Beyonce Is Not Your Enemy

Speaking of Queen B, here's a piece I wrote about her excellent performance at Glastonbury, and the rockist reaction on sites like the guardian and YouTube. It was published on the wicked Collapse Board - yowsah!!



Beyonce killed it last night at Glastonbury, and this morning the world woke up to a swarm of positive reviews all over the interwebs. However, some people are not happy with this situation, and have taken to leaving comments on sites like The Guardian (where the gig received a 5 star rating) and YouTube (where a clip of Lauren Laverne and Zane Lowe talking about the gig for the BBC has received critical attention), slamming Beyonce for being talentless, boring, pop shite, etc. Don't worry though, they're wrong and I will show you why. Beyonce's been my girl since Destiny's Child first broke through in the late 90s. That of course makes me biased, but I'm still going to approach this article in as subjective a manner as possible. If I fail... well, you can fucking sue me.

The first thing that struck me about the gig was listening to the crowd singing back Beyonce's own music, and realising how many women were there. Glastonbury is a massive (and truly diverse) festival, but it's easy to forget just how much of the musical coverage we see on the TV is male-orientated and how this skews our view of who exactly goes there. Who would have thought that the headliner on the final night could attract a capacity crowd that was majority female? And who would have thought that those women went there not because of sexual attraction or seeing naked flesh (though undoubtedly there were a few) but because they actually wanted to see a good show by an artist they like and respect?

You wouldn't know this by reading the comments on the Guardian website, which seems to be the new place where Mr £50 Rock Bore hangs out online, spouting off opinions about how rubbish Beyonce and pop music in general is. There are three main assumptions being touted by Mr Bore there, and in a nutshell they are: 1) Beyonce makes pop music, thus has no talent 2) Beyonce's stage show was had dancers thus it was the X-Factor, and 3) having pop performers at Glastonbury is going to kill the festival. Although comments like these come from a place of ignorance, they are to an extent understandable, as we are living in the X Factor age where mediocre talents receive huge media hype they do not deserve. What is less understandable is how Mr Bore is willing to overlook the vast discrepencies in talent between, say, Cheryl Cole and Beyonce, in order to make his own world view work. So, let's analyse them, shall we?

Read the rest here.