Beyonce chose to start a song on her new album with the following words: Flight controllers here looking very carefully at the situation. Obviously a major malfunction.<\/em><\/p>\n It sounds pretty dire. Sampling sounds from the Challenger And yet… Beyonce is around my age. We are the age group for which the Challenger disaster was a harsh lesson in Things Go Wrong. Americans are fond of preserving in children the naive belief that life is like the movies- good guys win, bad guys lose, and everything will come right in the end.\u00a0 Challenger smashed that belief in a puff of smoke that shouldn’t have been there. The words Beyonce sampled were the confirmation that no, the thing that was wrong wasn’t us kids watching not knowing what a shuttle launch was supposed to look like. Things go wrong. People die.<\/p>\n I decided maybe I should hear the song. So I found it on YouTube. And I did something I think the outrage folks didn’t: I listened to it without watching the video.\u00a0 That sample at the beginning changes the whole direction of the song. Without it, it could be just another love song. With it, a few things jump out in the lyrics<\/a>: Your love is bright as ever, even in the shadows. In the darkest night, I’ll search through the crowd. We don’t have forever.<\/em>\u00a0 The repeated Lights out<\/em>.<\/p>\n Maybe this isn’t a breakup song or a song about a bad relationship, as the outrage brigade thinks. It sounds to me like a song about loss, about death did us part. Things go wrong. People die. And whoever is left has to find a way to go on.<\/p>\n Beyonce is a grown woman who’s been working in music long enough to know what she was doing. And it sounds like what she was doing is a little smarter than the outrage brigade is willing to credit her for.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" Not that she particularly needs me defending her. Woke up this morning to headlines on Twitter “Beyonce Slammed For Sampling Shuttle Tragedy” and “Beyonce: Sampling the Sounds of Tragedy for Pop Music“.\u00a0 “Inappropriate in the extreme.” Beyonce chose to start a song on her new album with the following words: Flight controllers here looking very … Continue reading In defense of Beyonce<\/span> ![\"Objection!\"](\"https:\/\/i0.wp.com\/www.entropologie.com\/wp-content\/uploads\/2013\/12\/275095.jpg?resize=100%2C84\")
<\/a> disaster? Not cool, you might think.<\/p>\n