Beyonce is beat 2.0

Regular readers of this blog may not realize that, in general, it serves as a clearinghouse for the bimonthly column I write for NYU's daily student newspaper, the Washington Square News. This helps to explain the rather high-minded, self-obsessed style, as well as the average post length.
I am trying to blog more, and not just dump my column here; one result of this is that the things that I've blogged have ended up in more thought-out, complete form in my column.
So without further ado, here's Beyonce rant 2.0:

Sometime during Sunday night's sorry excuse for an Academy Awards - perhaps when Chris Rock shouted out Jay-Z, the night's true emcee, but probably when the girls at the party I was at started cooing about Beyonce's miraculous Jiffy-Lube hair-n-MAC transmogrifications for the fifth or sixth time - Ms. Knowles rose to the tippity top of my celebrity shit list.
A year or eighteen months ago - hell, five years ago, this would have been inconceivable.
After all, as pop icons in this era of Bobby Brown covers, Ja Rule duets and clitoral piercings go - putting aside the pernicious influence of her poppager - Beyonce has been my number one chica for about half a decade.
Let's review how such a thing might have come to pass:
Beyonce rose to stardom with the success of Destiny's Child, who proved through their evanescent hotness that the girl group in the grand tradition of the Supremes was very much not dead, and she quickly distinguished herself as the Aretha of the group.
"No, No, No Pt. II" aside, DC didn't immediately warrant such exalted comparisons. But when "The Writing's on the Wall" dropped in 1998, Beyonce & Co. proceeded to kick Top 40 radio a set of consecutive new ones.
Their hits from this period display a brazen disregard for R&B and pop formulas, combined crucially with a sort of grrrl-power funk-punk lyrical attitude ("I don't think you're ready for this jelly") that slammed home the sistahood's informed, sexy brand of empowerment far more forcefully - and with a great deal less camp - than the generations that had followed "R.E.S.P.E.C.T." with "We Are Family" and "I Am Woman, Hear Me Roar."
Like "Sex & the City," a pop cultural event with which the group shares a context and a theme, Destiny's Child made being a sexually empowered, financially independent, free-thinking, urbane single woman seem not only politically correct, but also impossibly, recklessly cool. Who among us can claim to have not thrown up our hands at them, celebrating the profiting of dollars? I cannot.
Beyonce kept up her mojo through a solo album that no one with functional hearing faculties needs me to tell them about. "Naughty Girl" anyone?
And with "Lose My Breath," which is about a man's virility being eclipsed and emasculated by his girlfriend's insatiable sex drive, Destiny's Child seemed to continue down their funkily feminist path.
But that sound you hear? That sound of a needle dragging across a record? That sound of death, decay, failure and the end of all good things? SKKKKRRTCH. Yeah, that's the sound of "Soldier," a betrayal of all that was once good about Destiny's Child so profound that it makes me want steal all their platinum plaques and dissolve them in the gushing Hudson of my bile.
Seriously, though: How did a band that has never been less than full-frontal in its feminism go from "Try to control me boy you get dismissed/always 50-50 in relationships" to "I need a soldier/That ain't scared to stand up for me" in less than five years?
Does the war on terrorism really warrant such a complete capitulation to traditional gender roles?
Further, did no one in the group even start to think about the effect a ghetto-flavored new single in which its three sultry, bad-ass stars celebrate the romantic qualities of "soldiers" might have on armed forces recruitment drives and/or gang violence in the 'hood?
I'm sure that if Donald Rumsfeld had any idea what this "hippity-hop" is, he'd be cackling himself to sleep. Either that or he ghostwrote the lyrics.
And while I'm at it, how can Jay--Z - who is, incidentally, the best decision Beyonce has ever ever EVER made - possibly still be considered "street"? Do the members of the co-op board in his $6.5 million TriBeCa condominium know this?
All these thoughts were swirling around my head on Sunday, while young B. did her best America's Sweetheart impression, getting Barbied up good and proper and singing a procession of astonishingly awful, soulless "original songs" that required none of the attitude, sass and charm that have gotten her to where she is today. (Although she did do a charming butchering of French that I'm sure gained her mad love in crimson country).
And while my girl friends gawked in uncharacteristic awe at her paint jobs, I realized that all the sass and charm, all the sexuality, all the grrrly power, was a simulacra, an impression of her bootylicious forebears, to get her to the point of being beloved by everyone enough to take power over the Oscars and bask in the adoring gaze of millions, without needing to express an iota of soul or integrity in doing so.
Frankly, I find that incredibly boring.