“Beyoncé Didn’t Go to College, But Homecoming Is Her Graduation - The Cut” plus 2 more |
- Beyoncé Didn’t Go to College, But Homecoming Is Her Graduation - The Cut
- Beyoncé’s Underwear Designer Once Had a Boring Desk Job - The Cut
- Beyoncé Honors Meghan Markle in Beautifully Beyoncé Fashion - The Cut
| Beyoncé Didn’t Go to College, But Homecoming Is Her Graduation - The Cut Posted: 18 Apr 2019 12:00 AM PDT  Beyoncé at Coachella. Photo: Courtesy of Parkwood Entertainment/Netflix A year after she delivered a Coachella performance so epic the whole 2018 festival was given the moniker "Beychella," Netflix dropped Homecoming: A Film by Beyoncé. For the past year, only bootlegs of the performance existed, but the Beyoncé-directed concert doc, which gloriously melds together both of her Coachella weekend sets, finally brings us all to the pyramid-shaped stage that was so iconic festival organizers displayed it again this year. (Yes, Beyoncé is such an icon that her stage, without her on it, is worth a visit.) Beychella celebrated America's historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs), and the annual homecoming that brings alumni back to them each fall, filling the streets with beautiful, smart, black people. It's a week of football games, marching bands, and step-dancing routines so intricate that they rival any choreography on Broadway. Black sororities and fraternities proudly wear their colors and do dance routines that go back to the early 1900s. In the film, Beyoncé talks about growing up in the shadow of Prairie View A & M University in Texas (established in 1876, just 13 years after the Emancipation Proclamation, it is one of the nation's oldest HBCUs) and about seeing Coachella as her own homecoming to the stage after the difficult birth of her twins. Howard's homecoming website describes the event as "that intense excitement and happiness you get when you come home and reconnect. It's Black love. It's steeped in excellence, truth and service." That description is as apt as any for what Beyoncé's Coachella performance and Homecoming documentary are about as well. But for me, Homecoming was not just a tribute to the world of HBCUs and black love and excellence, it is a tribute to something I've come to consider and appreciate deeply: the education of Beyoncé Knowles-Carter. For the last month I've been on book tour for a collection of essays I edited: Queen Bey: A Celebration of the Power and Creativity of Beyoncé Knowles-Carter. It's been striking to me, when I've done radio interviews and talks, how many people question the singer's intelligence. They call in to the station or they raise their hands at events and say, "She's pretty, but…" "She can sing, but…" Lord knows, Beyoncé doesn't need me to defend her (the Beyhive is fierce), but again and again, I would say, Come on now … If you listen to her music, if you follow her Instagram, if you watch the visuals that accompany the music, you know that she's more than intelligent. And she's self-educated. When she quotes poets like Warsan Shire or the novelist Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, you know that she's not just saying the words. She's read the books. And when she puts those quotes into her music, it's like a speakeasy book club that makes you want to read these books too. You don't even get five minutes into Homecoming before Beyoncé quotes Toni Morrison, and then later on, Alice Walker and W. E. B. Du Bois, while also noting the schools they attended (Howard, Spelman, and Fisk, respectively). Throughout the Homecoming Bey celebrates the vaulted temples of education that produced some of the world's greatest minds, while acknowledging that college is something that she missed out on. "I always dreamed of going to an HBCU," she says. "My college was Destiny's Child. My college was traveling around the world and life was my teacher." But what I saw in the film, through the references she makes, through the way she studies her craft as well as the histories and people who shaped the culture, is how much she believes that you can live in a black world and never want for genius. When I was in college in the late '80s and early '90s, black work was still seen as outside the canon. But by the late '90s/early 2000s, people like Toni Morrison were the American canon. People no longer believed that you only have to read white authors to be well-read. We have Morrison and Adichie and Zadie Smith and from them we get a Beyoncé: someone who was taught to be and is unapologetically black. As I was putting together the Queen Bey book, while authors like Luvvie Ajayi, Brittney Cooper, and Michael Eric Dyson, said yes right away, there were writers who turned me down. One writer said, "What is there to say, in a book, about Beyoncé?" I remember so well, sitting in the quad at Stanford University, where I was teaching at the time, talking on the phone to an older author who declared that Beyoncé had failed black people by not going to college when for generations black people had exalted education as a means to uplift the race. "She had the means and the time," this writer said. I argued then as I continue to do now, that it was clear she had devised a helluva independent study of art, literature, and history and infused that into her work. In 2014, Beyoncé and Jay-Z took a private tour of the Louvre and posted a photo of themselves standing in front of the Mona Lisa. In 2018, the couple returned to the museum, to shoot the video for their song, "Apeshit". Bey's fans have come to love how she mixes high art with low art, the rarified with the political, and "Apeshit" was no different. Only Beyoncé could sing lyrics like this in one of the most revered art institutions in the world: "She a thot that you claim / Can't be topping my reign / Sipping my favorite alcohol / Got me so lit, I need Tylenol / All of my people I free 'em all." The Louvre responded by creating a special Beyoncé and Jay-Z guided tour of the museum and fans from all over the world, showed up and showed out. Due largely to the Carters, the Louvre broke attendance records in 2018, 10.2 million people visited the museum that year, more than a 25 percent bump over the previous year, and more than half a million visitors more than the museum's highest attendance records ever. Beyoncé brought the Louvre to the world. Similarly, while Beyoncé didn't go to college, she brought college to Coachella. And now because of Homecoming, the text of those colleges and universities, the on-campus experience of going to those schools will live forever. Somebody give this woman an honorary degree so we can start calling her doctor, the way we did with our beloved Dr. Maya Angelou. There's a Wyclef Jean lyric where he says, "You're looking at my watch, but my mind is the diamond." I thought of that when I watched Homecoming. So many people stop at the beauty of her physicality. But trust, her mind is the diamond. Veronica Chambers is the editor of Queen Bey: A Celebration of the Creativity and Power of Beyoncé Knowles-Carter. You can follow her on Twitter and Instagram: @vvchambers |
| Beyoncé’s Underwear Designer Once Had a Boring Desk Job - The Cut Posted: 19 Mar 2019 12:00 AM PDT  Ade Hassan and Beyoncé. Photo-Illustration: by Stevie Remsberg; Photo: Getty, Courtesy of Ade Hassan Get That Money is an exploration of the many ways we think about our finances — what we earn, what we have, and what we want. In Payday, we talk to notable women about making it big for the first time. British-born Ade Hassan launched Nubian Skin, her line of skin-toned undergarments for women of color, in 2014. Her first campaign went viral, and orders from Asos and Nordstrom quickly followed. Two years later, Beyoncé was wearing Nubian Skin for her "Formation" tour, and in 2017, Queen Elizabeth II awarded Hassan an MBE (Member of the Most Excellent Order of the British Empire) for services to fashion, a title she shares with Adele. (Prince William himself presented her the medal.) It's a series of explosive accomplishments, but it certainly hasn't seemed that way, according to Hassan. Here, she explains the moments when it finally felt like she'd made it. Before I founded Nubian Skin, I worked in finance. When I was in school, someone said, "Oh yeah, people in finance make loads of money," and I was like, brilliant. That sounds great. This was before the recession, and finance was sort of the hot thing to do. If you were smart and did well in school, you could get a job in banking. And I was like, "Well, I'm smart." In the back of my head I knew I wanted to do something creative, something more independent, but I had to get finance out of my system and see what all the fuss was about. After a few years, when I was 25 and it was the height of the financial crisis, I decided to take a year off to live in Paris. People thought it was mad to quit my job during the recession, but I thought, well, this is the time. It wasn't actually scary, because I made a significant amount of money in banking, so I had a lot saved up for a 25-year-old. I had the funds to do it. I took intensive French lessons and learned to sew. At the end of that year, I came back to London and was like, Rubbish, I need to find a job. I tried management consulting, but it really wasn't for me. Six months in, I thought, What do I actually want to do for a business? And that's when I came up with the idea for Nubian Skin. I realized pretty quickly I'd need more money to launch a company, so I went back into finance, because I knew I could make more money more quickly there than in most other jobs. I did that for three more years, saving the whole time. When we were starting Nubian Skin, I made a lot of mistakes and, to be honest, wasted a lot of money. I didn't have experience in the industry, and that lack of confidence led to me spending money on consultants. Some of them were brilliant, some of them were not. Still, there wasn't much time to worry about the company failing because I was so excited. We did a photo shoot for the first campaign and it went viral; all of a sudden, we had a mailing list of 20,000 people and didn't even have product yet. It was madness after that. We needed to get this to market: go, go, go! Financially, our first big win was when Nordstrom approached us at a trade show and placed their first order. It totally changed the game. I was like, now I can pay my bills! I can cover all my costs for the next few months, and I can definitely pay my one employee! It was a huge relief, and a major point in the business getting off the ground. One day in 2016, we got an email: "I'm Beyoncé's stylist. We love your brand, we love what you're doing, we'd love for you to do the underwear for the 'Formation' tour. Let us know if you'd like to collaborate." I was like, that's a scam. Someone's messing with us and trying to get free underwear. I have a few friends in the fashion industry, though, so I thought I'd double-check. I forwarded them the email and one responds, "I know him! That's legit! You have to respond immediately." So we sent off an email saying, "Of course we'd love to work together," and then played Beyoncé nonstop in the office for hours. We really couldn't believe it. "Formation" was this massive thing, with all this amazing imagery, especially as it spoke to black womanhood. To be a part of that was phenomenal. We didn't publicize it until images of the tour started coming in, and we could basically see our stuff through the sheer outfits. We emailed her stylist to say, "Is that what we think it is?" And he said, "100 percent." We could shout about it a bit, because we had photographic evidence. It was one of those moments where you take a step back and you're like, literally one of the biggest pop stars in the world knows about my brand, and that's pretty sick. You've made some sort of impact, and an impact in a useful way. Because she is a superstar, and this is something that she needs. That's more the perspective: "Wow, we're clearly doing something important if somebody this renowned knows about it and uses it." At some point in 2017, a letter for me arrived at my parents' flat. My sister was there and she was like, "I think you might have done something bad. Or maybe good? There's a letter here from 'Her Majesty's Services.'" I thought she meant Her Majesty's Revenue and Customs, which is the tax agency. I hadn't sent in my tax return and thought I probably had to pay a fine. I asked her, "Can you just open it and tell me how much I owe?" She wrote back a series of "OMG"s. I said, "Oh, is it a big fine?" Then she sent me a screenshot of this letter, and it said, "You've been nominated to receive an MBE for services to fashion." I burst into tears. One, I was not expecting that! Two, I have those moments of thinking, "This is really hard. Is it even appreciated?" Then you get something like that and you're like, "Wow. This has made an impact, and it's pretty amazing." When those moments come, like with the Queen and Beyoncé, it's such a high. Then it's like, right, well this is great, but I've got to get back to work. The outside perception is: This is the gravy train, everything must be going so well. There must be a massive machine behind it, when really it's just not. Those big victories are amazing and fun but ultimately they're little blips in a pretty tough slog. We're past the point of proving the concept for our business — we know it works. Now we're asking, "How do we give the customers more of what they want?" The next steps are growing the range, which I'm excited about, and potentially fundraising. It's really hard to do this completely bootstrapped, trying to play with the big boys. |
| Beyoncé Honors Meghan Markle in Beautifully Beyoncé Fashion - The Cut Posted: 20 Feb 2019 12:00 AM PST  Beyoncé and Jay-Z weren't able to make it across the pond to accept their 2019 Brit Award for Best International Group. So instead they filmed a little video to say thank you, in the style of their iconic "Apesh*t" video shot at the Louvre. But rather than posing in front of the Mona Lisa in Paris, they stood in front of an original portrait of Meghan Markle. In a post on Instagram showing her and Jay beside the portrait, Beyoncé wrote, "In honor of Black History Month, we bow down to one of our Melanated Monas. Congrats on your pregnancy! We wish you so much joy." Beyoncé elaborated on her choice to honor Markle during her and Jay's acceptance speech on a section of her website called #WeGood, created specifically to honor black cultural figures during Black History Month. "Today we're pleased to honor Meghan Markle, Duchess of Sussex. Meghan's background as a film and tv actress has allowed her to use her platform for good. Meghan's charitable work in communities of color began years before becoming the Duchess of Sussex," the post reads. "At the wedding her culture was front and center, and she and Prince Harry have continued to push the race relations dialogue forward both near and far." Many people were moved by Beyoncé's choice to honor Meghan this way — especially given the treatment the duchess has dealt with since she and Prince Harry were married last May. The American duchess has endured months of endless harassment and insults from British tabloids. It got so bad in recent months that even George Clooney took time to speak out about the treatment of the duchess. The Carters have become the next American celebrities to show the duchess their support. Appreciation from a global superstar and icon is always nice, but recognition that looked not only at her status as British royalty, but also as someone dedicated to humanitarian work is really the highest honor one can receive from Beyoncé. A perfect baby-shower gift for Meghan Markle. |
| You are subscribed to email updates from "beyonce queen,beyonce quiz,beyonce red carpet" - Google News. To stop receiving these emails, you may unsubscribe now. | Email delivery powered by Google |
| Google, 1600 Amphitheatre Parkway, Mountain View, CA 94043, United States | |
0 Yorumlar