I Want To Read The Best Writing About Beyoncé

𝓺𝓾𝓮𝓼𝓽𝓲𝓸𝓷 𝓯𝓸𝓻 𝓽𝓱𝓮 𝓬𝓾𝓵𝓽𝓾𝓻𝓮 💬

Like Lady Gaga investigating the insurrection, I will be going to DC this month! You can hear Peyton and I talking at the National Museum of Women in the Arts. Plus: watch Mississippi Masala with me at Nitehawk on 2/25!

Beyoncé performs onstage during the “RENAISSANCE WORLD TOUR” at the Tottenham Hotspur Stadium on May 29, 2023 in London, England. (Photo: Kevin Mazur/WireImage for Parkwood)

I’m still thinking about Beyoncé’s Album of the Year win at the Grammys on Sunday night. I think my brain short-circuited, all the sense left my body, and I actually hollered. I don’t know if I can explain how it felt to choreograph dances to “Survivor” in my bedroom at my dad’s house in 2001, or to get “Dangerously in Love” for my birthday in 2003 and listen to it in the car with my mom (who told me there were some songs I had to skip — ignoring that was my first act of disobedience), or to ask for an iTunes gift card so I could listen to “B’Day” at the family computer in the kitchen in the fall of 2006. To stay up all night to watch the Beychella weekend one livestream! To have steam coming out of my ears I was so mad at the “Freakum Dress” tease on night one of the Renaissance World Tour!¹

Tonight I want to read the best, smartest, most evocative writing about Beyoncé. Reviews, essays, criticism, praise, even a meme or a TikTok or a YouTube comment.²

I still think regularly about this Rachel Kaadzi Ghansahn essay about the BeyHive, written just after the release of self-titled. That piece of writing is early on how confusing Beyoncé can be, how her talent is thrillingly alive if her politics are vexingly absent, or mobile. “Women like her, Tina Turner and Josephine Baker show us the necessity of constantly remastering how you are seen by others, how you are understood, and, in the choreography of that dance of dominance and submission,” she wrote, “they show us that the performance of a lifetime is one that you must do in the world, in practice and not just in theory, with all eyes on you.”