How Beyoncé got ahead of the story and owned her heartbreak

Beyoncé is one of the most famous people in the world. She’s so mysterious in how she d-rops her music (suddenly) and interacts with the media (she doesn’t) that it’s easy to forget she’s a human. When celebrities reach those levels of exposure, they cease to seem like people and more like representations of themselves.

Celebrities have always had public relations people, and they’ve always chosen when, and whe-re, and with whom to do the requisite interviews when they release a new album, movie, or book. But the most important press comes when they need to do damage control. Marriage falling apart? Get out in front of the story. Deny it. Admit it. Grant a tell-all. After Ben Affleck and Jennifer Garner’s marriage fell apart, Garner gave The Post-Divorce Interview to Vanity Fair, in which she came across as a relatable American woman with a broken heart and a resolve to move on with her life. 

It’s impossible to know whether this was the image Garner was hoping to present, but it’s the one the writer chose to put forth. Celebrities lose control of their stories, to a certain extent, when they tell them to a third party. 

With Lemonade, Beyoncé rewrote the rules. She made a polished statement of an album whose storyline is, “My very famous husband cheated on me and I am at once heartbroken, livid, and still very much in love with him.”

At least that’s been the public takeaway. Neither Beyoncé nor Jay Z have explicitly said that that’s what happened, so no one has any idea if Jay Z actually cheated on her. Her album is, after all, art. There’s a chance none of it is true.

But with the messaging of this album and the in-sertion of home video footage of him during the album’s one song of forgiveness, All Night, she really seems to be implying it.

In 2013, Beyoncé stopped giving print interviews. Until last Saturday, she hasn’t tweeted since then, either. Three years of silence, during which her only communication had been through her music. She released BEYONCÉ in 2013, her first visual album. In it, she and Jay Z dance on the beach together in Drunk in Love, appearing to marvel at how they get to wake up in the kitchen with their beautiful family and their incredible life. They were perfect, Queen Bey and America’s self-proclaimed king, watching their thrones together.

But divorce rumors started swirling around the pair when footage of Knowles’ sister accosting Jay Z in an elevator hit the web in 2014. There was a hubbub. Some of us — myself included — refused to believe there could be serious trouble in the royal marriage. The gossip subsided. We continued as we were.

Recently, the rumors started swirling again. Jay Z had cheated. Or hadn’t he? If Lemonade is to be believed, Beyoncé herself tells us that he had.

If this is true, the album is an incredible way to tell the story. If she’d been someone else, maybe Beyoncé would’ve gone in front of the media — granting an exclusive interview and trusting producers or a writer with telling what happened. But there are only so many narratives the media typically allows a woman after a cheating scandal: There’s the good wife, who downplays the drama and the pain and says she’s going to stand by her husband. There’s the angry woman who chooses to leave. There’s the woman who denies it all.

What’s harder to do through the traditional press is tell the story as it happened, with all the messy emotions and the ultimate decision to stick together. 

So Beyoncé did it herself. She released a powerhouse of an album, a tour de force of musical prowess — what I believe is her best, most versatile, impressive, and impeccably produced piece of work — in which she owns her narrative. The visual components are dynamic and breathtaking. It’s very real, too. As a woman, I identified with the feelings of anger, power, and pain her relationship caused her. “What’s worse, lookin’ jealous or crazy?” she sings, making fun of the very tropes she’d have to choose f-rom as a woman who’d been cheated on. Find me a woman who hasn’t felt stuck between the intersection of jealous and crazy, and then hated that those two options were what society had distilled her complicated emotions to.

Through her art, Beyoncé seems to be more honest than most celebrities ever are when it comes to talking about their personal lives. She didn’t have to tell a reporter or interviewer about the smashed plates on the counter of the the kitchen she once couldn’t believe she was lucky enough to wake up in. She didn’t have to tell them she lay in bed sweating. She tells us herself.

Therefore, each lyric, each moment, carries equal weight and is granted equal time. No one edited her words, and while we can take away what we want, imagine our own emphasis, it’s all there in her voice. With the wide variation in the style of songs — f-rom country, to screamy rock, to soulful R&B — her voice is the one constant, the thing that holds it all together.

A cynic could argue that, if it’s true, Lemonade is just damage control. Well, if it is true and it is damage control, it’s beautiful damage control. If this is PR masked as art, then it is moving, gorgeous PR that I cannot stop listening to and that has made me weep.

So often the lives of celebrities get watered down and filtered out. We forget they’re real as we watch them move about in the perimeters of their pedestals. Lemonade proved that Beyoncé is at once on the highest pedestal of them all and that she’s deeply human. “I’m not too perfect to ever feel this worthless,” she sings.

On Saturday night, Beyoncé tweeted for the first time in three years. All it was was the link to the album. Which was everything.