11/5/2016 Beyoncé’s True Political Statement This Week? It Wasn’t at a Clinton Rally - The New York Times
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MUSIC Beyoncé’s True Political Statement This Week? It Wasn’t at a Clinton Rally
By WESLEY MORRIS NOV. 5, 2016 I feel bad for anyone who still hasn’t learned to speak Beyoncé. Her language is the body. It’s stagecraft. It’s Instagram posts. She doesn’t speak; she signifies. And her performance on Friday at a Hillary Clinton rally in Cleveland won excitement and dismay over the possibility that she had reached some partisan peak by announcing that she was officially “with her.”
But anyone who caught her appearance on Wednesday at the 50th annual Country Music Association Awards in Nashville knew that while Friday might have been, for Mrs. Clinton, strategically necessary, it was also politically anticlimactic. Beyoncé had already been with her — three of them, in fact. Partway through the broadcast, she arrived flanked by the Dixie Chicks, a trio of once insanely popular, then absurdly disgraced musicians who keep on going anyway. Together, they did a version of Beyoncé’s twangy scorcher “Daddy Lessons,” with a little of the Dixie Chicks’ “Long Time Gone” woven in toward the end. As polemical television, it was powerfully sly.
The Cleveland show — which also featured Beyoncé’s husband, Jay Z, and Chance the Rapper — reeked of a kind of political desperation. (The Clinton campaign hopes to get more young people and black people to the polls on Election Day.) But Beyoncé diverged from desperate. In four numbers, she made a show of earnestness. “We have to think about the future of our daughters, our sons, and vote for someone who believes in them as much as we do,” she said, outfitted in a dark polka-dot pantsuit. Her dancers wore blue trousers, which is to say she made a show of slacks.
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