![]() ![]() A seductive nightclub routine casts a spell on Sgt. But her tendency to leave a trail of admirers everywhere she goes often places her in harm’s way. She dreams of escaping Philly for the greener pastures of Los Angeles, where her golden pipes and beauty will earn her a one-way ticket to the A-list. In it, our chanteuse portrays a gifted and irresistible wannabe-actress by the name of Carmen Brown. It sounds too good to have been true, and yet it so magnificently was: Could we have really all missed out on an over-the-top soap opera playing out 16 bars at a time with the vocal stylings of early-aughts iterations of Beyonce, Mos Def, Wyclef Jean, and Li’l Bow Wow? The fashion alone qualifies this film for preservation in the National Archives, with zeitgeisty Kangols, bejeweled baseball caps, and feather boas practically timestamping every frame “2001.” The style is of a piece with its era as well, tossing crude greenscreen and lyrics superimposed onscreen into the mix. Nobody gets this huge by accident, and while Lemonade amply proves that Beyonce has no patience for games when it comes to her men, she’s an expert at playing the game of fame.Ĭonsidering the public’s constant, near-obsessive scrutiny of every Beyonce factoid and tidbit, it’s bananas that we’re not all bringing up Carmen all the time. Her layered take on Carmen presages her later route to ubiquity, foretelling her future as a shrewd performer blurring the lines between the personal and the professional to her own benefit. But a bit of reflection on this odd footnote in Beyonce’s career unlocks a new understanding of the work she’s done since, and of the savvy moves she’s made to attain her nearly peerless level of stardom. In 2001, when she was merely the most charismatic member of the R&B group Destiny’s Child, a young Beyonce Knowles took the title role in a made-for-TV movie titled Carmen: A Hip Hopera.Ī modernized reimagining of Georges Bizet’s opera, this hilariously dated film has been all but forgotten in the wake of its star’s inescapable recent output. ![]() In the search for a fresh critical perspective on Beyonce’s electrifying present, we must turn to her distant past. Not even a week out, and her colossal Lemonade has already been written about dozens of dozens of times over. She talked a big game about running the world on 4, and when she left the industry’s petty rules behind her, she actually started to follow through on the threat. The world would be her advertising department, and word-of-mouth would be her guerrilla promo campaign. Few pop-cultural events arrive prepackaged with such a tremendous air of momentousness to them as this past Saturday’s unveiling of her new studio record Lemonade, which found the biggest name in pop transcending the need for PR altogether. When she releases an album, be it in the dead of night without any warning or on a premium cable special keeping America glued to their televisions through a Saturday night, the Earth’s tectonic plates shift. ![]()
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