lemonade documents Beyoncé’s painful and passionate process of transitioning from suspicion to anger to depression to self-actualization to reconciliation. That entire process only exists in the latter project, so from the outsider’s perspective, there is nothing radical or transformational about a dramatic retelling of a man’s selfishness and ego creating a situation where a woman becomes a beast of burden for her own pain.  

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