I have been watching Lemonade, the visual component to Beyoncé’s new album, and wondering wistfully why most mainstream movies released nowadays aren’t as interesting as this: part music video, part multimedia happening-slash-confessional. Crazy, audacious, exciting and mad.
No big-screen superhero is as scary as the superheroine of Lemonade, incidentally venting her genuine social anger: an aria on the theme of racism and injustice. I like the disturbing scenes where Beyoncé takes a baseball bat to various cars, wielding her own kind of counter-phallic rage, angry at the reported infidelity of her husband, Jay-Z. Has she forgiven him? Conditionally?
Is the fact her album is streaming on Tidal – Jay-Z’s own subscription service – evidence that the whole thing is a stitch-up? I have no idea, but the contorted marital-commercial dynamic only makes it more intriguing; and co-ownership of the delirious Lemonade adventure just reminds Jay-Z of how very much he has to lose in a divorce.
If it’s starry and self-indulgent, well, I’m reminded of how my teenage self felt on hearing the Clash’s ferocious single Complete Control in 1977: a whinge about how they were treated by their label – but nevertheless, fantastically exciting.
And as for the title, I guess it means life has handed Beyoncé the lemon of marital pain, from which she has made the lemonade of music. It also reminds me of Lemonade, the title of the fictional children’s story written by the hero of Ian McEwan’s novel The Child in Time – intimately disturbing and violent. I think I have just become a member of the Beyhive.
A tunnel vision for London
In 2004 the author AN Wilson wrote a book on the capital, in which he devoted a chapter to “Silly London”: the way the city in the new century became a home to political and architectural follies such as the Millennium Dome (since repurposed as the O2 Arena).
Perhaps the chapter will have to be rewritten to encompass the history of the Arcelor Mittal Orbit tower in the Olympic park. Anish Kapoor, the Turner prizewinner who designed the tower, has revealed that London’s mayor, Boris Johnson, has been pressuring him to include a feature to maximise visitor revenue: a 178-metre tunnel slide designed by the experimental artist Carsten Höller, like those at children’s soft-play centres, and like the slides Höller designed for Tate Modern’s Turbine Hall and the Hayward Gallery. It does sound very silly.
And yet maybe the secret of the tower’s future success is to embrace its Disneyland silliness and consider it a place for childish – or childlike – fun.
The great American lingo-off
Days after President Obama entered the Brexit debate Ted Cruz, who hopes to replace him, has countered by saying that if he were in the White House “Britain would be at the front of the queue” for a US trade deal – even if we vote to leave the European Union.
Cruz is entitled to his view, but his use of our word “queue”, like the president’s, is slightly heartsinking. We use American words more unselfconsciously: the super-British TV show Bake-Off smoothly appropriated the American “-off” phrase, meaning contest, and now it’s as if the term has always tripped off the tongues of Britons of every age.
I don’t think Obama’s use of our word “queue” means the script was written by No 10. It’s just that Barack and Ted, like many Americans of a certain age, take a delight in their ability to speak our quaint lingo, like someone repeatedly and mystifyingly talking about the “bobbies” he saw at Stratford-upon-Avon.
