Stuart Cosgrove: Beyonce’s success reminds us music has power to change lives

This week the resilience of black music triumphed yet again, setting new records at the socially distanced Grammy Awards, in a marquee outside the LA Convention Center. Beyoncé – the self-styled Queen Bey – became the most decorated female artist in the history of the awards ceremony. Her 28th Grammy was presented in honour of Black Parade, a celebration of black power and struggle, which she released to coincide with the ­Juneteenth celebrations, last year.

“As an artist, I believe it’s my job to ­reflect the times, and it’s been such a ­difficult time,” she said as she collected the award. “So, I wanted to uplift, encourage, celebrate all of the beautiful black queens and kings that continue to inspire me and inspire the world”.

Here in Britain, the murder of Sarah Everard in London, and subsequent ­arrest of a serving police officer has dampened any sense of progress in women’s lives, and achievements in starry Hollywood do not explain the catastrophic failure of ­policing in Clapham, nor conceal the collective pain that Everard’s death has unlocked.

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Those that witnessed the peaceful vigil as it turned into an ugly stand-off, where women were bundled, handcuffed, and arrested have every right to see last week as the very nadir of women’s rights.

But there is an alternative story, which in the emotional context of Clapham may seem distant, but it is no less important. Trinkets, celebrity, and awards will feel like cold comfort to many women, but the midnight train of progress moves ­restlessly on.

Power never concedes gracefully but it is easy to forget that the most ­successful racial justice campaign since the ­assassination of Dr Martin Luther King was launched and led by women. Black Lives Matter is now seen as a ­campaign about race, but it was started by three women deeply rooted in ­community ­politics. It was first and foremost a ­feminist campaign.

In 2013, three female black ­organisers — Alicia Garza, a single mother from Oakland, California, Patrisse Cullors, an artist and activist from Los Angeles, and Opal Tometi a Nigerian American from Phoenix, Arizona with a history of ­campaigning for immigrant rights, ­created the movement after the ­acquittal in Florida of George Zimmerman, the killer of Trayvon Martin.

Black Lives Matter began as a coalition of like-minded young women and grew ­virally with the global reach of the ­internet to become the biggest mass ­movement for racial justice ever. By the time it arrived in Scotland, the feminist and community origins were less well known, and scenes of inner-city disturbances and collapsing statues were to the fore.

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Nor was Black Lives Matter solely an internet phenomenon. Garza had also started, the Black to the Future Action Fund encouraging working class women, community-by-community, to take their protests to the polls. It began local not global.

Evidence of the feminism of black women singers can be heard on any good Spotify list. At the height of the disco era where the objectification of women and sexual display were at their height, ­women’s empowerment shaped the very best songs. Gwen Guthrie’s Ain’t Nothing Going on But the Rent, I’m Every ­Woman by Chaka Khan and Gloria Gaynor’s ­anthemic I Will Survive stood out among the throng.

To underline the point when those dance-floor anthems were first recorded Beyonce Knowles wasn’t even born.

As a fan of her outstanding achievements, there is a powerful argument to be made about Beyonce’s feminism. Her magnus opus, the visual album ­Lemonade was released in April 2016, supported by a 60-minute film simultaneously shown on HBO. The album which has been ­interpreted as a public therapy session and a feminist masterpiece, digs deep into the tragic history of women blues singers like Bessie Smith.

Lemonade’s standout track Freedom, samples works by the great folk-musicologist Alan Lomax, a collaborator with our own overlooked domestic radical Hamish Henderson. It features Kendrick Lamar (below), in what is a mesmerising essay on freedom, emancipation, and racial justice. In a filmed interlude that follows the Freedom track, the mothers of gun-law victims Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner and Michael Brown hold up portraits of their dead sons. It is a clear message about the role of the mother in the face of ­discrimination.

Last week as the Metropolitan ­Police tried to fend off damaging criticism, whilst in America, Derek Chauvin, the Minneapolis Police officer who killed George Floyd, faced trial charged with second-degree murder and second-degree manslaughter. One of the defining songs of the Black Lives Matter movement was inspired by George Floyd’s last desperate words – “I Can’t Breathe”.

Another prominent victory at the Grammys was Gabriella Wilson, recording under the pseudonym H.E.R., she won an award for her song I Can’t Breathe, a multi-layered poem of resistance that lent a whole set of slogans and demands to a movement already laden with urgent ­music. On receiving her award at the same ceremony as Beyonce’s triumph, she said “We are the change that we wish to see, and you know that fight that we had in us the summer of 2020, keep that same energy.”

TO understand the distance that ­Beyonce has travelled and the successes she has racked up, there is ample ­comparisons to be made with the life of Tina ­Turner which will be revealed in a forthcoming documentary on Sky TV on March 28th. It is simply called Tina and comes at a time when Tina, now 81-year-old, is plagued by ill health. She has suffered a stroke and had cancer as well as having kidney failure which led to her needing a transplant in 2017.

Viewers will be able to see Turner’s life story in all its darkness as she looks at a past filled with abuse and pain, before she finally found fame and a degree of self-realisation, as a middle-aged woman. Her experience contrasts starkly with ­Beyonce and that is progress.

Looking back at her life, Turner admits that she hasn’t had a good life. “The good did not balance the bad,” she said. “I had an abusive life, there’s no other way to tell the story. It’s a reality. It’s a truth. That’s what you’ve got, so you have to accept it.”

Tina has admitted that she wants to enter the final chapter of her life out of the spotlight and candidly admits that she has never fully recovered from the domestic abuse she suffered at the hands of her first husband, Ike Turner.

Compared with Beyonce’s story of self-assuredness, career control and remarkable personal wealth, there is a lesson in there. Tina Turner was advised against giving up the surname of her abuser because it was the name that given her fame.

Black music has changed in the 40 years that separate their lives. That change did not come from either fashion or music industry goodwill it came from direct action, wider social change, and the demands that women made in the face of an industry that profited from sexism.

This week a young African American woman not only won awards, but she has also driven a wedge through the industry that allowed Tina to suffer.