Suga Mama, Politicized

[donsu]

http://www.thenation.com/doc/20061218/brooks


The video for Beyoncé Knowles's latest single, "Ring the Alarm," shows the stunning 25-year-old singer, dressed in a caramel-colored trench coat that matches her glistening skin, being dragged away by policemen in riot gear and locked in a padded cell.

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The gloss and glitz of this shock-value video may cause casual viewers to write off Beyoncé's newest album, B'Day, as just another collection of sexed-up club jams. But they'd miss out on listening to one of the oddest, most urgent, dissonant and disruptive R&B releases in recent memory.


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Quirky and unpredictable from beginning to end, this record hits a range of intriguingly sour notes that defy expectation. This alone seems reason for pop fans to take a second listen to B'Day--and to take note of the way the album shrewdly remixes R&B tales of "Resentment" (the title of the closing track), desperation and aspiration in contemporary black women's popular culture. It comes at a time when public and political voices of black female discontent remain muted and mediated in the public eye, from the scuffle between police and former Congresswoman Cynthia McKinney to the ubiquitous images of Katrina survivors--overwhelmingly black and female, who are spoken for by the media, politicians and corporate interests far more often than they are heard speaking for themselves.

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It might seem strange to credit an artist whose contributions to the culture have so far included readying us for her "jelly" with making a statement on one of the worst American tragedies in recent memory, but B'Day defies the odds by delivering a collection of songs that refract the emotional and material stress of post-Katrina Southern life.

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Even a seemingly innocuous R&B song like "Suga Mama" has the power to force post-disaster questions related to protection and survival. What, for instance, does it mean to be a "Suga Mama" with an "accountant waiting on the phone"? What does it mean to be a woman who proudly claims to be the "type to take care of mine" in an age of gross federal (read: patriarchal) failure to serve and to protect? In many ways, particularly given the example of Knowles's own mother, clothing designer and salon owner Tina, who has been responsible for most of Destiny's Child as well as Beyoncé's onstage costumes, there is something remarkable, almost parodic, about a track with a sinuous chorus ("Sit on mama lap/Hey, hey/Come sit on mama lap") that insists on the power and the allure of maternal entrepreneurialism.

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What may be "toughest" about it is the way that it gamely challenges century-old American myths about race, class and gender--ones that still portray black women as lazy, feckless, "degenerate" and unwilling to work, thus encouraging what scholar and critic Hazel Carby has described as the "policing" of black women's bodies. Knowles's album stands as a musical response to black women's social dislocation in the wake of yet another massive migration, and it envisions a language of ownership that is at once perhaps almost liberating and disturbingly materialistic: So many poor and working-class African-American households, especially those headed by women, lost everything in the storm.

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Knowles's album of hard, militarized beats marches in defiance of a long history of public black women, from Sojourner to Superbowl Janet, who have been stripped and stressed and displaced and denied.
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