Beyoncé’s Black Is King Offers Awe-Inspiring Looks and Muddled Messages
The essence of Black Is King is summed up in one particularly extravagant scene. As Beyoncé lounges atop a leopard-print Rolls-Royce in a matching catsuit, she raps about raising the sons of empires and embodying Queen Sheba. She closes the verse with a proclamation: “I be like soul food, I am a whole mood.” And it’s true—this 86-minute spectacle scans as one long, stunning moodboard. It is gorgeous to look at, invigorating to absorb, and life-affirming in its display of Black cultural splendor. But it has little narrative weight.
The film functions well as a visual companion to her year-old movie soundtrack, The Lion King: The Gift, and as a vehicle for her finely tuned artistic machine, but there are also grander ambitions at play here. “With this visual album, I wanted to present elements of Black history and African tradition, with a modern twist and a universal message, and what it truly means to find your self-identity and build a legacy,” Beyoncé wrote on Instagram. That’s a lot to foist upon a movie slotted alongside Muppets Now and Mickey Mouse Clubhouse on the Disney+ homepage, and yet, at its best, Black Is King feels like an exultation. This is a massive production with many epic set pieces connected by bits of dialogue plucked from the 2019 movie and the larger thematic thread of serving looks. The film does not match the interpersonal world-building of Lemonade or the indefatigable pageantry of Homecoming, but it is definitely the most daring thing on Disney+ (sorry, Hamilton). In some ways, Black Is King even serves as a correction to last year’s Lion King movie, as it feels truer to the classic version than those creepy photorealistic animals ever did.
Black Is King loosely follows Simba’s familiar arc: A young prince is displaced from his kingdom by an interloper and must uncover his inheritance through travel and introspection. Throughout the film, his journey to reclaim his throne, captured by eight directors across three continents, is tracked alongside Beyoncé’s personal considerations of tradition, womanhood, motherhood, heritage, and legacy. All of her three children make cameos, and her mother and husband are prominently featured. Some of her collaborators from The Gift appear (Mr. Eazi, Pharrell, WizKid, Tiwa Savage, and more), while others are conspicuously absent (including Kendrick Lamar, Donald Glover, and Burna Boy), but Beyoncé is usually front and center (or within view). This leads to a perpetual dilemma: The storyline cannot unfold with her chewing up so much scenery, but every time she is out of frame, her absence becomes palpable. The entire project also hinges upon some of the least interesting music of Beyoncé’s illustrious career, and while several songs are elevated by this new context, it still lacks the punch and momentousness we’ve come to expect.
Many of the film’s issues come from the fact that it must tether its objectives to the framework of a corporation’s cat cartoon. The interstitial movie dialogue is distracting, yet there is no sense of story without it. In combination with Beyoncé’s spoken-word proverbs and recitation of Warsan Shire poetry, the voiceover work is inconsistent and contrived. Saddled with the well-worn Lion King franchise, she struggles to make its concepts fully jibe with her style.
Even with this responsibility to the original story, the focus is obviously elsewhere. This is a celebration of Black heritage and beauty—the spirituality of nature, the connective threads of the diaspora, the resplendence of bodies, hair, and skin. Blackness has been demeaned for so long that seeing it displayed so proudly and so magnificently feels like a political act all its own; even more so with the backing of such an all-American brand. The film’s value is mostly aesthetic, but there are lessons beneath the surface.
Beyoncé’s turn toward Africa as the Black ancestral home mirrors the longstanding narrative correction that Black people descended from kings and queens, that our roots run far deeper than American slavery, and that the Middle Passage disconnected us from our rich history and our birthright. The film’s very title is trying to invoke a repressed and overwritten royal lineage.
The King has become an obvious status symbol in Black pop culture, and Beyoncé herself once co-opted the mantle. On Watch the Throne, JAY-Z and Kanye West used royalty to denote Black excellence in artistry and social climbing. In one of the most famous renderings of Biggie Smalls, he is wearing a crown. For T.I., being king represented dominion over the South. From King of Rock and the endless King of R&B discourse to King magazine, this fixation reflects not just majesty and sovereignty but also the way history is passed down from generation to generation.
There is this idea that getting in touch with our royal ancestry will help us undermine the white power structure, even though the king is the linchpin of the patriarchal hierarchy. The film attempts to rectify this clear contradiction by redefining kingship as a rhetorical mode. Before the young prince returns for his throne, riding a horse with his new queen, new theories of kingship are put forth: “It would be a much better world for all of us if kings and queens realized that being equal, sharing spacing, sharing ideas, sharing values [...] that is the way in which our ancestors did things, and that is an African way,” one voice posits. “The royalty is there for you to be a blessing to others.” Black kingship, it suggests, is egalitarian.
Such a thing is fantasy and, in many ways, representative of an idealized motherland that doesn’t exist. The pan-Africanism espoused in Black Is King isn’t wholly representative of the product, either. The soundtrack itself omitted the music of North Africa, and the film—shot in New York, Los Angeles, South Africa, West Africa, London, and Belgium—largely does the same. Many of the images seem to play into existing Western conceptions of Africa in which the place is seen through a spiritual lens that borders on mythology. Some Africans pushed back against what they considered stereotypical depictions of the continent in the trailer: the huts, face painting, sweeping shots of the savanna, and, of course, lions. This sense of incompleteness is only furthered by the film’s lack of any cogent ideology. Even at its most nebulous, though, Black Is King produces some truly awe-inspiring visions.
The moments in the film that feel most vital often echo those from The Gift. On “Brown Skin Girl,” a colorful exhibition of melanin, Beyoncé shares tender exchanges with Kelly Rowland, Naomi Campbell, and Lupita Nyong’o, who each inspired lyrics in the song. The electric posse cut “My Power,” which features Tierra Whack, songwriter Nija, Nigerian Yemi Alade, and South Africans Busiswa and Moonchild Sanelly, is staged in an endless white labyrinth, recalling the surreality of Missy Elliott. The images of Beyoncé ad-libbing for Shatta Wale before a shirtless mob during “Already” and mugging in the back seat of a neon-lit hearse during Burna Boy’s “Ja Ara E” bring me profound joy. Even in instances where the observations are lacking, her presence is empowering.
It is obviously difficult, if not impossible, to create any sort of unified theory of Blackness, especially for Disney. Even with the collective traumas suffered, Blackness is not a monolithic experience. But with Black Is King, Beyoncé taps into a force of Black triumph and dignity that feels all-embracing, even when the delivery of its message gets muddled or platitudinous. In her Instagram post, she closed by saying that she wanted people to watch the film with their families, and for it to give them pride. That everlasting mood is translated loud and clear.
Originally Appeared on Pitchfork
