Analyzing Non-Traditional Texts: Beyoncé's Lemonade

Throughout students’ lives, they are forced to take a novel, or some piece of literature, and analyze it by close reading. The definition of a text is something considered as an object to be examined, explicated, or deconstructed. However, not just articles or novels are a text. Non-traditional text such as music videos, sculptures, movies, pictures, lyrics, and much more fit under this definition. Items such as Beyoncé’s visual album, Lemonade, is a great example of non-traditional text. Throughout the visual album, Beyoncé demonstrates non-traditional text with lyrics, poems, and her actions. On April 23, 2016, the world was introduced to Lemonade. Lemonade is a visual album, a set of music videos put together to create a storyline, that shows 11 chapters of stages when someone cheats in a relationship. In the visual album, Beyoncé is the one telling the storyline of being

Black Lives Matter (BLM), is an international activist movement that is for African-Americans to show equality to other races. This movement was made when police brutality, against blacks, was shown in the public eye. Beyoncé is a big activist for this movement. To show awareness, her storyline in Lemonade branches off to BLM. Throughout the whole visual album, viewers can close read all of the videos and see that all of the actors are African-American women. This is just one of the ways to show BLM. The first song that viewers can catch this in is “Don’t Hurt Yourself.” At the end of the lyric, “Motivate your ass call me Malcolm X,” then the music stops. The video then cuts off and shows clips of African-American women one-by-one. While viewers are seeing the women, the famous words by Malcolm X are being voiced over, “The most disrespected woman in America is the black woman. The most unprotected person in America is the black woman. The most neglected person in America is the black woman.” This is just one out of many to show