Squad goals: Hermione, Denise, Beyonce, Katniss, The Sapphires and Lolita. I see it as being able to show your anger to the world from a history of disempowerment and disenfranchisement. I mean, aside from the yellow dress and the baseball bat. When I think of Lemonade, I don’t think of really Jay-Z. As an artist, she’s just leaps and bounds beyond anyone. I mean, just as an artist, how many visual albums can you think of that have permeated pop culture and been so popular and been event viewing? None. Nakkiah: Also, I think saying it’s a revenge album really takes away from the power of black feminism that she portrayed with the visual album. And so, I see it more as a reclamation album than a revenge album. I wouldn’t even frame it as a revenge album because that centres her husband when really this was more about, I think the word empowerment is overused, but it was more about her journey and her experience of betrayal and looking at the roots of it and how she got herself through and then happened to be able to reconcile with her husband. Moderator: Is there a revenge album as good as Lemonade? But, yes, having a Sasha Fierce persona would be incredible. I think when I’m at my most articulate is when I’m being fuelled by frustration or anger so being in a public-facing setting is draining for the psyche, but effective. But I just find myself not feeling genuine at all. I’ve tried the whole ‘think of somebody, try and be somebody else’ or I quite often look at my partner, who’s a white male, and he’s so confident and I’m like, ‘try and have that confidence’. When I go on stage, it’s definitely not the sharpest, most confident version of me. Nakkiah: I think I’m kind of the opposite of that. Roxane: I don’t know that I have an alter ego, but I do know that when I go on stage, certainly it’s the sharpest sort of most confident version of myself.īeyonce pictured in a scene from her visual album Lemonade. Moderator: Beyonce has an on-stage alter ego named Sasha Fierce. It mostly started, I would say, probably 10 years ago and with each year, she just gets progressively more powerful and more in control of her image. I think Beyonce reached her limit and realised that she finally had enough power in the industry where she simply did not have to put up with any of that. Young pop stars have to give all of themselves and withstand all kinds of stupid interviews and stupid questions and misogyny. That’s an interesting choice and more than that, you have to be incredibly powerful to pull it off, especially as a woman and as a black woman. When she does interviews, she controls everything about them. She rarely speaks, she rarely does interviews. She only mediates her public image through image.
I also think she’s an interesting businesswoman. This is an edited extract of their conversation.
For Nakkiah, it was ultimate library pal Hermione Granger from the Harry Potter series the powerhouse performers that are The Sapphires and Vladimir Nabokov’s thought-provoking Lolita. Roxane chose the ultimate Queen B (aka Beyonce) the fierce Katniss Everdeen from The Hunger Games trilogy and the casually cool Denise Huxtable played by Lisa Bonet in The Cosby Show. Writers Roxane Gay and Nakkiah Lui were tasked with picking three women from pop culture who had shaped them.
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