Black Women Are Driving a New R&B Renaissance
Finally, our music icons don’t have to be larger than life to get attention
“I woke up like this — flawless.”
We all remember the iconic titular line of Beyoncé’s 2014 hit, “***Flawless.” The anthem, like other singles at the time such as “Run the World” and “Single Ladies,” encouraged women — and particularly Black women — to see and embrace their beauty, away from the validation of men. At the time, Beyoncé’s message was revolutionary; between the artist’s unapologetic declaration of self-love and Chimamanda Adichie’s beautiful feminist prose, the lyrics empowered Black girls to see their beauty and womanhood in an entirely new light. In 2014, we all felt flawless.
But did we feel whole? The “***Flawless” era was chock-full of songs — like Rihanna’s “Sex With Me” — that praised Black women’s beauty, sex appeal, and overall perfection. The music mirrored the times; in the early 2000s, terms like “goddess” and “queen” (and later, “Black girl magic”) were often used to describe Black women.
This language, on the one hand empowering, was also dehumanizing to Black women, who often felt the weight of these unrealistic and godlike societal expectations. In an attempt to erase centuries of rhetoric that characterized Black women as ugly or…
