Monday 7 November 2016

Beyoncé’s True Political Statement This Week? It Wasn’t at a Clinton Rally




I feel bad for anyone who still hasn’t learned to speak Beyoncé. Her language is the body. It’s stagecraft. It’s Instagram posts. She doesn’t speak; she signifies. And her performance on Friday at a Hillary Clinton rally
in Cleveland won excitement and dismay over the possibility that she had reached some partisan peak by announcing that she was officially “with her.”
But anyone who caught her appearance on Wednesday at the 50th annual Country Music Association Awards in Nashville knew that while Friday might have been, for Mrs. Clinton, strategically necessary, it was also politically anticlimactic. Beyoncé had already been with her — three hers, in fact. Partway through the broadcast, she arrived flanked by the Dixie Chicks, a trio of once insanely popular, then absurdly disgraced musicians who keep on going anyway. Together, they did a version of Beyoncé’s twangy scorcher “Daddy Lessons,” with a little of the Dixie Chicks’ “Long Time Gone” woven in toward the end. As polemical television, it was powerfully sly.

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