NEW YORK - With slogans against police brutality and celebrations of African beauty in her new song, Beyonce has suddenly transformed from crowd-pleasing entertainer to outspoken spokeswoman for the burgeoning Black Lives Matter movement.
The 34-year-old superstar, who had been relatively quiet in 2015, returned in spectacular fashion Saturday with a surprise new song, “Formation,” marked by a video rich in political imagery and a raw bounce beat in the style of Southern hip-hop.
One day later, Beyonce took the message to the largest possible audience as she performed the song during the halftime show of the Super Bowl, the most watched US television broadcast of the year which drew more than 111 million viewers.
Trading her soaring vocal range for a rap delivery, Beyonce — who is estimated with her husband, rap mogul Jay Z, to be worth a combined $1 billion — takes on much of the attitude of hip-hop and boasts of her success.
But in Beyonce’s version, the bragging also turns political as she insists that she remains true to her African American heritage.
She describes herself as a “black Bill Gates in the making” — referring to the Microsoft billionaire turned philanthropist.
“Earned all this money but they never take the country out of me / I got hot sauce in my bag, swag,” sings Beyonce, who was born in Houston to parents from Louisiana and Alabama.
The video brings together fleeting but poignant scenes of African American struggles, especially the string of killings of black men by police in the past two years that have triggered the Black Lives Matter protest movement. In the most striking image, a boy in a hoodie dances before a phalanx of police in riot gear. Later, the police raise their hands up like people under arrest as graffiti on the wall reads, “Stop shooting us.”
Setting the video in New Orleans, Beyonce sings from the roof of a police car that is sinking in water — an implicit reference to criticism that authorities botched relief efforts when Hurricane Katrina ravaged the city in 2005 and killed nearly 2,000 people, disproportionately African American.
Beyonce extols natural African hair just as the camera turns to her smiling four-year-old daughter, Blue Ivy.
And she makes clear her ideal of beauty: “I like my Negro nose with Jackson Five nostrils.”
Beyonce quickly came under fire over the performance at the Super Bowl, whose programmers are usually careful to pick non-controversial acts — such as Beyonce herself, who won acclaim for her 2013 halftime show with former band Destiny’s Child.
At one point Sunday, Beyonce and her troupe of dancers in short leather jumpsuits raised their fists — a gesture interpreted by some as the salute of the nationalist Black Panthers.
Members of the National Sheriffs’ Association, who were attending a convention at a Washington hotel, lowered the volume on the television and turned their backs to Beyonce, the group said on Facebook.
Former New York mayor Rudy Giuliani, a Republican known for his tough-on-crime politics, said that Beyonce should have instead tried to build respect for police officers within the African American community.
“This is football, not Hollywood, and I thought it was really outrageous that she used it as a platform to attack police officers who are the people who protect her and protect us, and keep us alive,” Giuliani told Fox News.
Even if she faces a backlash, Beyonce seems confident of her solid fan base. A moment after her Super Bowl performance, she announced a 40-date tour of stadiums across North America and Europe.
