Thus can we argue not about what the song says to us, but about what we think the rest of the world needs to be told, and whether Beyoncé is telling it right. A song like “Formation” isn’t set up as a story, or an interior monologue - it’s set up as Beyoncé, the public celebrity whose biography you already know, addressing the world, like an op-ed with drums. This is an ever-greater share of the public life of music. One song, one digestible thing, with millions of people standing in a circle around it, pointing and shouting and writing about it, conducting one gigantic online undergraduate seminar about it, metabolizing it on roughly the same level that cable-news debate shows metabolize a political speech. So these days it’s the song, and the scale of the event surrounding it.
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