TS 9 (1+2) pp.

41–57 Intellect Limited 2016

The Soundtrack
Volume 9 Numbers 1 & 2
© 2016 Intellect Ltd Article. English language. doi: 10.1386/ts.9.1-2.41_1

CIARA BARRETT
National University of Ireland, Galway

‘Formation’ of the female

author in the hip hop visual
album: Beyoncé and FKA
twigs

ABSTRACT KEYWORDS
This article explores how and why, from a feminist standpoint, two black female visual album
hip hop artists – Beyoncé and FKA twigs – have turned in recent years to the female authorship
emerging audio-visual format of the visual album towards a radical expression Beyoncé
of female authorship. This is ‘radical’, specifically, in two contexts: firstly hip FKA twigs
hop, the genre with which these artists are traditionally associated and which has hip hop
been associated, historically, with a repressive politics of gender and race repre- music video
sentation through music videos and secondly, that of the classical paradigm of
film style and narration, which the visual album as long-form video implicitly
confronts. Synthesizing traditional feminist film theory with more recent theori-
zation of music video aesthetics and representational trends, this article consid-
ers how Beyoncé and FKA twigs have remediated certain formal and narrative
paradigms of film and music video to create a uniquely hybrid form. Beyoncé’s
self-titled visual album from 2013 will be considered as an initial interroga-
tion-cum-problematization of the sexist representational paradigms endemic to
hip hop music videos and classical cinema from the inside out, while her more
recent Lemonade and twigs’s M3ll155X will be analysed as radically formally

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 Ciara Barrett

innovative and assertive of a subjective, female authorial voice. These two artists
will be seen to have self-consciously invoked a filmic mode of representation and
spectatorship across the formally experimental audio-visual format of the video
album to exert a remarkable degree of control over their audio-self-images’ narra-
tivization and signification.

This article explores the feminist impact of the use of the visual album as a
relatively new audio-visual format by two Black female artists, Beyoncé and
FKA twigs, both of whom work within or tangential to the hip hop genre
and have directed and performed in at least one visual album in the last three
years. Taken either as films, extended music videos or instances of a new
hybrid format remediative of the two, these works represent important – and
as yet still relatively rare – instances of women taking authorship over their
own audio-visual representation – if ‘authorship’ is to be understood as a self-
conscious exercise of control over the representational properties (formal,
narrative and aesthetic) of an audio-visual performance. Vernallis has stated
that ‘videos can have authors’ (2004: 201; emphasis added), implying an imme-
diate assumption that authorship is problematized for the performing artist
when he or she is imagistically represented on-screen by a third-party direc-
tor. This has been particularly at issue for the female artist historically and
extra particularly for the Black female artist. As in film, the popular music
industry has seldom facilitated female authorship either behind the camera or
in front of it and, moreover, it has traded on ‘audio-images’ (as Chion [1994]
suggests we should refer to the component structures of film) of the social and
sexual subjugation of Black women.
As Jhally (2007) has shown, hip hop music videos since the 1980s have
tended to construct a white male ‘dreamworld’ by which Black female bodies –
music video ‘models’ – have been used to harness visual awareness of musi-
cal performance, thusly to market it. Indeed, as Vernallis (2004: 3) has argued,
the primary goal of the music video in its traditional format has been to sell
the musical product: firstly by underscoring the music, secondly by high-
lighting the lyrics and thirdly by showcasing the star. At the same time, as
Korsgaard (2013) and Vernallis herself have noted (2013: 438), the function
of music video may be evolving out of the marketplace towards becoming a
socially liberated medium of and for interactivity, because of the proliferation
of digital media platforms and formats. In the case of the hip hop music video,
star performance has traditionally been represented and embodied according
to the gender dynamics of classical cinema – despite the important narrative
and formal differences between film and the music video discussed below  –
by which subjective authority has been gendered masculine and objective
spectacularity gendered feminine (Mulvey 1975: 808). Gender differentiation
has furthermore existed in a problematic dialectic with racial Othering in the
mainstream hip hop video. Black male performers – the presumptive ‘authors’
of most of these texts/performances (seeing as most hip hop emcees histori-
cally have been male; however, their authorship is debatable in light of the
frequent reality of White male executive production) – are represented ubiq-
uitously as misogynistic: the abuse of Black women by Black men is spectacu-
larized within the diegetic ‘dreamworld’ to offset the reality of Black women’s
multiple layers of oppression under the ‘blanket’ (Yuval-Davis 2006: 196) of
White supremacy in the real world.

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 ‘Formation’ of the female author in the hip hop visual album

As scholars of the hip hop music video Emerson (2002), Balaji (2010) and
Durham (2012) have shown, this representational paradigm has not been
without resistance on behalf of Black women in the hip hop industry: author-
performers such as Erykah Badu, Missy Elliott and Lauryn Hill (Emerson) and
models-of-representation such as video performer Melyssa Ford (Balaji) have
exercised performative and representational strategies of subversion across
their video work. Yet as these same scholars have shown, this subversive-
ness is brought to bear by the narrative and formal conventions of a certain
genre of music video, which have been concretized against the expression of
female authorship. In such a way, the hip hop music video may be seen to
follow gendered paradigms of representation associated with classical narra-
tive cinema, though they are not across the board pertinent to music videos.
McDonald (1997: 280), citing Goodwin (1993: 76), has astutely noted that
filmic politics of representation, particularly regarding gender, are not broadly
applicable to music video analyses because classical realism and narrativity
have never been paradigmatic to the music video. This point has been further
borne out in the seminal research of Vernallis (2004), as well as of Whiteley and
Korsgaard, who have noted music video to have a distinctly a-narrative project
in foregrounding music over image (Vernallis 2004: 3), ‘musicalizing’ the image
(Korsgaard 2012: 6) and in effect subordinating narrative as a function of
rhythm (Whiteley 1997: 260). The music video is therefore unconcerned with
the psychological development of characters, narratively or with continuity if
editing formally, and as such bears perhaps more similarity to avant-garde
film-making (Vernallis 2004; 2016) than to the classical narrative cinema upon
which the theory of a traditionally gendered politics of audio-visual represen-
tation is based. Nevertheless, female authorship of audio-visual performance
in hip hop may be seen as a ‘radical break’ with the generic representational
paradigm precisely because ‘the erotic spectacle of the male body’ (McDonald
1997: 280) is not an ‘established convention’ of the specifically hip hop music
video. (And thus, when engaging in textual analysis of audio-visual media
that cross over into the territory of hip hop music video, I will apply the same
filmic theories of a gendered politics of representation employed by Emerson,
Balaji and Durham).
Currently Beyoncé, as a Black woman associated with hip hop music
production, represents the most high-profile challenge (in critical discourse) to
repressive formal and representational paradigms associated with audio-visual
media in hip hop. Beyoncé is widely celebrated as subversively negotiating
both paradigmatic and transgressive strategies of performance and represen-
tation throughout her now decades-long music career, vis-à-vis her appear-
ances in music videos. In analysis of how Beyoncé ‘has used her lyrics and her
persona to become a powerful icon of black female sexuality’ (Kohlman 2016:
27), scholars have argued across now-numerous articles (Weidhase 2015;
Durham 2012) and chapters (specifically within the 2016 edited collection The
Beyoncé Effect) that she presents us with intersectional ‘feminism in practice’
(Cupid and Files-Thomson 2016: 105). This is not, however, without contesta-
tion: both Hobson (2016) and Kohlman have problematized (as a means, ulti-
mately, of affirming) Beyoncé’s credentials as a feminist shaped by the ‘terrain
of [contemporary] gender, race and sexual politics’ (Hobson 2016: 24), point-
ing to bell hooks critique (2014) of Beyoncé as ‘collud[ing] in the construction
of herself as a slave’. hooks (2015) has gone on to argue that while Beyoncé’s
high-profile performances and appearances have ascribed much-needed value

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 Ciara Barrett

and humanization to the Black female body, re-/envisioning her as such, they
do not actively un-do her victimization. For hooks, Beyoncé’s radical represen-
tation of Black female oppression has not yet amounted to an effective revolt
against the system.
But as Cupid and Files-Thompson have shown in discussing Beyoncé’s
innovative techniques of self-promotion across digital media, she must be
seen as having actively disrupted traditionally gendered-and-raced politics of
representation, as well as helping to diversify trends of access to critical and
cultural theory (specifically feminism). Examining Beyoncé’s release of a self-
titled ‘visual album’ in 2013, Cupid and Files-Thompson detail how Beyoncé
took unprecedented control over the release of her collected music videos,
reinventing their form and practically inventing a marketing strategy. Beyoncé
was released in two formats: a 14-track audio album and a 17-track compila-
tion of music videos, united by the theme of mature womanhood, without any
advance promotion. Instead, Beyoncé relied on fans’ interaction over digital
platforms to spread word of its release, bringing it to the top of the music
charts. Her most revolutionary act, perhaps, was to necessitate consumers’
purchase of either format in its entirety, thus satisfying a theoretical feminist
requirement that a woman (or representation of herself, here in the form of
a self-titled album) be viewed ‘holistically’ (Cupid and Files-Thompson 2016:
103), without fragmentation or undue mediation (in the form of third-party
advertisement). In such a way, Beyoncé may be seen to have initiated a pattern
of self-authorization regarding her own audio-image-ination via the visual
album format, which is in and of itself a feminist act.
Three years after Beyoncé, Beyoncé released a music video for the song
‘Formation’, which appeared to recall her previous two stand-alone solo and
collaborative releases (a remix of ‘Flawless’ featuring Nicki Minaj [2013], ‘7/11’
[2014], and ‘Feelin’ Myself’ again with Minaj [2014]), before it was revealed
to be the final song on a new visual album, Lemonade. Premiering first on
HBO in April 2016 and becoming purchasable for streaming on Tidal imme-
diately after, this release expressed even greater aesthetic cohesiveness than
Beyoncé, this time with a narrative through-line and dealt even more explic-
itly with the theme of Black womanhood. Again, Beyoncé effectively bypassed
conventional marketing and representational techniques to exert fuller autho-
rial control over her audio-visual release.
On a smaller scale – and, we can speculate, as inspired by Beyoncé and
others’ recent exercises in audio-visual authorization vis-à-vis the visual
album – FKA twigs released M3ll155X (pronounced ‘Melissa’) in August 2015.
Similar to Beyoncé, it provides visual illustration to each song off her same-
titled, simultaneously released-for-digital-download extended play, largely in
chronological order. But even before Lemonade, M3ll155X asserts a narrative
through-line with a willingness to disrupt the audio integrity of each individ-
ual song to satisfy the overall audio-visual meaning and integrity of the album.
Similar to the thematics of Beyoncé’s visual albums, twigs’s visual album is
evidently concerned with an exploration of Black female agency and repre-
sentation in popular culture. It carries with it an implicit critique of the popu-
lar (specifically hip hop) music video in rejecting the conventional marketing,
formatting and representational constraints of the hip hop audio album:
(which is traditionally comprised, piecemeal, of three- to five-minute long
individual tracks, some of which are released as singles to market the greater
album, promoted and made easily [re]consumable through the production of
accompanying music videos that are styled and directed by miscellaneous [and

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 ‘Formation’ of the female author in the hip hop visual album

mostly male] collaborators, abiding by traditional, i.e. sexist, representational 1. Vernallis (2016: 1)
describes Lemonade
paradigms). Working within the new, digital media format of the visual album as a hybrid of music
(which as we have already seen depends on digital streaming-and-sharing video and avant-garde
platforms for dissemination), Beyoncé and FKA twigs have established such film, but in that she
has already remarked
an alternative and subversive platform for the expression of a female autho- on the formal parallels
rial voice. between music video
and experimental, i.e.
overtly formalist or
avant-garde, film-
VICISSITUDES OF THE VISUAL ALBUM making (2004: 29);
we can extrapolate
While the rest of this article will not attempt to provide a formal definition a proposed marked
of the so-called ‘visual album’, it will nevertheless suggest a framework of distinction between
ideas on the emergent format’s commonalities and how it may be of particu- the visual album and
classically realist
lar interest to feminist film, sound and digital media theorists and practition- narrative cinema,
ers. Employing close textual analyses of Beyoncé’s two visual album releases, which edges it more
Beyoncé (2013) and Lemonade (2016), and FKA twigs’s M3ll155X (2015), it will towards music video as
a form of audio-visual
highlight recurring strategies by which these female artists have subverted a representation that
traditionally gendered politics of audio-viewing and audio-visual represen- employs experimental
aesthetic tendencies.
tation. Ultimately, it will show Beyoncé and FKA twigs to have harnessed a
hybridized format uniquely suited to an implicit critique of the two domi-
nant audio-visual media by which female performers have, historically and
contemporaneously, been regulated and repressed: film and the music video.
Not by coincidence, these are the two formats which the visual album most
explicitly and consistently remediates.
Beyoncé and FKA twigs do not, of course, represent the only audio-visual
artists working within a ‘true’ or even ‘new’ visual album format. Following
the release of Beyoncé’s Lemonade in early 2016, the most commercially
and critically successful visual album release to date, a spate of newspaper
articles sought to address the question of what, really, amounts to a ‘visual
album’. A basic criterion would seem to be that a visual album includes at
least two songs with an accompanying image track or tracks (Sommers 2016).
Questionable, however, is whether the various audio-visual tracks must have
thematic and/or narrative cohesion. (If so, then Justin Bieber’s Purpose: The
Movement [2015] would be disqualified as a series of disparately themed music
videos with a varying cast of personnel, bookended only by the appearance
of Bieber himself, singing in the middle of the desert about the importance, if
not specification, of a ‘purpose’.) Also at issue is how soon before or after the
release of the audio album the visual album must have been released or if they
should be chronologically separable at all. (This criterion could disqualify Pink
Floyd’s The Wall [1983] from visual album status, having been released four
years after the same-titled record, while simultaneously admitting Nick Cave
and the Bad Seeds’ Skeleton Tree, which was first ‘heard’ audio-visually as part
of the documentary One More Time With Feeling [Dominik 2016].) Finally, and
perhaps most provocatively, there lies the question of what distinguishes the
visual album as a specific audio-visual medium or format (if it is one) from the
music video, and/or from the musical film, at that.
Scholarly theorization so far – by Vernallis (2016) and Perrott et al. (2016) –
has aligned the visual album, vis-à-vis Lemonade, more with music video than
with film (at least in the form of the classically realist narrative film), while
noting its innovative format.1 This is due to Lemonade’s overall non-linearity, its
‘processual’ (Vernallis 2004: 177) movement between audio-visual sequences
without defined temporal boundaries, such that multiple ‘beginnings, middles
and ends’ are elicited (Vernallis in Perrott et al. 2016), privileging circularity

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2. It is of course entirely over teleology. Nevertheless, it remains that in Lemonade – as in any album
debatable that the
music video should be
or collation of songs and as in Beyoncé and M3ll155X – the musical numbers/
associated primarily audio-visual sequences are presented in a distinct order and exhibited as
with television and such holistically. While ‘music videos are intended to be watched many, many
the ‘glance’ now, due
to the music video’s times’ (Perrott et al.), as facilitated by their short duration, the length of the
transmediation into visual album as a multi-track sequence re-invokes the ‘concentrated gaze’, as
largely digital formats opposed to the ‘distracted glance’ which McDonald (1997: 279–80, citing Ellis
over digital platforms,
and its concomitant [1982]) has ascribed to the music video as a televisual medium.2 Thus, the
invocation of visual album, taken as a whole, invites a mode of spectatorship akin to that of
immersive audio-
viewing through remix
cinema, and with it, a method of analysis employing film theory as much as
and other interactive the vocabulary of music video analysis: the method of analysis must itself be
practices, as Korsgaard, hybridized. And in that the most recent cycle of audio-visual representation
(2013) has shown.
in the visual album format dialogues with the specific genre of hip hop music
3. Nevertheless, it should and music videos – which we have already seen to be aligned, traditionally,
be acknowledged
that the imagistic with classical cinema’s conventionally gendered politics of representation – a
representation of the textual analysis approach inflected by film theory is appropriate.
object-Other, and its The past six years have seen the release of a number of self- and/or popu-
potential to acquire
agency, authority larly proclaimed visual albums that bear significant formal, narrative and prac-
and/or autonomy, tical similarities. Kanye West’s Runaway (2010), Beyoncé, M3ll15X, Lemonade
is, interestingly,
interrogated by
and Ocean’s Endless (2016) have all, over this time, been audio-visual releases
these artists, much produced or co-produced, -directed and performed by a Black artist. They have
as the object-Other also been released as available to watch seamlessly from start to finish over at
at issue in the recent
work of Beyoncé least one digital commercial platform, either simultaneous with or in anticipa-
and twigs. The Black tion of the release of an audio-only album, bearing significant thematic and/
woman is also West’s or aesthetic coherence sequence-to-sequence, if not an explicit narrative tele-
Other. In Runaway,
West may be seen ology, with an episodic structure. On this last point, Runaway, M3ll15X and
implicitly to critique Lemonade are united by their tendency to distinguish between filmic sequences
his own predilection
for the sustained
according to, or in synchronization with, distinct audio tracks, and vice versa.
sexual objectification The episodicity of Beyoncé is obvious in the distinction of each audio-visual
and subjugational sequence track by track, whereas on the other end of the spectrum, Endless is
Othering of women
as an economically most loosely (even questionably) episodic, divisible into at most three poten-
empowered, Black male tial sections or sequences, identifiable by their imagistic, narrative content: (1)
hip hop artist (as seen Frank Ocean preparing materials for the building of a staircase, (2) building
in the extreme fetish
image of his character’s and climbing that staircase and (3) repeating the process.
love interest, the While West’s Runaway and Ocean’s Endless deserve sustained critical anal-
Phoenix, played by
model Selita Ebanks).
ysis as further examples of visual albums that challenge traditionally gendered
At the same time, he and raced representational paradigms within film and the music video, it is
offers a platform in not within the remit of this article to perform such analyses.3 The represen-
mise-en-abyme for
the expression of tational nuances of both these instances of male-authorized visual albums
female-authorized deserve further consideration, both unto themselves and in comparison and in
performance during contrast to the work of female artists. For now, however, we will be confined
the ‘Runaway’ ballet
sequence. Ocean, to a more sustained discussion of the latter, which will entail the close textual
on the other hand, analysis of Beyoncé and FKA twigs’s visual albums towards a deconstruc-
appears in Endless
to experiment in
tion of their systems of audio-visual representation. A sequence from Beyoncé
withholding the will be closely considered as an example of transition between the traditional
spectatorial pleasure – music video format and the formal paradigms of the visual album, setting that
the sexual release (or at
least gratification) from album as, perhaps, more a compilation of music videos that critique their own
a subjective position form and representational paradigms from the inside out. This will also estab-
– that is commonly lish the feminist theoretical framework and analytical methodology by which
gendered masculine
in mainstream hip the other texts will be viewed. We will then move on towards Lemonade to
hop music videos. observe how Beyoncé has extended her female authorial voice more deeply
The only video model
and consistently throughout her audio-visual work, refining the format of the

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 ‘Formation’ of the female author in the hip hop visual album

visual album. Finally, FKA twigs’s M3ll155X will be considered as a lesser- here is Ocean himself
(or often multiples of
known, though no less authoritatively subversive, feminist challenge to the himself on-screen) in
repressive audio-visual regimes of classical film and hip hop music video blackened silhouette,
through a new hybrid form. working relentlessly
on a stairway that can
never be completed.
Subversive of the
‘GHOST’-ING AROUND THE MUSIC VIDEO traditionally gendered
politics of viewing
The start of ‘Ghost’, the second music video from Beyoncé’s self-titled visual and representation,
album, opens with a fade-in from black onto a close-up of her face against a structured according
to an ‘active male’ (or
stark white background. The camera lingers on the face longingly, in anticipa- male-oriented) gaze
tion of the beginning of the song. This establishes Beyoncé as the source of the and ‘passive female’
voice-to-come and as the focal point of an initiated narrative, in the absence (or feminized) object
(Mulvey 1975: 808),
of a foregrounded music track, an imagistic spectacle upon which to fix the Ocean depicts his own,
lyrics yet unsung (or unspoken, as ‘Ghost’ is primarily rapped). Beyoncé’s eyes male ‘exhibitionist
remain closed. We are invited to admire the contours of her face, the mini- like’ as active within
the frame and over
malistic style of hairdo and costuming. Almost imperceptibly, she quivers to the soundtrack,
satisfy the perception that Beyoncé is present and performing in diegetic real yet passive and
ultimately narratively
time for the camera/audio-viewer, as opposed to having been captured in a inconsequential, under
past moment, photographically – which of course she has been, regardless of the spectatorial gaze.
what the ‘moving’ picture claims of her presen(t)ce. Thus, Ocean arguably
objectively Others his
The composition is a familiar visual rendering of the solo female performer subjective position
in audio-visual media. Whereas Vernallis (2004: 32) has argued that the from the audience and
close-up in music videos functions more normally to underscore lyrics, musi- even from his own
embodied figure.
cal hooks, peaks of phrase or fit an already established shot pattern and not
necessarily to fetishize the face, in the absence of an already established musi- 4. I have argued that
this is paradigmatic
cal pattern or lyrical progression, we are invited to consider her imagisti- of the audio-visual
cally, according to a traditionally gendered politics of visual representation. representation of
female musical stars of
It is classically scopophilic in film theoretical terms: indulgence in the ‘to-be- the Classical Hollywood
looked-at’ image of woman (or part of woman) disavows her difference and Era in particular,
distance from the viewer (Mulvey 1975). In a musical performance-in-motion, vis-à-vis Deanna
Durbin, Shirley Temple,
the lingering spectatorial gaze also disavows the fact of the performance’s Jeanette MacDonald
(re)mediation, thus ‘demystifying’ the performance process (Feuer 1995) and, and others. However,
particularly for the female performer, confirms the ‘naturalness’ of her perfor- this representational
paradigm of ‘fixing’
mance, her seeming un-self-consciousness in the face of seeming un-reme- the female voice to the
diation. An effect (and affectation) of this explicit and explicating gaze, more face-as-object is seen
in many audio-visual
recently identified by digital media and film sound theorists, is of physical representations of
proximity to the performer on behalf of the audio-viewer, or an affectation female singing stars in
of immediacy. This invites the audio-viewer’s entry to the performer’s vulner- film and other screen
media.
able/emotional ‘interior’ – an interior that, as Silverman (1988) has posited,
is always already culturally, if not sub-consciously on the part of the subject
audio-viewer, associated with the feminine and the female body. (The sexual
nature of this coming-closeness may be made more or less explicit through
expressive aspects of mise-en-scène and editing, such as the intercutting of
images of Beyoncé’s minimally clothed and writhing body that follows this
opening sequence). The close-up on the female musical performer’s face satis-
fies what I have elsewhere referred to as the ‘gendered politics of viewing and
hearing’ (Barrett 2017): the objectification and consequent demystification-
cum-neutralization of the female singing face – the source of vocalization,
sonic power, agency and authoritative aural signification – on behalf of the
female musical performer.4
Superimposed over Beyoncé’s face is the intertitle ‘Ghost’, cutting
suddenly to an image of Beyoncé in a black mesh swimsuit and red lipstick

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– the stereotypically sexualized image of the hip hop music video model –
becoming enveloped in black fabric, back to her face as she opens her eyes
and back and forth, as she sing-speaks: ‘[a]nd I’ve been drifting off on knowl-
edge/Cat-calls on cat-walks, man these women getting solemn/I could sing
a song for Solomon or Salamander/We took a flight at midnight and now
my mind can’t help but wonder/How come?’, thus expressing a direct verbal
critique of the image-ination of woman at the hands of the hip hop music
industry (‘catcalls on catwalks’), by which her own performances to date have
largely been regulated. (One recalls her stomping, literally, catwalk-esque,
onto the scene of ‘Crazy in Love’ in her first solo video in 2003, to pose in front
of hundreds of diegetic flashing lights and dance for Jay Z throughout a dizzy-
ing array of flesh-baring cross-cuts. One also recognizes that the music video
for ‘Pretty Hurts’, immediately preceding ‘Ghost’ within the Beyoncé visual
album reflects similarly explicitly on the imagistic objectification of women,
however not within the specific context of the music industry). ‘I’m climbing
up the walls because all this shit I hear is boring’, she intones; ‘[a]ll the shit I
do is boring/All these record labels boring/I don’t trust these record labels I’m
touring’.
The image cuts to multiple layered images of a nearly nude Beyoncé in full
black body paint, contrasted with images of her ensconced head to toe in an
alabaster shroud. Thus, the always already racialized image-ination of Beyoncé
as a Black female hip hop artist is acknowledged and established as an object
for implicit critique (a critique that will become explicit in the later Lemonade).
There follows a cut to an extreme close-up of Beyoncé’s eye, in which the
reflection of her own figure is visible: the performing female regards herself as
object and in so doing becomes subject.
Throughout the first two minutes of this two-and-a-half minute video,
Beyoncé’s vocals have largely been synchronized with the close-up on her
face, established as the diegetic point of vocalization and narrativization. These
audio-synchronized shots provide the filmic ‘metalanguage’ (MacCabe 1974:
8), or perhaps better the music video’s ‘meta-sequence’, by which the other
insert shots and cross-cut sequences – Beyoncé in black body paint, Beyoncé
in alabaster shroud, Beyoncé running in place against a flashing background –
are organized into a hierarchy of meaning as narrational, illustrative and/or
ornamental ‘object’ sequences (which Vernallis [2004: 178] would refer to as
‘visual microrhythms’ or specifically joined audio-images reflecting certain
musical patterns). This is by virtue of these close-ups’ internal vococentric-
ity – the meta-sequence’s accrual of meaning via the synchronous play of
verbal dialogue – and the inherent vococentricity of screen media, by which
‘the presence of a human voice instantly sets up a hierarchy of perception’
(Chion 1999: 5) and structures an uninterrupted sequence with synchronized
dialogue as meta-narrational. This ‘lip-syncing’ adheres to the dominant mode
of ‘sonorous representation’, not only in the mainstream cinema (Doane 1980:
24–25) but also in newer forms of screen media including popular music
videos (though they tend to have greater freedom to stray from strict synchro-
nization). It is yet another representational paradigm that ‘Ghost’ goes on to
subvert, as Beyoncé, in the last half minute of the video, stares into the camera
and in voice-over – now, de-synchronized from the meta-image – intones,
‘[s]old not for sale/Probably won’t make no money off this’. Image and vocals
briefly reunite for her intonation of ‘oh well’. In slip-sync again, whereby
the utterance of the spoken/sung word is de-synchronized from the imag-
istic source of its vocalization (the mouth), Beyoncé speaks, ‘[r]eap what you

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sow/Perfection is so’. Finally, as Beyoncé exhales a deep-throated ‘Mmph’, her

re-synced visage lifts an eyebrow and shrugs.
Of course, the deployment of slip-sync is not particularly original to music
videos, or indeed even to Beyoncé’s oeuvre, as Benson-Allott (2013) has shown
in her analysis of Beyoncé and Lady Gaga appropriating the ‘digital glitch’ – of
which slip-sync is one example – to problematize the gaze upon the performer.
On top of Beyoncé’s explicitly verbalized critique here of the representa-
tional practice of ‘perfection’, this manifestation of imperfect synchronization
compounds the final, purposeful audio-visual ‘imperfection’ of ‘Ghost’: a sonic
aesthetic of Beyoncé’s work within the visual album format/medium. At odds
with the imagistic immediacy of the close-up meta-sequence, Beyoncé’s voice
is perceived at a spatial distance from the seeming point of vocalization/audi-
tion in close-up to the audio-viewer. Flouting the convention by which female
pop singers tend to be close-miked, thus to ‘invite a sense of intimacy’ or
identification on behalf of the audio-viewer (Greene 2009: 64), Beyoncé is not
(or, if she is, her vocals are manipulated to affect greater reverberation). The
ostensible meta-narrational quality of her voice-over rap, both in slip-sync and
in lip-sync, is thus undercut in being ‘Othered’ to the subjective position of
the audio-viewer (who is otherwise invited to identify subjectively with the
narrational ‘I-voice’ when it is perceived as ‘dry’ or without reverb [Chion 1999:
51]). At the same time, perhaps more subversively than Chion has considered,
the explicitly Othered-from-the-image female I-voice is allowed to ‘embody’
(Greene 2009: 63) or at least cast a bodily shadow, over the multiplicitous and
fragmentary images of Beyoncé’s figure that flash across the screen – a body
bearing various significations of Otherness as female, as Black, as sexual, as
repressed, etc. – many times over. Her voice ‘ghosts around’, in echo, in the
song’s refrain: ‘[w]hat goes up/Ghost around’.
Fittingly, the track that follows on the visual album (and for which ‘Ghost’
functions as an intro on the audio album version) is entitled ‘Haunted’. The
video features Beyoncé stalking past a mansion’s rooms filled, freak-show-like,
with various, garish BDSM-themed tableaux, as her voice oscillates between
close-miked richness and reverberant distanciation. In such a way, Beyoncé
not only haunts and embodies the music video, but she launches an aural
and physical assault on the gendered representational paradigms of tradi-
tional audio-visual media from within its paradigmatic set-up. In such video
tracks as ‘Drunk in Love’ and ‘Partition’, she appears to be dancing for her
husband-collaborator Jay Z – performing the stereotypical objective function
of the hip hop video model (Durham 2012; Balaji 2010) – while singing about
sex with her partner, her ‘baby’/‘daddy’. At the same time, she modulates her
voice between what Greene (2009: 64) distinguishes as the ‘chest’ versus ‘head’
voices available to the feminine vocal register, displaying Beyoncé’s affinity –
initiated by Beyoncé – for diversifying her feminine-sounding, trained singing
voice with the rawer, deeper vocal intonations of ‘masculine’ rapping, which
also carry class and racial connotations.
Within two phrases – ‘[w]oke up in the kitchen saying/“How the hell did
this shit happen?”, oh baby’ – Beyoncé shifts from singing in a relatively high
register to a throatier speech-song voice, whilst in the image track she leans
forward to the camera, nodding her head in emphasis. Similarly in ‘Partition’,
from ‘Oh he so horny, he want to fuh’, to ‘Take all of me/I just wanna be the
girl you like’, she swings from chest-deep rapping to an exaggeratedly elevated
‘head voice’, emulating the stereotypical hip hop video model’s explicit invita-
tion to be ‘taken’ or ravished by the male subject: this is audio-visual role play.

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Self-reflexive masquerade is also underscored in the ‘Partition’ video intro/

track ‘Yoncé’, in which Beyoncé poses with a posse of well-known Black high-
fashion models – Jourdan Dunn, Joan Smalls and Chanel Iman – who lip-sync
the exhortation ‘tell me how it’s lookin’ babe’ (a sequence that Kumari [2016]
has similarly pinpointed as a significant instance of gender play on Beyoncé’s
behalf). This theme of masquerade and self-reflexivity as permeating Beyoncé
is furthermore confirmed in the narrative framing device of ‘Partition’ itself – at
the beginning and end, Beyoncé stares across a breakfast table at an unseen
male subject – establishing Beyoncé’s performance-for-Jay Z as a performance
within a self-authorized fantasy. Beyoncé looks at herself getting looked at
(evocative of the close-up on her eye in ‘Ghost’). Furthermore, as Mulvey
(1989) and Doane (1982) have separately theorized of the ability of the female
subject to masquerade or metaphorically cross-dress in order to subvert or
even bypass the gendered dichotomy of looking and representation, Beyoncé
invokes and is in control of the gaze. In such a way, Beyoncé plays with conven-
tionally gendered tropes of representation within the hip hop music video,
vacillating between subjective and objective positions and sincere and parodic
registers of performance, paralleled by her oscillation between high/feminine/
singing and low/masculine/rapping registers of vocalization. If Berman (2016)
is right that a visual album is ‘also a work of criticism – an instructional manual
for reading music’, then this is Beyoncé’s master’s thesis, a critique in praxis of
the traditionally gendered politics of audio-viewing the female.

THE VISUAL ALBUM ‘IN FORMATION’

To continue the analogy, if Beyoncé is a master’s thesis, then Lemonade is
Beyoncé’s doctoral dissertation. Moving beyond the formal confines of the
traditional music video, following a formal blueprint similar to West’s Runaway
and an intersectional feminist theoretical framework, she hybridizes the music
video’s audio-visual format with cinema to create a new (re)mediational form.
Instead of further fragmenting the song tracks of Lemonade as an audio album
to create a greater number of music videos (as done with Beyoncé), Lemonade
the visual album links them together via the suturing device of semi-narra-
tional voice-over, as well as a recurrent visual motif of a gathering of Black
women on the grounds of a Southern plantation, costumed in pseudo-ante-
bellum style. This motif could be seen to function as the meta-sequence
that provides narrative and aesthetic logic and cohesion to the other ‘object’
sequences, representative of each of the audio tracks, and each itself repre-
sentative of a stage or chapter in the life of a Black woman, from suffering
to transcendence: intuition (‘Pray You Catch Me’), denial (‘Hold Up’), anger
(‘Don’t Hurt Yourself’), apathy (‘Sorry’), emptiness (‘6 Inch’), accountability
(‘Daddy Lessons’), reformation (‘Love Drought’), forgiveness (‘Sandcastles’),
resurrection (‘Forward’), hope (‘Freedom’), redemption (‘All Night’) and,
finally, ‘Formation’.
As suggested by the inclusion of poetry by Warsan Shire, which Beyoncé
recites between most sequences, combined with illustrative imagery and
interspersed with snippets of speeches by Black women and civil rights’ activ-
ists, this audio-visually heterogeneous audio-visual work comes together to
present the explicit narrative of a woman wronged by her partner; implicitly,
it narrativizes the suffering of Black women under patriarchy. And despite
the heterogeneous or even polyglot nature of the text, comprised as it is from
a number of different ‘object’ narrative sequences, as a whole it is ‘annealed’

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 ‘Formation’ of the female author in the hip hop visual album

(MacCabe 1974: 9) through the authorizing audio-image of Beyoncé. The 5. Vernallis (2004)
would note that
‘I-voice’ is woman, and she is Black – a complete subversion of the metalan- the hypermediative
guage, or structuring logic, of the conventional hip hop music video, which is nature of music video
engaged in the construction of a ‘hypermasculine’ (Durham 2012: 39) ‘dream- aesthetics is not
generally predisposed
world’ (Jhally 2007) founded on dichotomously gendered paradigms of perfor- to a masculinist
mance and representation. fragmenting of
This tendency towards ‘annealing’ disparate voices within the text speaks the object-image,
in that the music
to the filmification of Lemonade as music video, at the same time as its hetero- video presents a
geneity, its essential intertextuality, speaks to its harnessing of digital media flow of images in
a sonic manner
aesthetics as film. Lemonade dispenses with ‘masculinist’ (Palmer 2012: 4) – what Korsgaard
hypermediative editing practices and aesthetics5 associated with the hip hop (2012: 6) terms the
music video.6 Indeed, the sequence within Lemonade that might be most closely musicalization of the
image – such that the
associated with hypermediative aesthetics (aside from ‘Formation’, which was image is not fixable or
released initially as a stand-alone music video and therefore may be expected fetishizable in the same
to retain some un-annealed intertextual and hypermediative elements towards way that the filmic
image is.
the highlighting of spectacle over narrative), ‘Daddy Lessons’, ultimately seeks
to close the representational gap between the different views of/lenses on 6. For example, the hip
hop music video’s
Southern Black fatherhood and family life that it offers. use of fragmentizing
This chapter on ‘accountability’ opens without musical accompaniment and fetishistic shots
of female body parts,
on a number of different shots of Black men, interspersed with women, as its rapid ‘MTV-style’
Beyoncé recites Shire’s words: cutting, penchant for
product placement and
a further fetishistic
[t]each me how to make him beg glamourization
Let me make up for the years he made you wait of audio-visual/
Did he bend to your reflection? communication
technology; see music
Did he make you forget your own name? videos for Busta
Did he convince you he was a god? Rhymes’s ‘Pass the
Courvoisier’ (2001),
Did he make you get on your knees daily? featuring Diddy and
Do his eyes close like doors? Pharell Williams; 50
Are you a slave to the back of his head? Cent’s ‘Ayo Technology’
(2007), featuring Justin
Am I talking about your husband? Or your father? Timberlake or even
Beyoncé’s ‘Videophone’
All the while, Beyoncé’s closely miked voice is heard acousmatically as the (2008), featuring Lady
Gaga.
narrativizing ‘I-voice’, a subjective point of identification for the audio-viewer
and omniscient perspective on the unfolding series of views of Black men
and their families. When Beyoncé’s voice returns, de-acousmatized by her
appearance on-screen and ‘in character’ as a Southern belle, to sing the open-
ing bars of ‘Daddy Lessons’, it is with an elevated level of reverberation – an
echo of her embodiment within the frame. As such, her singing persona is
recognized as yet one more objective character within the narrative of the
sequence, preserving the meta-narrational status of Beyoncé’s ‘I-voice’ within
the sequence/chapter. Thus, it adheres to a classical, filmic style of narration.
Moreover, the sequence anneals its aesthetic hypermediativeness to Beyoncé’s
‘I-voice’. ‘Daddy Lessons’ consistently juxtaposes grainy, home-video–style
footage of Black people in domestic settings against high-resolution shots of
Beyoncé singing, which are further montaged with real home video footage
of Beyoncé’s family. In such a way, the sequence as series of images becomes
a collage of film styles and narratives: an onslaught of mediative onslaught.
However, as framed by Beyoncé’s spoken word and lyrics, this works to reveal
important continuities – per classical narrative paradigm – between Beyoncé-
the-performer’s personal biography and the experiences of the Black fami-
lies who are depicted in the affectedly grainy footage. The ‘process’ of viewing

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 Ciara Barrett

which Palmer (2012) has argued techniques of hypermediation elevate above

the product/image, and which is symptomatic of masculinist digital culture, is
actually seen to be the point of the audio track ‘Daddy Lessons’: self-reckon-
ing is in the process of self-narration and the narrativization of others’ actions
upon them (hence the refrain, ‘My daddy said shoot’). Thus, the hypermedi-
ative form of ‘Daddy Lessons’ follows its narrative function to reveal, if not
fully explain, the vagaries of Beyoncé’s – and indeed Black womanhood’s –
relationships to men. In such a way, Beyoncé remediates digital/music video
aesthetics through an audio-visual format reflective of the complex structura-
tion of a female identity.
If the popular music video is the (initially) analogue audio-visual medium
most receptive to the ‘experimental’ aesthetics of digital and new media
culture in the twenty-first century, as Bolter (2005: 17) suggests, then the
visual album – vis-à-vis Lemonade and/or the female authorial voice – may
be a digital format desirous of a return to the analogue aesthetics and narr-
ativizational strategies of classical cinema. Whereas we have seen this plat-
form for audio-visual representation to have been associated with a repressive
politics of viewing and hearing in the case of the female subject, neverthe-
less it is that representational paradigm that facilitates the establishment of
an authorial, narrativizing voice. Therefore, it is not surprising that Lemonade
would appear to hybridize new media aesthetics associated with popular
music video production with classical film narrative techniques. In such a way,
Beyoncé – who we have already seen to be receptive to the invocation of the
gaze, towards a subversive upending of active/male-passive/female dynam-
ics – licenses herself as author of the text, despite its internal heterogeneous
intertextuality and contradictions. Such are the complexities of Black female
identity:

[m]y daddy Alabama

Momma Louisiana
You mix that Creole with that Negro
Get a Texas Bama

‘IN TIME’ FOR FEMALE AUTHORSHIP: FKA TWIGS

Thus, we have seen how Beyoncé, a high-profile pop/hip hop star, has
harnessed the emergent audio-visual format of the visual album towards
the assertion of authorial control over her own work and audio-image over
the course of two formal experiments, Beyoncé and Lemonade. In such a way,
Beyoncé may be seen as having reclaimed an authorial voice for herself and
for the both literally and metaphorically silenced Black female subject of the
hip hop music video. It would, however, be a disservice to the history of Black
female subjectivity across audio-visual media to claim Beyoncé as its spear-
head figure  without also referencing the work of FKA twigs, who has been
actively invested in the assertion – indeed the embedding – of an authorial
voice, also that of a Black female artist, across her work since the debut of her
LP1 in 2014.
In such music videos as ‘Papi Pacify’ (2013) and ‘Video Girl’ (2014), twigs
has explicitly interrogated gender roles, representational paradigms and
sexual dynamics, often invoking similar strategies of subversion to those
which Beyoncé employs consistently throughout her music videos in the
Beyoncé album: she invokes the male gaze and physical domination almost

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 ‘Formation’ of the female author in the hip hop visual album

masochistically (e.g. ‘Papi Pacify’, in which she is depicted as having her

mouth manually penetrated by her partner) and/or she parodies the personal
lap dance or striptease of the hip hop video model (e.g. ‘Video Girl’, which
recalls/anticipates the active/passive looker/performer dynamics of Beyoncé’s
‘Partition’ and ‘6 Inch’). In these videos, she has been able to mediate the tradi-
tionally gendered politics of audio-viewing associated with film and the hip
hop music video via/alongside overtly feminist lyrics that narrativize the blur-
ring of active/male-passive/female roles. Here, from ‘Video Girl’, she addresses
the male subject (become sexual object):

[a] body that can move

The hardest in the room
With a quick switch, kiss
Got all eyes on you now
What you gonna do?

In that, twigs has, from the beginning of her music career, been consistently
upfront about the feminist project of her work, as well as her interests in
experimentation – her foregrounding of explicitly sexual lyrics and imagery;
her genre-bending musicality – it might seem surprising that Beyoncé, a rela-
tively mainstream artist, ‘beat’ her to the visual album. On the other hand, in
view of the high production costs involved in the making of a feature-length
filmic production on a level with Lemonade, it is rather more shocking that
twigs – without a major record label deal – has already managed to produce
a 16-minute visual album on an aesthetic par. As such, this speaks to the
authorial import with which artists such as twigs and Beyoncé must view
the emergent format and indeed the urgency they feel to project their audio-
images as female performers thusly. From start to finish, and again similar
to a ‘thesis’ from Beyoncé, M3ll155X asserts the female authorial voice to be
itself a product, narrativized in process: the end goal of the female artist who
must resist the repressive cultural and textual forces that attempt to meta-
phorically silence her, to deny her voice the ability to embody the space of a
text.
Evocative, purposefully or not, of the opening shot of ‘Ghost’ (and myriad
other music videos), M3l155X opens on a close-up of a female face, recalling
the representational paradigm by which the female voice is ‘fixed’ to/contained
within the facial fetish image. In this case, however, the fade-in to the face
reveals the wizened visage of an old woman (fashion icon Michèle Lamy) with
facial tattoos and an elaborate headdress evocative of the head of an angler
fish (from a psychoanalytic perspective, the promontory light bulb standing
in for the missing phallus that the fetish image in the first place disavows,
thus doubly threatening the male subject denied visual confirmation that the
female image ‘lacks’ this phallus). Thus, the reverberant, acousmatic voice of
FKA twigs is unable to be sutured to the ‘mismatched’ image (Fleeger 2012) of
the old woman, extending the space-filling or ‘ubiquitous’ (Chion 1999: 24–25)
aural quality of twigs’s vocalization without the traditionally necessary and
mitigating technique of ‘fixing’ its image. The audio-image is thus kept at a
double distance from the audio-viewer, uncontained, unconstrained. Even the
one instance of lip-sync within the sequence – Lamy mouths ‘hold that pose
for me’, which is an aural flash-forward, of sorts, to the refrain of ‘[g]lass and
Patron’ – effects a further distanciation, as an instance rather of slip-sync. The
two images – visual and aural – cannot be sutured. Indeed, the final image of

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 Ciara Barrett

the sequence, in which Lamy takes the promontory light bulb into her mouth
before spitting out a glowing ball of light, confirms that the audio-image is at
a remove from the audio-viewer.
The rest of the visual album then appears to narrativize twigs’s rebirth as
claimant to the authorial voice, moving from ‘insemination’ or provocation at
the hands of patriarchal culture (‘I’m Your Doll’), to ‘pregnancy’, or incuba-
tion of the artistic idea (‘In Time’), to ‘birth’, or artistic creation (‘Mothercreep’),
to ‘motherhood’, or ownership of authority. In the ‘I’m Your Doll’ sequence,
twigs’s voice is finally de-acousmatized in the revelation of her face attached
to the body of a blow-up doll, which is raped by a middle-aged White male.
The visual mismatch between twigs’s Black face and the ‘White’ body of the
blow-up doll underscores the expected plasticity of the female body – her will-
ingness to ‘be a doll’, to meet male desires and welcome the sexually objec-
tifying gaze. Such cultural expectations under patriarchal rule are referenced
further throughout ‘In Time’, which most directly interrogated the representa-
tional paradigms of the hip hop video. Invoking the hypermediative aesthetics
of such, the sequence cuts back and forth between two parallel worlds: one
in which twigs, now impregnated following her rape, goes into labour and
the other in which she dances as a video model for a diegetic male viewer
(the same actor who appeared in her video for ‘Papi Pacify’), framed as viewer
within a screen-within-the-screen, mirror image to the audio-viewer on
his laptop. When these worlds collide and twigs goes into labour, rainbow-
coloured streams of liquid pouring down her legs, the diegetic male viewer
winces, suddenly disabused of the hip hop ‘dreamworld’ fantasy in which
women exist purely for sexual-recreational – as opposed to procreative or
other – purposes. As Emerson (2002: 123) has noted, ‘[p]regnant women and
mothers, as well as women older than 30, are not desirable as objects of the
music video camera’s gaze’ – a theory on trends in popular music reaffirmed by
songwriter Charlotte Greig (1997). It is only in the final sequence, ‘Glass and
Patron’, that twigs’s audio and aural images are finally sutured satisfyingly and
synchronously together, as she participates in a voguing competition with her
‘rainbow children’ offspring. In close-up, she commands them (and the audio-
viewer) to ‘strike that pose for me’, to dance, to bodily respond – and acknowl-
edge that response – to the product of her productive process. Her nomadic
voice has finally fixed to the object of her body, but, in that it has been liber-
ated from sexual subjugation through the process of artistic creation, the cohe-
sive audio-image speaks from a position of subjectivity, maintaining authority.
In such a way, FKA twigs’s performance and representation throughout
M3LL155X may be seen as consistent with the thematics of her previous work
within the audio-visual format of the music video. Here, however, the dura-
tion and episodicity of the format allow for intellectual movement between
sequences/videos – again this is analogous, perhaps, to the cognitive process
of working through a thesis. Not only does twigs interrogate the gendered
politics of audio-viewing in praxis, but she also presents an embodied answer
to the question of the female authorial voice: the woman who dances down
the catwalk accompanied by her followers, not catcalled from the sidelines.

CONCLUSION
This article has sought to show how the hybrid audio-visual format of the visual
album has been utilized by two female artists, Beyoncé and FKA twigs, towards
authorship of their own audio-visual representation in hip hop performance.

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 ‘Formation’ of the female author in the hip hop visual album

In the context of a traditionally gendered, filmic politics of representation –

which is the not-so-implicit narrative subject matter of these albums, viewed
as films – this must be seen as a radically feminist act. While the format is
neither reserved for such representational purposes – nor is its tendency
towards formal experimentation unique in the context of audio-visual media,
as adapted from music video aesthetics and thus not inherently ‘radical’ – the
visual album is nevertheless particularly well-suited to the expression of female
subjective integrity in the hip hop genre. In that, the hip hop music video has
traditionally borrowed a classically filmic paradigm of gender representation
according to the meta-narrative and logic of the male gaze (though not with-
out resistance), Beyoncé and FKA twigs have revolted against this paradigm
from the inside-out: self-consciously invoking a filmic mode of representation
and spectatorship across formally experimental audio-images to exert fuller
control over their audio-self-images’ narrativization and signification.

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SUGGESTED CITATION
Barrett, C. (2016), ’‘Formation’ of the female author in the hip hop visual
album: Beyoncé and FKA twigs’, The Soundtrack, 9:1&2, pp. 41–57, doi:
10.1386/ts.9.1-2.41_1

CONTRIBUTOR DETAILS
Ciara Barrett is a university fellow (teaching and research) at the Huston
School of Film & Digital Media in the National University of Ireland, Galway.
Her research is centred on explorations of female performance and represen-
tation in popular screen media.
Contact: Huston School of Film & Digital Media, NUI Galway, Galway, Co.
Galway, Ireland.
E-mail: ciara.c.barrett@nuigalway.ie

Ciara Barrett has asserted her right under the Copyright, Designs and Patents
Act, 1988, to be identified as the author of this work in the format that was
submitted to Intellect Ltd.

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