On Beyoncé

What happens when your delusions of grandeur are not delusions; when you accrue the talent, resources, and courage to execute any dream or vision you possess, and there will invariably be an audience from which detractors will be cast as lunatics or heretics, fanatics as voices of reason, the willfully indifferent as lacking in imagination and joie de vivre, and grandeur itself will be defined by your whims? Beyoncé is some of what happens; she’s one of the last bastions of the wilting American dream, as pedestalized, scrutinized, criticized, and territorialized as Elvis and Michael Jackson, and, like them, often blamed for entrancing fans with more spectacle than substance. This is her fate, that of all who become pop cultural legends, and that of the nation. She opens Cowboy Carter, the second chapter of her Renaissance trilogy, with a ballad titled “Ameriican Requiem,” appropriating an ambivalent nationalism that constantly appropriates or scapegoats her as its greatest cultural export, arbiter of a transnational zeitgeist reliant on black performance for collective repentance. Bey renews shared vows of grandeur (hers and the nation’s) by lending them an icy macabre veneer, which she melts and reverse-engineers for the album’s duration.