White People Lose Their Minds Over The Blackness Of Beyoncé’s ‘Formation’ In This Brilliant ‘SNL’ Skit
"Maybe this song...isn't for us."
Beyoncé managed to pull off a formidable twofer last week, dropping her latest single ‘Formation’ the day before her headlining performance at the Super Bowl. As others have extensively written on already, ‘Formation’ is a celebration of being black, Southern and female, while the video references the Black Lives Matter movement and Louisiana post-Hurricane Katrina.
The song, as well as her subsequent Super Bowl performance which invoked Michael Jackson and the Black Panthers, was met with a fair degree of hysteria from mainly white media commentators seemingly upset that something in the world has been made without them in mind. Andrew Bolt, everyone’s go-to source of perspective for all things racial, penned a column based on the supremely shaky assumption that anyone cares what a middle-aged Australian conservative thinks about Beyoncé’s newest song, and his American counterparts have been labouring under the same delusion.
Artist’s impression.
Saturday Night Live set out to capture the tenor of this overreaction in their latest episode, and to convey just how ridiculous it really is, went with the most melodramatic medium in existence: the trailer for a Hollywood disaster movie.
“Maybe this song…isn’t for us,” a deeply confused Bobby Moynihan wonders, while a distraught Cecily Strong shrieking: “but usually everything is!” The Day Beyoncé Turned Black captures one of white America’s darker fears that the ‘Formation’ nontroversy encapsulated: the fear of losing cultural and political primacy-by-default.