What the Water Remembered: Beyoncé and Black Matter

Before Lemonade broke the dam, Beyoncé released one video that already held the flood. “Formation” at ten.

February 6, 2016 fell on a Saturday, the first week of Black History Month, and Beyoncé Knowles-Carter dropped a music video with no advance press, no single rollout, no label-approved timeline. She put it on Tidal, her husband’s streaming platform, where the audience had to seek it out. You came to “Formation” or you did not arrive. That gatekeeping mattered. Before a single television set picked up the signal, the video had already sorted its viewers, had already fashioned a door and elected not to hold it open.

What happened inside that door has been discussed for a decade now, mostly in the wrong direction. The dominant read positioned “Formation” as a message aimed outward, a Black woman telling America something about itself, a corrective broadcast from the margins to the center. And that framing, comforting as it is to certain ears, inverts the actual mechanics of the thing. Melina Matsoukas did not direct a letter to white viewership. She constructed a sealed room and let cameras document what lived there. America pressed its face against the glass afterward and called the experience confrontational. The confrontation was self-generated.

Consider what Matsoukas built in two days of shooting at the Fenyes Estate in Los Angeles, a property selected because its architecture mimicked the plantation houses of New Orleans. Production designer Ethan Tobman and his crew dragged in storm shutters, hung Spanish moss and wisteria from the façade, laid vintage rugs across the floors. They wanted French Renaissance portraits of Black subjects on the walls. When they searched for originals, none existed anywhere in the historical record. So the crew painted Black figures over the faces already hanging in frames and mounted them as if they had always been there. That single production decision contains the entire thesis of the video, compressed into oil and canvas. The absence was institutional. The correction was manual, physical, irreversible once dried.

Matsoukas told The New Yorker she found her visual grammar in the work of Morrison, Angelou, and Butler. That lineage is legible in every frame. The video borrows documentary footage from Abteen Bagheri and Chris Black’s 2012 short That B.E.A.T., a film about New Orleans bounce culture commissioned by Nokia and Sundance. Their footage of second lines, of bodies moving through the Seventh and Ninth Wards, of the city’s physical scars from Katrina entered “Formation” as inheritance, not quotation. Matsoukas grafted that material onto her own staged sequences because the distance between document and invention was, for her purposes, a false border. The real New Orleans and the one she fabricated occupied the same waterlogged ground.

Water saturates every plane of the video. Beyoncé perched on a sinking police cruiser in a flooded street. A house submerged to its roofline. Bodies floating, wading, dancing in liquid. The camera never rises above the waterline. Water is geography here, the actual surface on which Black life in the Gulf South has been conducted, interrupted, and rebuilt for generations. When Hurricane Katrina broke the levees in August 2005, the federal government’s abandonment of New Orleans became the starkest domestic evidence of what happens when Black infrastructure loses its value to the state. Eleven years later, Matsoukas returned to those same visual coordinates and refused to narrate them as tragedy. The water remained, and the people in it were dancing.

That unwillingness to grieve on command is where the video’s deepest work lives. American popular culture had, by 2016, developed a specific appetite for Black pain delivered in digestible increments. Award-season films about slavery, prestige television about incarceration, documentary campaigns about police violence. The packaging varied; the transaction stayed constant. Audiences consumed Black suffering as education rather than emergency. “Formation” canceled that arrangement. Beyoncé sitting in an antebellum parlor wearing a wide-brimmed hat and Victorian dress was occupying a space that had been erected to exclude her and furnishing it according to her own specifications. She did not perform anguish for outside comprehension. She ate breakfast in the master’s house and let the lens linger on her ease.

Messy Mya’s voice opens the track from beyond the grave, a young man shot dead in New Orleans’s Seventh Ward in November 2010 at the age of twenty-two. Big Freedia’s voice punctuates the middle section with the call to get in formation. Neither presence is explained, contextualized, or introduced. They are the load-bearing walls. The structure does not stand without them. Their deployment assumes an audience that already knows the cultural geography of bounce, that already understands why a dead man’s voice opening a Beyoncé single amounts to a territorial claim on the entire genre’s bloodline. Listeners outside that geography were welcome to look it up. The clip was not going to pause for them.

Mainstream American media found this posture disorienting precisely because of its absolute indifference to legibility. Beyoncé had spent fifteen years as a crossover artist whose commercial machinery depended on universal palatability. The Destiny’s Child era, the Dangerously in Love solo launch, even the visual ambition of the self-titled 2013 album. Every phase maintained a careful bilingualism, a fluency in both Black idiom and pop-market syntax that kept every entrance propped open. “Formation” bricked several of those passages shut. The hot sauce reference, the negro nose lyric, the Jackson Five nostrils, the Red Lobster flex. Every signal was calibrated to a frequency that either registered immediately or went unheard. Translation was not on offer, and no footnotes were appended.

The backlash confirmed the release’s precision. Within forty-eight hours, law enforcement unions across the country organized boycotts of the forthcoming Formation World Tour. Rutherford County Sheriff Robert Arnold blamed gunshots fired near his home on the video’s release, a claim that required believing a music video about dancing in New Orleans had migrated into Middle Tennessee and squeezed a trigger. The hashtag #BoycottBeyoncé trended alongside #IStandWithBeyoncé. An anti-Beyoncé protest materialized outside NFL headquarters on February 16, drawing exactly three participants; the counter-protest dwarfed it. Later reporting revealed the Kremlin-backed Internet Research Agency had placed Instagram advertisements encouraging attendance at those demonstrations, exploiting the fracture “Formation” had made visible. The Russians did not create the fault line. They simply recognized it faster than American commentators did.

One week after “Formation” surfaced, Saturday Night Live aired a sketch called “The Day Beyoncé Turned Black,” depicting white Americans in apocalyptic panic upon discovering that Beyoncé was, in fact, a Black woman who made music for Black people. The sketch worked because it named the precise shock “Formation” had delivered. For a segment of the American audience, Beyoncé’s Blackness had previously been ornamental, a background texture that never disrupted the foreground of pop stardom and halftime spectacle. “Formation” moved that Blackness from wallpaper to foundation. Suddenly the walls were different. A supporting beam had materialized where none was expected, and certain viewers discovered they had been standing in someone else’s house the entire time.

Matsoukas has spoken about wanting to depict the full breadth of Black experience in a single visual text. She told The New Yorker: “I wanted to show — this is black people. We triumph, we suffer, we’re drowning, we’re being beaten, we’re dancing, we’re eating, and we’re still here.” That catalog collapses the distance between spectacle and routine that American media typically enforces. Triumph and suffering and drowning and dancing all listed at identical weight, denied hierarchy by the grammar of the sentence itself. A video that contains both a boy in a hoodie performing before riot police and Beyoncé eating breakfast in a plantation mansion does not toggle between protest and pleasure. It insists they share a zip code.

The boy in the hoodie remains the work’s sharpest image. He dances alone, arms raised, facing a line of officers in tactical gear. When his hands go up, the officers mirror the gesture. Then a hard cut to a wall tagged with three words: “Stop shooting us.” Matsoukas films the sequence without slow motion, without swelling strings, without any of the formal devices that American cinema uses to signal moral seriousness. The boy moves, the police answer, the graffiti stays painted on the concrete long after both parties leave the frame. Every element occupies the same visual temperature, the same tonal register, because Matsoukas declines to elevate one above another. In this video, a child’s choreography and a plea for survival carry identical weight. In the geography “Formation” maps, they have always been the same activity.

By April, Lemonade would arrive and crack the whole project wide open, spreading across an hour-long HBO visual album what “Formation” had compressed into a single Saturday afternoon. But the February video accomplished something Lemonade could not repeat, precisely because it came first and came alone. “Formation” landed as one unannounced incision. No rollout softened the blade, and no album context diluted its concentration. It arrived in the American living room, performed its surgery, and left the wound to breathe overnight before Beyoncé walked onto the Super Bowl stage the next day.

Ten years later, the most remarkable thing about “Formation” might be its clarity of address. Every American visual text carries within it an implied viewer, a pair of eyes the camera assumes will be watching. Hollywood blockbusters, network television, Super Bowl commercials. The industry constructs that viewer with demographic precision, and for most of the country’s history, that viewer has been white, male, and situated comfortably above the action. “Formation” voided that assumption by the simplest possible method. It trained its gaze on Black life in motion and never once glanced over its shoulder to check who else was looking. The focus pointed inward. The frame faced its own residents. And the rest of America, catching its reflection in a window it hadn’t known was there, saw itself clearly for the first time as the weather pressing against the glass rather than the people sheltered inside.

The water remembered everything the levees were erected to forget. The video held that memory without flinching, without translating, without apology. What Matsoukas and Beyoncé assembled on a Saturday in February was a room. The door, ten years later, still opens only from the inside.

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Works Cited

Bagheri, Abteen, and Chris Black, dirs. That B.E.A.T. Nokia/Sundance, 2012. Short documentary.

Knowles-Carter, Beyoncé. “Formation.” Lemonade, Parkwood Entertainment/Columbia Records, 2016. Directed by Melina Matsoukas. Music video premiered on TIDAL, February 6, 2016.

Okeowo, Alexis. “The Provocateur Behind Beyoncé, Rihanna, and Issa Rae.” The New Yorker, March 6, 2017. https://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2017/03/06/the-provocateur-behind-beyonce-rihanna-and-issa-rae.

Romm, Tony, and Elizabeth Dwoskin. “‘Pro-Beyoncé’ vs. ‘Anti-Beyoncé’: 3,500 Facebook Ads Show the Scale of Russian Manipulation.” The Washington Post, May 10, 2018. https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/the-switch/wp/2018/05/10/here-are-the-3400-facebook-ads-purchased-by-russias-online-trolls-during-the-2016-election/.

“The Day Beyoncé Turned Black.” Saturday Night Live, hosted by Melissa McCarthy, NBC, February 13, 2016. Digital short.

“Beyonce’s ‘Formation’ Video: Footage Controversy.” CNN, February 9, 2016. https://www.cnn.com/2016/02/07/entertainment/beyonce-formation-controversy-feat/index.html.