I can very clearly remember in 1993 the first time I heard Robin S.’s “Show Me Love.” I felt moved.

It wasn’t just me. The infectious groove and Black gospel diva delivery filled dance havens across New York City (where I had become a studied and serious house head) and all over the country. It had us all doing our best house moves on the dance floor as we loudly sang along to the lyrics of the anthem, still considered, by many, to be the last great song of the golden age of the house and dance movement.

In the late ’80s, it seemed everyone was into this music. There was so much going on: inflation, a global AIDS pandemic, gender discrimination and racial strife, and government failure and corruption. The dance floor was a place to sweat it all out. Inflected with house music, it became a truly liberatory space that Black women and queer folks of color were the key architects of.

Now, as we’re faced with similar societal crises—rampant inflation, the COVID pandemic, racial, political, and social disunity—one of the biggest stars on the planet is bringing it back. Beyoncé’s first single, “Break My Soul,” off of her multi-part project, Renaissance, out tomorrow, heavily samples “Show Me Love,” using house and dance to speak directly and irreverently to the moment.

Beyoncé has long established herself in the tradition of what I term “Black female cool,” a historical line of Black women artists whose cultural production and social engagement have reflected both the Black woman’s unique interior self and external struggles. The singer is known for raising feminist themes and spotlighting challenges to Black life, such as police brutality and women’s inequality.

From her headlining Coachella performance, which included over 100 Black performers in the marching band military formation of historically Black colleges and universities (HBCUs), to her homages to the South, Beyoncé draws on and salutes Black tradition. She speaks to and for Black women. She has also given queer culture its due when many artists failed to directly acknowledge its substantial popular imprint. Now, with Renaissance, she is purposefully reaching back to the unsung Black divas of dance, who, in tough times, were continuously signaling pathways to freedom in their verses.

Beyoncé is drawing not only on the sound, but also the aesthetics and ethos of liberation fostered by her dance forebearers. This legacy includes Loleatta Holloway, whose song “Love Sensation” became the foundation of vocal and musical sampling in early house; Jocelyn Brown, whose “Somebody Else’s Guy” was a blueprint for ’80s dance music formula; and gender-defying icon Sylvester, whose “Do You Wanna Funk?” was a lesson in transformative angelic funk. This says nothing of their many formidable contemporaries, such as Gwen Guthrie and Alicia Myers or the many seminal DJs of house, such as Larry Levan and Frankie Knuckles who ascended from vibrant Black gay nightclubs. The starkly segregated homophobic music landscape kept the majority of these singers and DJs from true breakout success, despite the fact that they were laying the groundwork for the genre for little money or credit.

Then came ’90s pop, which got a firm stranglehold on dance. It had already killed disco and was now stalking its progeny, house. With it, the national airwaves brought the boil to an easy simmer, extracting more accessible club music from the unapologetic strongly queered and Black diva dominated genres of house and underground dance. As pop ascended, house lost its fleeting moment of commercial emergence—one of the reasons Robin S.’s song that broke through in ’93 was such a pleasant reminder of the truly liberatory space that house and dance of that era embodied.

Renaissance is taking from all these threads and transporting us all back to the spirit of house once again, while also reminding us that the production of dance music never stopped. It’s continued and multiplied in forms, such as bounce, a fusion of dance and southern Hip Hop with a strong queer base, developed out in New Orleans. “Break My Soul” has this legacy, too, with queer bounce artist Big Freedia’s song “Explode” sampled in the track. It’s all a reminder that house is still a refuge that can transport us mentally and physically away through boogie. As Beyoncé said of her new album: “my intention was to create a safe place, a place without judgment. A place to be free of perfectionism and overthinking. A place to scream, release, feel freedom.” She adds, “I hope you find joy in this music.”

Beyond labor and social discord, “Break My Soul,” is about liberty, the freedom of thought, spirit, and movement. It gives some sustenance to our souls, as it simultaneously illuminates the looming economic and political forces surrounding all of our bodies. As Beyoncé sings, “You won’t break my soul … I just fell in love, And I just quit my job, I’m gonna find new drive … I’m takin’ my new salvation … I’ma build my own foundation …”  This message of finding freedom outside the economic and political structures conjures the legacy of the house and dance movement.

Scores of people rethought their lives and the meaning of personal happiness during the COVID-19 lockdown. From spikes in break-ups and divorces to wild relocations to the Great Resignation (the high number of people who voluntarily resigned from their jobs during this pandemic), many were attempting to find or reconstruct bliss, even momentarily. This included big moves by women, people of color, and those at the bottom of the economic ladder. Inequity was made even more visible as the world concentrated the burden on their backs. Beyoncé speaks their language when she says that their soul, that spiritual core of who you are, is intact and will not be broken.

In these times, one answer to the question “where can freedom be found?” is “where we last left it”—on the dance floor. I am not talking a girls’ night out here. I’m referencing the holy state of being that pure music can illicit. Be it disco, house, bounce, or some other dance club genre. Dancing for the sake of dancing. It’s that “come as you are” crowd feeling that accompanied house and ’80s dance—eclectic club kids spanning all genders and sexual orientations from downtown mixed with those from uptown wearing baggy jeans and extra clean sneakers, and middle-aged white men in business suits from midtown—which may be just what the world needs right now.

The ‘Come As You Are’ Playlist:

The post Beyoncé’s Dance Floor Liberation appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

The bordello scenes in the video recall famous photographs from Storyville, New Orleans’s notorious red-light district, which flourished from 1898 to 1917. And while the song is clearly about Beyoncé, the persona she embodies in it resonates with an earlier iconic black female: Lulu White, the self-styled “Diamond Queen” of New Orleans’s turn-of-the-century demimonde. Knowing Lulu White’s story helps us see Beyoncé’s artistic creation within a complex historical framework, for in it are woven together threads of American history: stories of sexual slavery and prostitution; revolution and exile; and, not least, capitalism and the American Dream.

Lulu White was the most notorious madam in Storyville. She earned fame and fortune as the “handsomest octoroon” in the South, and her bordello, Mahogany Hall, featured “octoroon” prostitutes for the pleasure of wealthy white men during one of America’s most virulently—and violently—racist periods. It was also the dawn of consumer culture and the beginning of modern advertising. Thus, Lulu White crafted a persona for herself through stories that had long circulated in New Orleans; she repackaged those stories to create what today we would recognize as her brand.

The first story in White’s compendium was that of the “tragic octoroon.” The word “octoroon” describes a person who is seven parts white, and one part black. By the 1890s, the female octoroon was already a stock character in literature, having entered public discourse as part of antislavery efforts to highlight the moral and sexual depravity of the South. The label “octoroon” actually told a story about the women it described: in it their fathers were always white, and the “black” (enslaved) mothers always got successively lighter, finally producing a white-looking “octoroon.” Even in spite of paternal wishes, their daughters remained in slavery, where their light skin added to their value in the sexual slave market. The octoroon often takes her own life rather than submit—hence the “tragedy.”

The most famous abolitionist novel featured the “tragic octoroon” trope. In Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe described Eliza as the picture of feminine perfection, with her “rich, full dark eye,” “long lashes,” and “ripples of long silky black hair.” The reader encounters Eliza through the eyes of a visiting slave trader. “The brown of her complexion gave way on the cheek to a perceptible flush, which deepened as she saw the gaze of the strange man fixed upon her in bold and undisguised admiration.” The trader offers to sell Eliza in the New Orleans slave market. In spite of the “brown of her complexion,” she was fair enough to pass. “You would scarcely know the woman from a white one,” remarks one of the characters.

Even as stories of tragic octoroons protested slavery, they reinscribed “race.” Neither “octoroon” nor other terms, like “mulatta” or “quadroon,” were meant to be precise; the point was “one drop” of “black blood” producing something hidden deep under white skin. This played into a prevailing 19th-century stereotype of upper-class white ladies as sexually pure, pious, and submissive; black women, free or enslaved, were imagined as the opposite—sexually passionate and depraved. The very word octoroon evokes white male racial and sexual domination over several generations, with a prurient twist. The octoroon’s dormant black blood held the promise of intense, and forbidden, sex. She may have looked “white,” but, to quote Beyoncé, she had “hot sauce in her bag.” By incorporating the story of the octoroon into her brand, Lulu White reoriented her tragic fate into a modern sexual fantasy, and promised its fulfillment at Mahogany Hall, also known as the “Octoroon Club.”

The second story White wove into her brand was that of the Caribbean diaspora in New Orleans, which she used to confound her own racial status. White was born in Alabama, but she often claimed to be from the West Indies. After a racetrack refused her entry, a newspaper reported White’s complaint that “some people take her to be colored, but she says there is not a drop of Negro blood in her veins. She says that she is a West Indian, and she was born in the West Indies.” White thus asserted control over her narrative by playing on the illegibility of race in New Orleans.

What did “West Indian” mean there? Several things. New Orleans had a large Caribbean-descended population, stemming from the migrations during the French Revolution, through what became the Haitian Revolution in 1804, and then exile from Cuba several years later. All tiers of Caribbean society entered New Orleans—free whites, enslaved blacks, and free people of color—adding to a diverse population that already had a substantial percentage of free people of color. New Orleans, unlike the South as a whole, was a three-caste society, where one’s “race” did not always accord with “free” or “enslaved” status or, later, heritage. There are instances on record of Creole women suing for libel after being labeled “colored.” White’s assertion of West Indian provenance left her “race” ambiguous.

It also increased her value, because when it came to women, “West Indian” signified sublime, ineffable beauty, seemingly created by the mixture of races and the environment. The New Orleans writer Lafcadio Hearn described the type as “certainly” among “the most beautiful women of the human race,” having “inherited not only the finer bodily characteristics of either parent race, but a something else belonging originally to neither, and created by special climatic and physical conditions.” Antebellum travelers to New Orleans rhapsodized at great length about the beauty of New Orleans “quadroons.” Some of these women participated in a kind of institutionalized concubinage, whereby they entered contracts with white men. The terms of the contract, Frederick Law Olmsted remarked, varied “with the value of the lady in the market.” The female creoles of color were thus imagined as quasi-free “tragic octoroons.” Instead of being fated to sexual slavery, these women were thought to “pass their life in a prostitution,” in the words of another visitor to the antebellum city.

Lulu White’s claim to be at once West Indian, not “Negro,” and “octoroon,” blurred the matter deliberately. In a sense, she claimed both the heritage of white male creoles and of their female creole of color mistresses. This blurring was integral to White’s brand, a selling point for her business. Perhaps Beyoncé is drawing on some of this history, too: “My Daddy Alabama; Momma Louisiana; you mix that Negro with that Creole make a Texas Bama.” Lulu White turned the history of Caribbean “creoles” in New Orleans to her own use at Mahogany Hall, where light-skinned black women were literally prostitutes. White was the proprietress there; she determined the value of the lady in the market.

This brings us to the third story White’s brand comprised: the self-made man. The story of the self-made man is among the oldest in American culture, beginning at least as early as Thomas Jefferson’s fabled yeoman farmer, and, of course, Alexander Hamilton. The turn-of-the-century version still reassured Americans that by hard work, honesty, and a bit of luck, anyone could rise from humble circumstances to achieve greatness—or at least a comfortable living. Northern businessmen had long come to New Orleans to make their fortunes. The New South desire to develop the region along the lines of Northern industry created new opportunities for strivers. Lulu White’s self-promotional brand encompassed the men she sought for customers. She could make their (American) dreams come true at Mahogany Hall—as she had her own.

Postcard depicting Basin Street, once a hub of high-end prostitution. Courtesy of the New Orleans Public Library/Wikimedia Commons.

White’s narrative of self-made success presented a distorted, winking reflection. She was a woman of color; her business was selling sex. Yet, it scarcely mattered that “legitimate” New Orleans did not believe White’s self-creation myth. Her customers were unlikely to have believed it themselves. A promotional pamphlet touting the success of “this famous West Indian octoroon,” described Mahogany Hall as having cost $40,000 to erect, and called it “unquestionably the most elaborately furnished house in the city of New Orleans, and without a doubt one of the most elegant palaces in this or any other country.”

White operated in a netherworld of transgressive pleasure that flouted the morality of respectable society. Lulu White, the brand, was not diminished by newspaper reports deriding her and calling her “negress”; the notoriety amplified her appeal. And men seeking sex with lovely “octoroons” knew just where to go. As the historian Roland Marchand explains about the dawn of the consumer age, “popular convention permitted advertisers to exaggerate, as if all their statements were placed within qualifying ‘quotation marks.’” Lulu White’s keen marketing sensibility predicted the transformations in American mass culture ahead of their time.

Long before Beyoncé sang, “I dream it, I work hard, I grind ’til I own it,” Lulu White built a similar narrative of self-made ascendancy, and even a brand that allowed her to profit from the interweaving of historical narratives. And Beyoncé continues to play with these ideas, so that while her success is premised in part on her sexuality, no one imagines that she’s literally a prostitute, or that she’s really treating her lover to dinner at Red Lobster. Rather, Beyoncé embodies a fantasy, crafted from multiple stories, tinged with the hard realities of racial, sexual, and economic subordination, but, in the end, triumphant.

To be sure, the similarities between White and Beyoncé can be overstated. Lulu White was a real madam who trafficked in young women and girls for the purposes of prostitution; Beyoncé reimagines that role to inhabit all at once the prostitute, the madam, and even the pimp, while embodying a brand that is at once autobiographical and relatable to her millions of fans. If White pioneered this kind of self-packaging, Beyoncé, also known as “Queen,” perfected it.

Lulu White died in obscure poverty in 1931. But her brand has been revived over the years as an emblem of a mythic, romanticized Storyville. The older stories persist, too. At the end of the “Formation” video, Beyoncé lies atop a police car floating in the Mississippi River. She sings as the car sinks into the deep, an homage, perhaps, to the tragic octoroon.

The post The Notorious, Mixed-Race New Orleans Madam Who Turned Her Identity Into a Brand appeared first on Zócalo Public Square.

Please forgive the tardiness of this note. You moved to California more than a year ago, and I’m only now welcoming you. And I still haven’t baked you a cake.

First, a huge thanks to you and your husband Jay Z for taking Gwyneth Paltrow’s advice and relocating here. A move to California by “the most important and compelling popular musician of the 21st century,” as the New Yorker called you, provides a heavy dose of cultural credibility to our struggling entertainment industry.

Already, you singlehandedly debunked the enduring myth that the megarich are fleeing California because of our high tax rates. And unlike so many in your bracket, you haven’t whined about the possible extension of the Proposition 30 tax rates on upper-income people. Indeed, you’ve been so quiet and discreet—no public pouting, no loud parties—that a New York tabloid editorialized against the California versions of you and Jay Z: “We never knew they were this boring.”

The best part is that you moved to raise your four-year-old daughter, Blue Ivy, right when California, at a time of lower birth rates and immigration, needs more children. Los Angeles County, where you live, especially has seen big declines in its number of kids under 10.

But I know that any transition to California can be difficult. We are, after all, the “Great Exception” among states. So out of gratitude for your commitment to California, let me offer some neighborly assistance. Particularly with the challenge that vexes you and your fellow Californians more than any other:

Finding a house to own.

As a Californian, I’m sad and embarrassed to learn, via TMZ and various real estate sites, that, now in your second year here, you are still a renter. Apparently, your first rental home in L.A. got sold for $30 million or so, and you were kicked out by the new landlord. (Who hasn’t been there?) Then you got outbid for one Beverly Hills mega mansion by that Swedish “Minecraft” gamer (who was willing to go to $70 million). So you’re now renting a Holmby Hills palace formerly occupied by a Dodgers owner for $150,000 a month, on a one-year lease that isn’t up until fall.

I realize the fact that California is the state in the nation with the highest housing costs probably is not a direct concern of someone with a net worth of hundreds of millions of dollars. But as you are now experiencing firsthand, the reason for our high housing costs is that we simply haven’t built enough houses for anybody—rich and poor and middle class alike.

With our limited coastal land and development restrictions, there simply aren’t enough mansions for all the superrich people from around the world seeking a safe haven for their families and assets, whether it’s in Carmel, Montecito, or Encinitas. This shortage at the top hurts all Californians—since we’re missing out on attracting rich people whose tax dollars could be put toward building more affordable housing for the poor.

No matter who you are, being a renter can be a real blow to one’s feeling of autonomy. As you taught us in your song “Independent Women”: “The house I live in, I’ve bought it … I depend on me.” Owning would seem to be essential to privacy for someone with your professed love of cooking naked (that was in “Jealous”—I do know all your hits). And as you and your husband indicated in your duet “Drunk in Love,” you need a home with many spacious rooms to accommodate lovemaking that isn’t always confined to the bedroom.

Plus, you have cultivated an image of wealth and ownership that is essential to your career. “Girls Run the World,” you famously sang (that’s why I’m writing this letter to you and not Jay Z, by the way). And your house in that “Partition” video (which, as I discovered in my careful research for this letter, is not safe for work) looks bigger than Versailles.

Given all this, I’m worried that you might throw up your hands and, like too many other Californians, move back to your native Texas, which would be a huge blow to our state’s pride.

The only permanent home Beyoncé has in Los Angeles at the moment is on Hollywood Boulevard.

 
So, Bey, I beg you—say you’ll never let us go. You not only can afford a home here, but also you can play a big role in drawing the attention to the causes of California’s housing problems by finding one. And the subject needs attention. While polls show it’s a big concern for regular people, it’s not a priority of our leaders; Governor Brown didn’t even mention our housing shortage in this month’s State of the State speech.

Give me a moment to elaborate on why it is so tough to buy here, particularly in California’s coastal areas: lack of developable land and our crazy governing system. In a recent report on housing costs, the non-partisan Legislative Analyst’s Office found that the coastal housing shortage means more people move inland, and drive up housing costs there. And that means longer commutes, which are bad for the health of commuters and our environment.

And, unfortunately for you, rules prohibiting development aren’t going to change anytime soon. The worst NIMBYs in California are found in rich coastal communities where you’re shopping for houses. We have all kinds of regulations and commissions that are used to block housing (it took U2’s The Edge years to get coastal commission sign-off on building five houses in Malibu), and our tax and local finance systems encourage cities to favor commercial developments over housing.

So since you share the same predicament as so many Californians (albeit at a higher price point), your housing crisis represents an opportunity: You would be an irresistible (and irreplaceable) spokeswoman for efforts to expand California’s scandalously small affordable housing programs and strip away anti-housing regulations. How about bringing your alter ego Sasha Fierce out of retirement and sicing her on a major contributor to our housing crisis, the California Environmental Quality Act? CEQA long ago stopped being a force to protect the environment and limit private development; newer research shows it is mostly a way for entrenched interests to block vital public projects, including the replacement of dangerously degraded infrastructure.

Fixing CEQA would empower Californians, and your music is all about empowerment.

Instead of a wardrobe malfunction at next week’s Super Bowl halftime show in Santa Clara, why not slip in a pro-housing political statement into one of your numbers instead?

And as you struggle with your own search for a home, I want you to know that if you ever need a shoulder to cry on, just give me a call.

Yours in crazy, drunk, and dangerous California love,
Joe Mathews

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