Beyonce's Black Southern 'Formation' - Rolling Stone

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Beyonce's Black
Southern 'Formation'
Her latest video and Super Bowl performance center some of America's most
marginalized groups

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/beyonces-black-southern-formation-20160208[1/12/2018 4:37:35 PM]

Beyonce's Black Southern 'Formation' - Rolling Stone

Beyonce's entrance at the Super Bowl 50 halftime show nodded to the iconic style of the Black Panther Party.
Harry How/Getty

By
Zandria F. Robinson
February 8, 2016

Announced by a small all-women drum line contingent, 30 black

women, led by Beyoncé, appeared in formation at the halftime of the
50th Superbowl. Their style marked a different 50th anniversary, with
the afros, black berets and leather commonly associated with the Black
Panther Party for Self Defense, founded in Oakland in October 1966.
For their 90 seconds on the field before joining Bruno Mars and
Coldplay on stage, Beyoncé and her complement of dancers used
widely recognizable imagery of black empowerment, even raising
clenched fists in unison, to reinforce the messages of black pride in
"Formation" – the surprise single and video Beyoncé released on
Saturday afternoon, which has us still sweeping pieces of a broken
Internet into our collective dustpans.

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Yet along with this easily discernible symbol of a national black justice
movement, one like today's movement, Beyoncé nodded in particular
towards the South and her southern heritage. It was the Black Panther
Party in Lowndes County, Alabama, also known as the Lowndes County
Freedom Organization, that inspired the founding of the Oakland-based
group with which we are now familiar. As Beyoncé reminds us in the
lead-up to one of the hooks on "Formation," her father and mother's
respective Alabama and Louisiana backgrounds begot her – a "Texas
Bama" who likes her daughter's "baby hair" to be in an afro, who prefers
her partner's nose with "Jackson Five nostrils," and who keeps hot

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/beyonces-black-southern-formation-20160208[1/12/2018 4:37:35 PM]

Beyonce's Black Southern 'Formation' - Rolling Stone

sauce in her bag in case of criminal under-seasoning or an unexpected

fish fry. Even on a national stage, Beyoncé brought the black South,
and its formation, into the conversation.

Beyoncé has a long history of using her pop platform to make her
regional birthright explicit. For 2008's "Single Ladies", she drew on
choreography inspired by Jackson State University's Prancing J-Settes.
The Houston screw sound was central to 2013's "Bow Down/I Been
On", on which she tells us that she snuck and listened to UGK, ate
boudin in the parking lot and wore dookey braids. Later that same year,
"No Angel" was a visual love letter to a gritty black Houston. Through
this work, Beyoncé has quietly built her position in global pop by
claiming and accomplishing a black southern specificity, albeit one
largely contained on the margins of how she presents herself as an
artist.

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/beyonces-black-southern-formation-20160208[1/12/2018 4:37:35 PM]

Beyonce's Black Southern 'Formation' - Rolling Stone

Beyoncé sits on a sinking New Orleans police car in her "Formation" video, in an image that echoes the violent impact of
Hurricane Katrina.

But the video for "Formation" does not settle for restrained allusions to
black southern identity or an easy conversion of black southern into
black American. In her latest work, Beyoncé opts to tell a sweeping
history of her southern identity and the black South writ large, bringing
the weight of black New Orleans, past and present, and black women's
and queer black men's cultures to the task. The voices of black queer
artists Messy Mya and Big Freedia provide opening context and
guidance for the formation of country, southern black identity. Women
sit in parlors fanning themselves carefully and twirling umbrellas,

https://www.rollingstone.com/music/features/beyonces-black-southern-formation-20160208[1/12/2018 4:37:35 PM]

Beyonce's Black Southern 'Formation' - Rolling Stone

reminiscent of the sartorial splendor of black New Orleans. There are

grand gestures to conjure work, from little girls' play circles to a little boy
conducting a line of police. Mardi Gras and second line imagery pepper
the video, offering a celebration of the city that accounts for the black
and indigenous cultures that created and sustain it through their labor.
The majorette choreographic styling reflects black southern parade and
club cultures, as drum majors march and bounce dancers twerk. From
the parlor to the street, the black South slays in rhythm and formation.

Through its affirmation of the culture, resistance and resilience of black

southerners, and the slaying of black women and black queer men in
particular, Beyoncé's "Formation" asks us to remember the dire
circumstances of racial violence – Jim Crow, Hurricane Katrina and
police brutality among them – that have shaped black life in America.
She centers the voices and visuals of black women and queer black
people so that they can give and get in-formation and bring the roots of
current black justice movements into view. In so doing, "Formation"
makes unprecedented use of a pop platform to recognize some of our
nation's most marginalized groups and tell an important story about the
black South and black America.

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