Beyonce's Argument Analysis

Ott & Mack say that reception scholars believe the audience determines what a text ultimately means and signifies to them, despite the fact that media owners might have an economic power to craft media texts with particular messages. Since everyone has different experiences and ways of interpreting things, then the audience will have different opinions on what a text represents. For example, hooks sees Beyoncé’s Lemonade album as a superlative ode to capitalism. While on the surface, it is easy to dismiss Beyoncé’s inspiration to solely derive from her husband’s alleged cheating, there really are so many subtle and blatant nods to meaningful social issues. For example, in Freja Dam’s Spin article analyzing Lemonade she says, Beyonce is “visually empowering black women, celebrating Deep Southern culture, and referencing the Black Lives Matter movement, Malcolm X, and Hurricane Katrina.” While hooks may also see these issues ingrained in the album, capitalism is what first struck her/him and goes unmentioned by Dam. …show more content…
A piece of text can evoke a great sense of hope for some, like Mollie Hemingway, who sees Beyonce “punishing herself for the absence of her husband,” while “full of resentment towards an unfaithful husband,” yet her songs lead to emphasizing “the importance and benefits of forgiveness and reconciliation.” Whereas, others, like Kelly McGlaughlin and Mia De Graaf of the Daily Mail, recognize Queen Bey’s acknowledgement to the Black Lives Matter community by featuring the mothers of young black men killed by police officers in a music video. Whether or not the audience interprets a product like Lemonade the way Beyonce intended is irrelevant, because the audience’s reception dictates how texts are consumed and that allows for such a wide variety of opinions that go deeper than a surface-level analysis and support an “active audience”