But although desirability has played a starring role in Beyonce’s career, ‘Lemonade’ expands this definition of female power before exploding it from within. The visual album, which samples Malcolm X’s 1962 speech “Who taught you to hate yourself?” and is laced with haunting spoken word written by the poet Warsan Shire, intersperses images of Beyonce spitting verse in a fur coat and grinding in the red-lit gloom of the club with scenes in which she floats, grief-stricken, underwater, destroys everything around her grinning with manic energy, strides through a field flanked by naked women wearing crowns that channel the Egyptian queen Nefertiti and presides over the mothers of Trayvon Martin, Eric Garner and Michael Brown.

— My column on Beyonce’s Lemonade and how the witch hunt against ‘Becky’ misses the point for Daily Life.