The Intellectual Underpinnings of Beyonce’s Awesomeness w/ Kevin Allred

Laverne speaks with Kevin Allred, author, scholar, speaker, who came on the pop culture radar when he started teaching a university course on Beyonce back in 2010. It’s called Politicizing Beyonce, with a syllabus composed entirely of black feminist writers. It’s his mission to facilitate conversations that disrupt America’s racist and heterocentrist status quo by studying America through the eyes of female Black artists and intellectuals, like Beyonce. He draws connections through history and asks us to take a different perspective. His class has been adapted into a best-selling book, Ain’t I a Diva, available at The Feminist Press. //

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Episode Transcript

Speaker 1 (00:02):
Welcome to the Laverne Cox Show. A reduction of shondaland
Audio in partnership with I Heart Radio music kind of
comes and goes piggy pop music. Yeah, and so she's
turned that whole turned everything on its head. As a creator,
I don't even know what the right word for artist creator.

(00:23):
I don't know what to call her anymore, because she's
just beyond the labels. She's beyond, beyond, beyond Beyonce. Hi,
Welcome to Laverne Cox Show. I'm Laverne Cox. When you
think about why Beyonce Jazelle knows Carter means so much

(00:46):
to me, I think about the your Destiny's Child's first
album came out. It was a self titled album. It
came out that was the year that I started by
medical transition. And so as long as I have publicly
identified as a woman, Destiny's Child and Beyonce have kind
of been in my life. And I feel like I've

(01:07):
sort of grown up with Beyonce in a way. I
just saw so much of myself, and she's obviously influenced
a lot of my aesthetic choices. She's just given me
a lot of permission over the years to explore different
parts of myself through her music and through her performances.

(01:28):
So I am insanely excited about today's conversation. What I
knew I was going to be doing a podcast and
knew I wanted to have an episode about Beyonce. I
just don't want to have an episode where I'm just
like fanning out over Beyonce, although that would be perfectly legitimate.
I wanted to sort of know Honor the depth of

(01:49):
her work. And I was like, who can we bring
on and have a conversation about Beyonce? And I thought
about Kevin Alred, So a little bit about Kevin. Kevin
Already is an award winning author, speaker, educator, and musician
who says he loves Beyonce above all else and two
thousand and ten, he created a college curriculum Politicizing Beyonce,

(02:10):
which paired Beyonce music with black feminist literature to interrogate
American race, gender, and sexual politics. He is the author
of Ain't Idiva, Beyonce and the Power of Pop Culture
pedagog We go there and it's so fun, it's so awesome.
I can't wait for you to hear this. Please enjoy

(02:33):
my conversation with Kevin Alread. Hello, Kevin, welcome to the podcast.
How are you. I I'm good, as good as anyone
can be during these times. But you know, I do know,
I do know. So I I am really nervous and

(02:54):
excited about having this conversation with you. And what was
interesting preparing for this was reading of a book and
realizing that it's not just in homage to Beyonce, that
it's also in a celebration of black feminist writers and thinkers.
And then I would put on music and then I
would start dancing and have all of my feelings and say, sthetic.

(03:14):
I have such a complicated relationship to Beyonce, and it
sounds like you do as well. In your book, you
say that bed A was sort of your indoctrination into
the bee Hive. Why was Beatata moment for you as
opposed to you know, Dangerously in Love or Destiny's Child.
I mean, it just was like a feeling for me.
I don't know, like that album hit me different. Of course,

(03:37):
I've been a fan of hers, like you can't not be.
Some people try not to be, but you have to
try hard not to be a fan of Beyonce. Just
the music and the fun and you know everything. But
I just distinctly remember like sitting at the desk I
had at the time, and like hearing Deja Vous Star
and like the bass rattle and this feeling of this

(03:58):
whole new sound. It was for me, I think, a
pivotal moment where she started to claim an independence that
we've now seen blossom. But it was that moment where
she went away from all the you know, the record
companies she had played Dina Jones and Dreamgirls, and she
was like powerless and she wanted to like hit back

(04:19):
really hard and I don't know, that's just like hit
me in a way that some of her other other
music hadn't. And I became like a fan times a
million at that point. I was just a fan before,
and then that just like pushed it into the stratosphere.
I guess. I think for me, I I was a

(04:40):
fan since Desse's Sheathon is No No. I remember seeing
them on tr L. I think was the first time
I became aware of Destiny's Child. Remember they did an
interview with that they didn't perform, and they talked and
I was like, who are these cute girls? You know?
And then I heard the song and I was, I
came obsessed, and then the writings on the wall like
solidified it from me. When and Bill's Builds Bills came out,

(05:01):
I was, I was all in and then say my
name and then jump and jumping in like you know
the chronology, but I think it was beat eight. But
it was also it happened like with the Beyonce Experience concert,
you know, was her first visual album, when I saw
the concert and understood that she was on a new

(05:22):
level as a live performer, Like I went to a
new level, and I think she gave me permission to
queen out in a way that I had not felt before.
Because and this is really interesting. I'm just I'm literally
having this aha moment right now. I'm like, I started
my medical transition in year that Desney Schell's first album
came out. But I was very much like at that

(05:43):
time in New York and I was in the club scene.
People wanted to sort of conflate my identity with being
drag and I needed to sort of divorce myself from like,
you know, gay clubs and gay culture because I'm like,
I'm a woman, I'm not a drag queen. And like,
I saw this this black woman who was beautiful and
may saying, who is embracing all this sort of over
the top drag queen esque obviously inspired movement, and it

(06:07):
just gave me permission to own that part of myself
channeling Josephine Baker too. Let's not forget I will never
forget the Deja video and those performances, like that's how
she kind of unveiled that era and it was like,
oh damn, this is something that we haven't seen from
her before. Yeah, you reference the Fashion Rocks live performance

(06:31):
which was dedicated to Josephine Baker, and she actually wore
the banana skirt and the movement is very much influenced
by Josephine Baker, who has been a huge influence for me.
But that Fashion Rocks performance for me, is still one
of my favorites. The wind she sounded so great, and
I love the Deja choreography so much, like I'm obsessed
with that coreo. That's very African dancing, it's very Josephine

(06:54):
Baker influenced. It seems like one of those first homage
moments to m black women of the past, black entertainers,
black feminist history even and it's nothing to say that
she does that now because she's you know, homecoming, she's
interspersed with with quotes and all of this stuff, and
she's kind of taken on the role of teacher herself

(07:16):
and she's like educating the masses about all this stuff.
But I think that was another moment that was impactful
because it was like, this isn't just a pop single,
this isn't just a song. She's like teaching us something too.
And that to me, obviously, because I was like going
into being a teacher, I was like, oh, cool, so

(07:36):
we can look to this as a teaching tool as well. Yeah,
you're referencing your book an article by Daphne Brooks from
The Nation magazine Sugar Mama Politicized. Yet Sugar Mama politicized.
You rite that Brooks imagined that Beyonce was reclaiming a
meticulously nuanced political image of black women with her work

(07:58):
participating in larger or a black feminist historical trajectory. Um,
can you talk to us a little bit about Brooks
is inspiring you to create the course curriculum politicizing Beyonce
that you did over eleven years ago. Yeah, that article again,
just like the B Day album was kind of like
a bombshell to me. That article was too, because I'd

(08:18):
been listening to Beyonce now in this new way, and
it was the first critical writing about Beyonce that I'd
ever come across. I mean, it may be the first
like critical analysis of Beyonce that exists, but it was
really an album review, but it got into all of
this stuff about the historical context of the release of

(08:39):
B Day, which is a year almost to the date
after Hurricane Katrina, has come through that same geography really
like she's because she's also bringing forth this Gulf Coast,
so much Gulf Coast imagery on that album, and it
just got the wheels in my head thinking about how
we could analyze other Beyonce stuff. So it like broke

(09:01):
open these floodgates of inquiry and questions and listening to
her in a different way that I didn't even know existed.
You know, people will right thirty two articles about analyzing
a Shakespeare play or whatever, and I was like, this
is the level Beyonce is on now. She's producing work
that can be taken so many different ways and analyzed

(09:24):
in so many directions. Once you dig into the evidence
she puts into the videos starting at B Day, you
see her grow in ways that have now born fruit.
And so that article by Daphne Brooks and a lot
of her other writing about music just kind of was
so inspirational to me that like you could look at
something that people just take his pop and go so

(09:47):
much deeper. Yeah, I I checked out Daphne Brooks's article
and it was It's really stunning and beautiful. And I'm
obsessed with Beyonce, but I've always the sort of overt
materialism is in the music. Right, Beyonce seemingly is very materialistic,
But the way that Brooke puts it is that, you know,
I guess in a capital society, money is sort of
synonymous with power and sort of the role reversal. And

(10:08):
the way she even talked about sugar Mama, it's so
interesting because I've been thinking about sugar Mama in a
very different way. I have no desire to be a
sugar mama. Right, We've seen like black women who are
who are the breadwinners, Sherry Shepherd, Wendy Williams, Melby, Mary J.
Blige or four black women and who I love all
of them I love dearly who had very public divorces

(10:28):
from men who are now getting crazy amounts of alimony
from them or got crazy settlements. And it felt very
particularly the Sherry Shepherd moment, where it just felt very
sort of exploitative and just felt very I just as
a black woman in my forties myself, I'm like, I
never want that situation. But then you know, I'm I've
recently started hanging out with the dude, and I was

(10:50):
just like, I literally had that. Then when she starts
the song Damn, that was so good, I think I'm
gonna buy him a short setter. I was like, I
get it, get like being so earned out that you
just like want to just you know, shake your purse
and just like come on boy. You know. So it's
really complicated, but I also think there's a piece of
like who has the power in relationships is what Brooks

(11:14):
seems to be sort of asking us to interrogate and
look at when we look at songs like Shocker Mama
and Upgrade you, what are your thoughts on the materialism
or the capitalism or well, the capitalism in her music
is like the toughest nut to crack. I guess you know, like,
and at one point I came to the conclusion that,

(11:35):
you know, she may very well be material like she
may not mean it to be commentary on anything else,
and she may be materialistic. That's fine, like whatever, but
it does open up spaces for conversation about materialism and capitalism.
And obviously Bell Hooks has taken her to task for
this a couple of times. To me, it's less important

(11:56):
whether it's it's her real like, she's not telling you
to go be materialistic like her, but rather, can we
have a conversation about how materialism equals power in this
society or can we talk about why a black woman
being materialistic might be somewhat different than a white man
being materialistic, because you know, Brooks talks about it in

(12:17):
relation to Hurricane Katrina again and like, we watched on
TV as black women's possessions were taken from them, everything
was taken from them. So what kind of a statement
is it for Beyonce to come out a year later
and be like, no, I own this, this is my ship,
this is what I have, you know, like to claim
her possession of things, And that to me is an
interesting you know, there's ways to find those kind of

(12:39):
twists and tweaks around that that to me, aren't just
about celebrating unfettered, no checks capitalism. And then in her
private life she also does get back a lot. You
can feed that into the narrative. I don't think she's
out here like going to create the socialist revolution as
she sings in front of all the expensive paintings and

(13:01):
the louver for ape ship. But in some ways her
more recent visuals around around that, like it's standing in
the louver to me have almost read comic like it's
almost a parody of why should someone have this much money?
Why should one person have this much money? The recent
stuff kind of makes me ask that question. I don't

(13:21):
know if she's meaning to ask it, but I think
it's a useful question to have a conversation around, and
that gets around some of the criticism. Well, I think
what's interesting for me about it just thinking about that
the element of the work is that her being so wealthy,
her being so you know, so successful in the context

(13:42):
of capitalistments given her a freedom that a lot of
other artists don't have, right that she can go and
you know, make a movie like Lemonade or Black It's
King and do these visuals because there's so much money
there and then there is power there, and it's think,
you know, the master's tools will never dismantle the masters,
how but there's something and we're all sort of living
in contradictions, you know, which is something belt Hooks even,

(14:05):
you know, says that we that is the reality being
poor and capitalism is certainly not ideal. And I've been
there and it's it's quite awful. But I just I
love complicating that those questions in the work. There's another
moment in your book where you almost talk about her
character of Sasha Fears. It's sort of this drag persona

(14:28):
and then it becomes this simular locker room of a simulacroom,
you know, in a way that like Sasha Fears is
this drag persona. It's it's really interesting. And I was
thinking about, you know, sort of politicizing Beyonce, and you
were like, well, Beyonce was always sort of politicized, And
I wonder if she's if queering Beyonce word thing isn't
she is she always already queer is well, not in
terms of her sexuality, but in terms of queer as

(14:50):
a verb. I think of queer. I don't identify personally
as queer, but like I think they're queer is something
that you can do, and um, yeah, I think I
like to think of it as a ver to queering
the ideas around gender. And that chapter where I'm like
trying to think about Sasha Fiars, because there was something
so over the top and overblown and over just overly

(15:12):
done about Sasha Fears. And even that album was like
a binary in that it's two discs. This is for
like the older folks that remember when you like bought
the CD as a disk that you put in your player,
but like you know, you go out to the store
and you bought this double album which didn't need to
be a double album, but you had to switch between

(15:33):
the disks to get the I Am side and the
Sasha Fiar side, and the Sasha Fear side was all
these like more like club tracks, dance tracks. The subject
matter wasn't necessarily about love, love love, love will save
the Day like all that kind of stuff, whereas the
other side was more ballads, traditional composition, but they both

(15:55):
kind of messed with gender in the ways they played
off of one another. And then single Ladies She Comes
out and shows her wedding ring for the first time,
which is a contradiction. And so then I'm saying, like, well,
then maybe she wants us to think about contradiction. Who
are the ladies? Who is single? What is being a
lady mean? Over time, lady has been you know, white

(16:18):
womanhood has been the like space for ladies and all
of this stuff. And I use not to complate drag
at all with trans identity, but I used Janet mocks
book about Redefining Realness, which is all about and Ladyship
Lee actually use some of Ladyship Blie her autobiography to
talk about the ways gender can never be contained in

(16:42):
those binaries, even if it's a trans story, it just
like can't be contained. And so that's what, in some
ways I think is a really cool analysis of Sasha
Fierce as a character who then she kills right and
then maybe brings back at later times, like I kind
of see Sasha Fierce in other places is in her work,
But she publicly stated that she murdered her at one

(17:04):
point after she kind of got this concept out. I
saw that she said she didn't need Sasha Fierce anymore
because Fierce was because she's just historically very shy. Beyonce
is very shy, and so she needs to sort of
take on this persona to be this suit of wild
woman on stage, if you will. And so it became
something that she needed and she said she didn't need
Sasha Fierce anymore. Yeah, exactly after she had kind of

(17:26):
exposed all these things about the limits of gender in
a binary sense, then she's like, Okay, next project, Let's
move on to the next thing. Yeah. One thing I
wanted to say before about when we were talking about
class and capitalism, that I was thinking about this with
black is King, that there isn't a desire in so
much of her work to elevate beauty and blackness and

(17:48):
and duart expectations of what blackness is um in that
kind of imagery, you know, thinking about the Mafi Coast
and you know, all of the through things what was
on Piqua, nipples in your necktie, Ermi's briefcase, cardier top, clips,
et cetera, all these upper class you know sort of
things that like, we can have access to this too,

(18:08):
and certainly, you know, we can be critical about that,
but I think there's a desire to have a kind
of blackness exist in this and I would say high
not just a high art space, but this in this
space of couture and this this moneyed space that it's
that's really about celebrating blackness in a diverse way. I mean,
that's there's a real deep desire to create culture that

(18:31):
celebrates blackness and its beauty in a way that is
I would say, linked to something that feels more sort
of upper class, but then it is deeply grounded and
being you know that girl from the block that like,
you know, third Ward kind of vibe and like a
Houston and the beats and and and and hip hop. Yeah. Well,

(18:53):
and then the flip side of that makes me think
of the No Angel video where she's doing the opposite
and like elevating these common everyday things too. Question our
judgments over what counts as high class, low class, wealthy poor.
You know, just because you don't have money doesn't mean
you can't create nice things or find nice things. And
just because I do have money doesn't mean my nice

(19:16):
things are going to give me what I need. So
she kind of has both ends of the spectrum. There
is complicated and she in the work, and we can
speculate about her personal life, but I think in the
work what I love. One of the things I love
about her so much is that she refused to be
placed in any box. She always insists on being really complicated,
and I think too with No Angel, there's sort of

(19:36):
an homage to strippers and sex workers and that feels
very liberating and super sex positive and sex positivity in
her work tipulally on the self titled album, it just
sort of came fruition, but it was really always there.
And one of the duos of videos I love breaking
down the most in class or with people talking, or

(19:58):
just talking about it to anyone who will listen to me,
is like Partition and Jealous as a two part story
where it's very sex positive, but it's also taking into
account the hyper sexualized stereotypes of black women. If you
take them both as a story, I think it does
this because they run into each other. The track changes

(20:19):
into Jealous before Partition is over and the visual part
of the album, and then Jealous is all about her
kind of like covering up because people are looking and watching,
and she does this stuff with the camera placement where
the audience is always placed watching her as the other
side of the camera, like at that dinner table where

(20:39):
she SIPs her tea and trying to get attention, and
so this double edged sword of her being not as
Beyonce the black woman personally with jay Z and all
of that stuff, but as a kind of representation of
of black women that want attention and want to be
able to express sexuality, but also have to deal with

(21:00):
already being stereotyped as too sexual. I think in those
two videos she offers some interesting commentary that points back
at the people watching, being like, you're the ones doing
this to me. It's not anything I do, and the
audience should take more. I think she's indicting the audience
a lot. Is one thing I love about her, and
forcing the audience, especially if you're not a Black woman,

(21:23):
to ask questions about how you're looking at her and
why you're thinking a certain thing about her, Because even
when she expresses sexuality a lot in videos, she's very
distanced from other people in the frame. It's usually her
by herself, unless she's in a frame with jay Z,
which then we can draw the personal connection in right,
But other than that, it's very like, so why do

(21:44):
people look at her this way? And so It brings
up a million interesting questions to me as as the
non black woman audience has to ask themselves about how
they're treating not just on screen and watching her, but
then how do you interact with people in your everyday
life as well. I just was thinking about the fact

(22:08):
that Brittney Spirits and Beyonce are about the same age
and came out around the same time, and how Brittany
was so sort of you know, my loneliness is killing
me a baby one more time, kind of very sort
of virginal Catholic school girl, playing with that kind of

(22:28):
Catholic schoolgirl image. And certainly when Destiny's Child came at,
they were very young girls. And I feel like Beyonce
was never sort of given that space to sort of
be a young woman, be splaced in this sort of innocent,
virginal space, even though she very much was from the
beginning of her career. And I was just thinking about that,
and you know, white womanhood and Black womanhood, you know,

(22:51):
they really, I mean, the kind of are contemporaries, but
they were doing in a very different world, right. It's
a very very something, very different going on with them.
Obviously artistically, she's thinking about that, and so when Beyonce
and when I when not a Girl comes out, for example,
even when Crazy and Love comes out, and like it's
her first solo single and she's sexy, Like she's so
sexy in it, but it's always very elegant and elevated

(23:12):
with her. I remember having a conversation with Frank Gatson,
who was her creative director and choreographer for many years.
He said he would hire ballet dancers to do all
the the oh dance, you know, so that it would
be it would never feel how wish too. You know.
I'm saying quotes not that we you know, not the
same thing wrong with being ho wish um, but that
it was always sort of be elevated because of the

(23:33):
classical dance technique. I'm paraphrasing what he said. So he's
just thinking about how sexy she's always been, but it
wasn't the same sort of scandal that I'm when Christina
Aguilera her dirty video comes out, and it's just this
whole thing, you know, I was thinking about that relationship
between like what you just said about how black women
are sort of presented is overly sexualized, and so it's

(23:55):
and I definitely have this tension as a as a
black woman myself trying to sort of being a space
of ownership of my sexuality among their trend and we're
definitely overly sexualized, but being in space of owning my
sexuality but not being overly defined by it and beyond
it gives us a great template for that. Yeah, so
inspiring and that in that realm, and it's a really

(24:16):
complicated like dance that she I mean, no pun but
dance that she has to do around it. Once you
start kind of analyzing each video, like you said, even
crazy and love going back to Destiny's Child too, to
see how she's had to give just enough but not enough,
and I think that's what comes out in partition and jealous.
She's finally kind of speaking about it, like, look, this

(24:38):
is what it's always been, like, you've never given me
a chance, or even in the song grown woman, like
I'm a grown woman, but she's mixing it with young
footage of her, so she's like mixing that kind of
this idea that black women never get to be girls.
They're always seen as older, over sexualized, all of these things,

(24:58):
and where's the space. I mean, it's obviously because the
society is organized around principles of white supremacy. That this
is true, and she's like calling that out in little
subtle ways that I think are really interesting too. Then
pull out and get people to talk about Now it

(25:21):
feels like a great time for a short break. We'll
be right back. Now we are back, and we're ready
to pick up where we left off. I have to

(25:50):
say I was very pleasantly surprised to see that my
name was mentioned in the context of of you talking
about the Journal Truth and I woman, and then the
title of your book is Ain't I a Diva? Can
you talk a little bit about the title the Diva
video and that that relationship with the Journal Truth. I
think some people have misunderstood since the book come out

(26:12):
that I'm trying to refer to myself as a diva,
which is not the case like it was meant to be.
Ain't she a Diva? I didn't think that. I never know. Yeah,
I've had a couple of people come up to me
and I was like, oh, I know, I would never,
Like I would never. The whole point is to not
insert myself in that way in all of this work.
But yeah, it's just kind of this blending of antire

(26:32):
woman so Journal truths speech because if you don't know,
I should I should. I feel like I should let
to let people know that we're referring to the Journal Truth.
And I want a speech that she allegedly gave at
the Ohio Women's Convention in eighteen fifty one, that released
twelve years later, that it became the speech that we've
come to know, but well alleged speech, right, because we

(26:54):
don't know the real people are saying this more and more,
but I still think it doesn't get spread around enough.
We don't know what Sojourner Truth said in that speech
because she didn't read or write, so she never wrote
it down. There's two different accounts, and I go into
all of that and you can like google this. It's
all over the place. There's two different accounts. One that
came up pretty soon after the conference where she gives

(27:17):
this famed speech. She also grew up speaking Dutch, so
the inflections, which are very contemporary African American vernacular English,
would not have been part of her speaking patterns. But
I think it is still an important like text that
we see as a performance. And so I I was
trying to like, make this connection between Sojourner Truth and Beyonce,

(27:40):
both as performers and maybe even performance artists. So Journer
Truth was known for singing a lot, she traveled around.
She was this truth teller, right, and Beyonce tours She's
not seen in that same way. But I just wondered
what what comes out of seeing them connected in that way? Right? Her?
The lyrics of her song Diva Beyonce song mirror in

(28:03):
some ways some of the things that were said to
have been said in so journal Truth speech. And regardless
however it was spoken and however it was delivered, the
point was she was fighting for this intersectional look at
like I'm am I not a woman and I'm a
black because I'm black? Does that make me not a woman? Right?

(28:24):
And I reference you're speaking tour as well, which you
add these different intersections onto. And I thought of Beyonce's
song It's Diva, Isn't that somewhat She's going into this
I am I not? You know, she talks about being
fifteen in my Stilettos. I've been again age and gender
and sexuality and class in some ways, and she's performing

(28:46):
it as Sasha fear So again we have the layer
of this kind of gender drag, and she's standing up
and making these statements similar to what so journal Truth said,
and like, how how could they inform one another? And
how might we think about Beyonce if she's connected back
that far? Like I think so journal Truth is the

(29:08):
earliest person I referenced in the in the book, and
so it's kind of setting this span of history that
I'm trying to relate to Beyonce and also like show
echoes of them, echoes of all these women through Beyonce's music. Yeah. Absolutely,
And I think what I might always love about thinking
about the history of black feminine feminism specifically is there

(29:31):
was always intersectional because it had to be, because it's
just the way that Sojourna saw the world. It's like, well, wait, wait,
what hold on? All these conversations about race are about
black men, and all these conversations about gender equality are
about white women. Hey, and I a woman. It's just
it's kind of really simple when you think about it,
but it was this Black women were just erased in

(29:54):
all of those discussions. And and I love how much
you reference Kimberly Crenshaw as well, who coined the term intersectionality,
which is such an important concept to think about in
relationship to Beyonce and then just the women's gender studies
that you really are doing with Beyonce. And I think

(30:14):
I have to talk a little bit about this, but
I discovered when I was shooting Disclosure through Susan Striker,
Professor Striker who's interviewed and Disclosure, a person named Polly Murray,
which you probably know Poly Murray, and I had not
heard of poly Murray before. And Paully Murray came up
with this term Jane Crow to sort of talk about,
like Jim Crow, it's like wait, hold on, and again

(30:35):
it was this intersectional analysis of like, but wait, I'm
experiencing racial oppression and gender oppression at the same time.
And that's a very specific thing. That's Jane Crow. Um.
I always like to remind people that they're good. Marshall
said that Polly Murray's thesis, you know, graduate thesis with
the Bible for Brown versus Board of Education, right, And
Paully Murray it's this person who was assigned female at birth,

(30:55):
but who struggled with their gender throughout their lives, struggled
with their sexuality throughout out their life and both thought,
you know, to um receive testosterone. It just several different
moments in Polly's life. So maybe Paully's on the spectrum
of being trans and the fact that this person, you
know who who Crnshaw credits as being the sort of
main influence for her coming up with the term intersectionality

(31:17):
is poly Murray. I think it's just a really interesting
historical fact that we should be aware of and acknowledge,
and just like like say, Polly Murray's name in this
context of talking about intersectionality and black feminism. Absolutely, and
that's really you know, the whole class came about because

(31:37):
I was teaching intro to feminism, intro to women's studies.
It could be called like intro to intersectionality, but feminism
is always taught through these white women's stories and you know,
Susan B. Anthony, and not that these people didn't do
important things and sometimes also some kind of bad things
or things we wouldn't want to recreate. But you know,

(31:59):
I just wanted to get us Beyonce's music, to get
all of these names in people's heads if they hadn't
already heard of them, and so that they could then
go read more um and learn more about the history
of just like the history of the United States through
the lens of black women is more instructive kind of

(32:20):
changing things going forward than anything else that I could
think of. So it was kind of at first it
was yes, I love Beyonce. I'm the Huges Beyonce fan.
I want to talk about it all the time. But
also I want to sneak in all of this stuff,
all of these women's names, so that you whether you
do the reading or whatever, you'll still have them on
the syllabus and you'll still know them at some point

(32:40):
and maybe you'll you'll hear it and it'll click in
your head and you'll say, oh, yeah, I heard about
her and that Beyonce class. Let me go see what
she was up to, or you know. I think what
I also love is that you're very cognizant that you are,
that you're white, and that you are male identified, and
that through out your course and throughout the book, it's

(33:02):
really you want you center the voices of of black women,
and you see in the book that, like you know,
everyone is obviously not a black woman, but that we
can many of us can benefit from the work and
that they lived experiences in the scholarship of black women.
Can you can you talk about just you know, the
subtitle of your book, Beyonce and the Power of Pop

(33:23):
Culture Pedagogy that like the space of sort of being
a teacher, being a pedagogue in the classroom. The nature
of the classroom setting for you and for for many
feminists was also a site of like how do we
do this differently? And it sounds like you're very much
influenced by a feminist sort of ways of teaching and
doing pedagogy in the ways in which you've taught Politicize

(33:45):
and Beyonce, Can you talk some more about that? Bell
Hooks Teaching to Transgress It is like my teaching Bible.
She has some other volumes too, but it's that first
one that just really still going back to it. It's like, yes,
this over and over. You're just shouting yes when you're
reading it as a teacher, because that's all I wanted
to like, I don't want to teach you what to think.
I want to teach you how to think about things

(34:08):
going forward. I want to teach you how to take
something from history, Like how do you take two sources
and use them to talk to each other, influence each other.
Obviously there's it's this is within the scope of black
women's history in the US. So I just want people

(34:28):
to learn reading black women for me growing up was
one of the most foundational things, like it taught me
more about the world than anything else. Of course, I
grew up in a small town in Utah, very religious
Mormon and coming out as you raise Mormon, yeah yeah,
I was um and coming out as a teenager coming

(34:53):
out as gay, I obviously looked for gay voice things
to read, you know, gay literature, which I had to
go to the library at that time to have the
Internet yet it was coming very close, but we weren't
at the internet stage yet. And one of the other
things I discovered as I was searching through stacks of
books was like poetry by black women and the language

(35:14):
the experiences learning about something that wasn't immediately around me
because I didn't know black people in my town really
hit me, like broaden my scope of the world and
taught me more about myself. Not that the experiences are similar,
but just taught me more about being who I am
in the world by learning about other people's experiences. And

(35:36):
so it always just had a really special place for me,
and I was like, more people need to learn about
history through black women. More people need to be reading
black women, because that's the way we really figure out
how power is functioning in this society. That nexus of
race and gender is really essential to learn about how

(35:57):
to shift the America we want to live in for
the future. So that was like kind of my thinking
trying to create this intro to women's studies that would
focus on black women's voices. Amazing, amazing, and your analysis
of Lemonade, you talk about America's sort of broken promise.

(36:20):
You know, I always say that, you know, it's about
eighteen years in her career when she got into Formation,
you know, And I think that, like I think you
referenced this in the book a week after the super Bowl,
So the Formation I think dropped on Friday, and then
she performed the super Bowl and maybe has been dropped
on Saturday, and they performed the super Bowl the next
day and then people were like sort of outraged, people
like lost their minds, and Saturday Night Live did a

(36:41):
skit that you talked about in your book that where
people were like Beyonce's black the suggestion was the sumber
four white Pants was sort of in denial about being
a black woman or something, which is kind of interesting.
But Lemonade information specifically was when the moment when she
really became overtly political in a way that she had
not before. And you talk about this broken promise of Americans,

(37:02):
what what are some of your thoughts around formation and
Lemonate in this era, and Beyonce's yeah, well, since I
had been teaching in this class since and then Lemonade
comes out, I'm like, well, now she said it, Now
we're done. She said it. Okay, trying to tell y'all
six years, Yeah, it all comes full circle. And she

(37:24):
is very explicit about the politics. I mean, Lemonade is
also a super super personal story. But one of the
things that I mentioned it in the book is that
that's not what I do in the class. Like her
personal life, she's gone to great links. She's like the
only star of her magnitude that can keep so much private,
and so yes, we can kind of like maybe she's

(37:47):
having trouble with jay Z, But I don't want to
assume anything that she doesn't say explicitly about her personal life.
So I thought, Okay, back up, how do we like,
look at Lemonade. It's this cheating story. It's this heart rake.
You know, I came to this idea. It's a broken promise,
which is what cheating is, an infidelity. You two had
a promise with one another. But what if the two

(38:08):
ends of the conversation are black women in America? Right?
So I read it as more of a representational story
about what do you do when you've been lied to
over and over and over and and not just black
women in America, a lot of marginalized groups are lied
to over and over and over by promises of what

(38:31):
the government will do of Oh, here's freedom, but we're
not going to give you anything. You know, there's nothing
with it. You're equal now. But we'll see how that goes.
Like I think about I think about the Malcolm X
quote Inliminating, and I kept thinking about the promissory note
speech from MLK. Yeah, So, I mean, so I just
was I thought it was this. I mean, it is

(38:52):
like a magnum opus of visuals lyrics that the songs
that flow into one another, they're the damn near one
song of every genre is on that album. She really
covers this kind of huge scope. And one thing I
love this is kind of unrelated, but one thing I
love about Lemonade is the way so she doesn't usually

(39:14):
do features much, but she had features from white men
on Lemonade, her blackest album, but they were only heard
and never seen. They're never seen in Lemonade, So she's
kind of flipping in interesting. I'm thinking about Jack White
and who are the other James Blake, James Blake, even

(39:35):
the country vibe of Daddy Lessons. Don't get me started
on the Dixie Chicks and and Daddy Lessons. That was
amazing when they did it all together. You write beautifully
about that moment in the book This country Music Awards
yet and country just country music in general, is this
like it was created by black artist, but we think
of it now as a super white space in music.

(39:56):
And so she's kind of reclaiming all these things and
doing to the white artists what has been done to
black women all along, which is like maybe you'r heard
but not seen, like your influences here, but it's not
spoken of by name and so, and you don't get
to benefit and you don't creative. Yes, and so she

(40:16):
does that and she takes it and it's like, Okay,
this is now my version of the story. I've been
lied to, the promises are broken. Now I'm going to
tell you what we need to do to move forward.
And it's the same as the cheating story, but if
you zoom out on it, I think it's really powerful.
Even that bowl that I talked about, the bowl a

(40:36):
whole lot the more freedom I mean, the song Freedom,
The song Freedom is so explicitly that for me, it's
it's my favorite song from Lemonade, And it's so Freedom
is so many different things. It's so complicated and what's
so powerful about music. I was rewatching Homecoming this morning
to prepare and Freedom is just such a powerful song

(40:59):
in live. It's just with all the horns and Homecoming.
It's just such a statement that like it's it's a
cheating story, but it's very much a story of black women,
right that you can't watch listen to Lemonade and not
understand that she's telling so many black women's stories. And
what's so beautiful about the specificity of it is how
it becomes universal. The specific becomes universal. How many women

(41:22):
of all races, how many people of all genders, have
connected deeply to the work and to the music, and
I still I was thinking about Adele at the Grammates,
like in shock that she won Album by the Year
and just like how did this happen? And why beyont
not standing here? I just will never forget that moment.
I still Lemonate was Alum of the Year that year. Anyway,

(41:45):
that's a little stand moment. Not this whole podcast is
in a stand moment. I'm trying to be somewhat objective.
I'm trying to have some kind of critical distance here,
but like I mean, come on, like, Lemonade change the
whole music industry, and I love how beautifully you talk
about there was self titled album changing the music industry.

(42:05):
Can you talk a little bit about how game changing
this self titled album was too, because it's just girl
m Yeah, it's I mean it was two th thirteen,
which isn't that many years ago, but it's almost like
I don't remember what before was. But like I think
back to my childhood, and I used to love Tuesdays

(42:25):
because that was the day new albums came out and
you would go to the record store and by the
album you'd saved up for or you know whatever, and
so like Tuesday. It was always my favorite day. Beyonce
just upended that completely with this surprise midnight end of Thursday,
back when everyone was watching Scandal. You know, Scandal was over.

(42:48):
We're going to bed. Oh my god, that's right, work Kevin, Yes,
take us back back. It was, you know, one of
the Scandal. I think it was the fall finale of Scandal.
Even so, people are like, well, what's gonna get us through?
What's going to get us through? And Beyonce is at
midnight surprise, not knowing anything, Like it's hard to not know. Oh,

(43:10):
this album is working on material, or this artist is
working on material. This artist is got a single coming
out Friday, like she just she was on tour, but
no one expected first of all, an album and then
also an album that had a video for every song,
with these huge, lavish productions that everyone had to have
signed three D nondisclosures for that we didn't know it

(43:33):
was coming out. To have that many people involved with
something and to keep it completely silent is another move
that shows just how powerful she is now. And then
immediately music was released on Fridays instead of Tuesdays. Part
of it has to do with the switch to digital stuff,

(43:53):
but that had happened a little earlier, and so now
people are like, oh Friday for new music, but that
is because of Beyonce, and it's worldwide, like sanked worldwide
because Beyonce sank her release worldwide for that. None of
that existed before December. So that's all hail to Beyonce

(44:16):
for that. Like major shift in in the music industry itself. Absolutely,
and I think just the visual the visual album is now.
Some artists have attempted them and with varying degrees of success,
but it almost just become this requisite thing. It's like
where where the visuals? And I just just the undertaking

(44:36):
of it. It's like, how do you I mean just
the budgets. Most record companies don't even have the kind
of budget to like make a video for every song.
So well, music videos, you know, music videos used to
be events too, So she brought that back. I don't
know exactly when they kind of died off, but I
mean in the eighties, Janet Jackson premiering a music video
was an event, like a prime time if that we're

(45:00):
Michael Jackson, Michael Jackson, the marrying events Madonna. Madonna's expressed
yourself and just for my love being like band and
I'm like that old I remember all that, Like videos
were like a huge thing. I think it really was
when CDs dropped off and everything became digital and budgets
got cut. It was you know, it's all of really
about things becoming digitized and but just becoming cut. At

(45:21):
that there's just no money that labels had anymore to
put into videos. But Beyonce was at a certain level
where she could invest and and it's in that visual
experience is so integral to helping tell the story of
what it is she wants us to understand about herself,
the world, or what she wants to say at any

(45:42):
given moment. Now, when your book was published, everything Everything
Is Love was just coming out, I think, And then
so Homecoming hadn't happened, Black Is King hadn't happened, So
you didn't write about those in the book. Do you
what do you want to say to us those? You know,
there's stick a lot to say about but every Thing
is Love, Homecoming, Black It's came. What do you think

(46:02):
about these very distinct eras of Beyonce? Yeah, I was
able to draw the Homecoming hadn't come out, but the
Coachella had happened, so I was able to drop a
couple because obviously I stayed up until, you know, yes,
six am, to watch it on my computer on the
East Coast, so I was able to dry. I was
there opening weekend. I was at Coachella on the first weekend,
my first time, last time at Coachell. I haven't been back.

(46:25):
My first time at Coachella, and Kevin it must have been.
I always want to cry thinking about it. I swear
to you it was. It was a religious experience. I
always feel like it's church when I go to Beyonce concert,
but Bachella was. I just I still can't believe that
it happened. And it's just you had to be there.

(46:45):
I mean, I watched Homecoming a lot, and it's a
great memory and it's a great document of her process. Wow,
blown away by that. But just to be there with
like all those hundreds of people on stage in the
marching band, and I was like, Okay, you think the
marching bands is going to be there for the first
little few songs, and they're there the whole time. And
of course it took four months to come up with

(47:06):
those musical arrangements. With marching bands. It's so intricated. It's
just just the musicality of it. It's something that I think.
I think it's the best concert that probably has ever happened. Um,
and I don't think it can be will be top
for at least ten twenty years if ever. I'm just
going on record. I think that's what I always say
about Beyonce. But then somehow she finds a way. Yeah. Honestly,

(47:30):
after a ball I was like, Okay, she can retire.
She like, no one's going to ever top. That makes
sad maybe her, But but what are your thoughts. I'm
kind of glad my book came out when it did, because,
like I was saying with Lemonade, she's kind of started
doing like my whole point was to analyze her music

(47:51):
in this way that I didn't didn't see a lot
of especially and more and more came out, and now
she's kind of taken on the mantel and so it's
like she's adding the sources to the Homecoming film with
all those quotes you know, Audrey Lord, Alice Walker. I'm like, well,
some of these were on my syllabus, and she's everything

(48:11):
is love. I I liked people gave a kind of
a you know response. I thought it was great as
a kind of epilogue to the Lemonade era, as a
you know, whoever the other side of this relationship that
you're imagining she's talking about in Lemonade must have done
their work, because now we've got this happy, little short

(48:33):
not EP, but you know, short album that is just
all about fun and celebration and all of that. There's
the materialism stuff, but we can put that over in
the corner to have conversations about. I didn't know if
we put it in the corner. I think it. It
does feel integral and it's very but it's very hip hop, right,
I think right, it's something that that the materialism is

(48:54):
very sort of hip hop. And you know, materialism isn't
gonna save anybody, I don't think, but like I think
it is, it becomes part of hip hop. It's part
of a certain kind of musical flex. I think we
can sort of enjoy the aesthetic of that without you know,
sort of embracing that ideology or way of being. And

(49:14):
it's nice to see that focus on love the two
of them. You know. The happiness of it, I guess
is just a nice epilogue as a closure moment for
the Lemonade era, right, and then her going forward into Homecoming,
Bicella Homecoming, She's really starting to incorporate more and Black
is King as well, incorporating these diverse influences and sources

(49:38):
and musical inspirations and all from all black and being
explicit about all the different blacks, so from you know,
the Josephine Baker homage and b Day, to all of
these African artists that she uses on. It makes sense
to me. It's just a trajectory. It makes sense all

(49:59):
of these different influences come in. And I was thinking
about the question of cultural appropriation and like what that,
what that is, and what that means. And I think
that like everyone's influence, I think, and I think in
a multicultural world, everyone is ultimately going to be inspired
and be influenced by things that are probably from another culture.
And I think the issue becomes around, like exploitation, issue

(50:22):
becomes around who can profit, who gets to profit. So
I think that, I mean, I think cultural appropriation is inevitable.
And so I think that when people say, oh, that's
cultural appropriation in a dismissive way about anything I'm not
just this isn't about Beyonce. This is my sort of
cultural appropriation rant. But I think when we just say oh,
that's cultural appropriation, and then it becomes dismissive and then
always already problematic, it's like, well everyone's appropriating. It's really

(50:45):
about power. It's really about power and who gets to benefit,
you know, sort of all the white artists who stole
from the little Richards and the Chuck Berrys, you know,
back in the day. The big issue with that is
that Chuck Berry and real Richard weren't getting the same
money in the same recognition for their work. So that
that's what added by callosal appropriation. And because I think

(51:06):
we're all influence for sure, and the way she gathers
influences I think is really interesting. It's I like to
look analyze her now as as a teacher herself, like
she's creating her syllabus with the influences the artist she's
either samples or features, the visual references she makes because

(51:31):
she's always referencing paintings or films or you know, so
many things, and there's so many takes you can have
on it. There's not one right or wrong analysis of
a Beyonce video or film. And so to me, she's
creating these little she's creating work that will, believe will
be like analyzed a hundred years from that, Like she'll

(51:52):
be what some of these old hundred year old artists
or writers are. And I think that's air in the
music world, like music kind of comes and goes piggy
pop music. Yeah, And so she's turned that whole turned
everything on its head. As a creator. I don't even

(52:13):
know what the right word for artist. Creator. I don't
know what to call her anymore, because she's just beyond
the labels. She's beyond She's beyond beyond Beyonce. It's time
for a short break when we come back more with
our guest, and of course are what else is true segment?

(52:46):
We're back without further ado. So, Kevin, if you could
ask Beyonce one question, okay, or maybe two, what would
the one or two questions be? After all these years
is steadying her and doing whole course days about books,

(53:11):
like a whole book. That's such a hard question because
she wants to be private and I respect that, Like
I don't think I would ask her anything personal about
her life. I might, you know, what would be a
good question. I would be like, okay, I do one
of those desert island What five albums would you take
to a desert island or something like. I want to

(53:32):
know more about either her process or her inspiration, or
like what music has meant the most to her as
she's become this icon, this legend, because I can't imagine
asking or anything personal. It's it's it seems too I
don't know. Yeah, it's interesting. I've met Beyonce once. Yeah,
you've met her. Yeah. I met Beyonce once at the

(53:54):
Grammates in t seventeen, and I just told her how
much I loved her, and she was like, I her teammate,
and she's a video there are many videos, and so
I just was so because I always sort of fantasized
about meeting her, and when I was like thinking of
meeting Beyonce, it was always in tears. And when I

(54:14):
met her finally, I remember saying this to um Stephen Colbert,
that a sense of calm came over me. It's like
when you meet the Queen, a sense of calm comes
over you. And she was she was pregnant with the
twins at the time. At the Grammar's you can google
the pictures and it was just so it was so
funny because jay Z was sort of behind her and
he was smiling from ear to ear. It was just
like everybody like, no, it's like, how big this moment

(54:36):
is for me? It was like jay Z, he's like her,
and everybody it's like her that like I am a
huge Beyonce fan and so like I'm meeting her and
everybody's like, Okay, LaVerne's meeting Beyonce. This is the thing.
That's what it felt like. Yeah, it's so funny because
I have no desire. I was thinking about this and
I as much as I love her, I have no
desire to necessarily be friends with her. Not that I
wouldn't want to be friends with her, but like I

(54:58):
I love I love interacting with the work from a distance, Right,
she really enjoy that. I love that. I don't. And
I've thought a lot about this, and I'm like, I'm
in Hollywood now, I'm like, why am I not hanging
out with Beyonce. I've had these questions, ask myself these questions.
I'm like, you know what I tell me? To hang
out with Beyonce. She's given us so much through the
music and through the visuals and the fashion and just

(55:21):
so much. And that for me is everything. And one
other thing I want to you know, we've gone to
deeper meanings around intersectional feminism and her work, but just
the virtuosity of what she does musically vocally, She's a
brilliant singer, She has an amazing vocal technique, she is
an incredible dancer. Just the virtuosity of what she does.

(55:44):
I think part of the reason Beyonce is Beyonce is
the live performances and that like, how few people have
trained to physically be able to get up for two hours,
two and a half hours and just execute what she does.
That is just insane. It's so amazing. And it's just
for anyone out there who's not a fan of Beyonce,

(56:04):
great thing is to go to our concert. The live
experience that Beyonce will give you, it's unparalleled. You can
start with Homecoming to the Homecoming Will Get You Together
too on Netflix. Homecoming will Get You Girl, get you
all the way together. And her ear for her ear
for harmonies always like knocks me down. So if you're

(56:25):
starting like listen to the backgrounds as well. Listen with
headphones and listen to the backgrounds like Lemonade, Pray you
Catch Me the Heart. She's singing like twelve part harmonies
or something, and it's just the layered and it's all her.
So just to be able to hear those and create
those out of thin air is like magical to me. Yeah,

(56:46):
And because she does so many things, people don't always
give her the credit for that. I think starting with
a Destiny's Child and being in a girl group and
how harmonizing like that was his great training ground for
that ear. That is just it's amazing. There's so much
we can talk about Beyonce all day. Obviously, what what
is the biggest thing that though, that you want to

(57:08):
say about Beyonce and her body of work, your relationship
to it. To sort of a conclusion, I just think
that obviously it's fun and empowering for a whole host
of different groups of people, and people are drawn for
for their own reasons, whether it's identity reasons, black women
are drawn to listening to another black woman, you know,

(57:29):
whatever it maybe she brings together so many groups of people,
you know, maybe some of the white fans. After that
snl skit points out brilliantly. I think I think it's
one of the best SNL skits ever done. You know,
the day Beyonce turned black and they're they're like shocked
and horrified and don't know what to do because now

(57:50):
the white people are like, how do I enjoy the music? Now?
I don't know how to navigate this when she's actually
you played it on and you enjoy it. He just
put the music on. The music is amazing, right, and
you like go out and learn and honor the you
know the history she's invoking, and you learn about it

(58:13):
and you tell someone else about it, and you expand
your own worldview. That's what I love about. You can
use Beyonce's music to just like expand people's views of
the world, and hopefully for good purposes that we all
will people will fight for more equitable futures for everyone,
because there's something in Beyonce's music that you can use

(58:36):
to kind of talk about why those things are so important.
So to me, she's like she's one of those figures.
She doesn't give speech. She sometimes will give a speech,
but she's very private, but her music does those things
and it's I don't want to compare her to other
musicians because they're so different. But I know she's very
much inspired by Nina Simone. Ever since in Life Is

(58:58):
but a Dream, she's been explicitly red and Singina Simone,
and I think she is like she's has that inspirational, motivational,
educational quality about her that absolutely people dismisses just pop
music are really doing the disservice to themselves and everyone else. Yeah,

(59:20):
I think though at this historical moment, she's been able
to let everyone understand and know that it is more
than bought music. And I think about Brown Skinned Girl,
for example, and my Veni Simone and colorism and and
the song Brown Skin Girl, and how necessary that song is.
And I think how necessary is from from a light
skinned black woman too, with all of the sort of

(59:41):
violence of colorism, that it's still pervasive that you know,
young girls out there, dark skinned girls can have this song,
you know. And I think a lot of I don't
like to get into beyonce espercial life either, but I
think of her as a mother now that is certainly
you know Blue is singing on that song, you know,
is is such a beautiful moment in the in the

(01:00:04):
video with Naomi and Kelly and all of these just
beautiful brown skinned girls. I think it's just there's something
so healing about that. I think because there's been historically
the ways in which white supremacy, you know, sort of
perpetuates colorism and pits dark skinned women against light skinned
women is just so deeply painful. It's really really painful,

(01:00:26):
and and Beyonce is just cognizant of that, and it
just feels like this beautifully healing moment that doesn't even
I mean, it's hard, it's just not even really fully
words for it for me, for that that song, and
there's just still there's a lot of fiance moments like that.
I'm always going to cry. But I would love to
wrap up with a quote from your book, You you
right towards the end of the book that we need

(01:00:47):
to start over recenter Kimberly Crunshaw's original theorization of intersectionality
as about exposing, challenging and dismantling intersecting systems up power
and oppression, not simply about representation or collaboration. Black women

(01:01:08):
laid the foundation, but everyone has a responsibility and stake
in creating a more just world. It's a really beautifully
written book. Everyone out there, you should really check out
Kevin All It Ain't a Diva, Beyonce and the Power
of Pop Culture Pedigoa to either other underlying moments that
I have that we haven't gotten around to reading from today. Kevin,

(01:01:31):
thank you so much for being here. I like to
end the podcast with this question, and the question is
what else is true when it comes from my therapy,
my therapeutic process that's based on the community resiliency model
in this idea of both and And it's basically like,
when things are really challenging in the world, and there
are many things that are challenging in the world, and
it's easy to focus on those challenging things, what are

(01:01:53):
the things that get you through? What's the both? And
what else is true for you? What helps you to
get through? Right now? Kevin obviously Beyonce, right, But yeah,
just music in general, I think, and I was a
lot younger. I wrote music and played and you know,
I played guitar and singing and write songs. And I've

(01:02:14):
been going back to that this year, like playing music,
listening to music of all different genres, and just kind
of studying, like diving into music, whether it's Beyonce or
old music I used to listen to in high school,
and it's like taking me back. Maybe it's because I'm
getting older now and I'm like I need to reconnect

(01:02:35):
with my younger self. But going back to all the
you know, lesbian folk music I used to listen to
in high school, and remember like what like who oh,
you know, like Annie de Franco and the Indigo Girls
and all the it was the Lilith Fair to him
when I was in high school. Yeah, so I'm going back.
I'm going back to the Lilith Fair inspirations and just

(01:02:56):
like remembering how I felt back then, and it's kind
of reminding me that we still have like dreams and
power and like, don't let all of the stuff going
on in the world just keep you down. I love that.
Thank you so much for being here. Everyone. Check out

(01:03:18):
Kevin Alread's book. Ain't I a Diva? Are you on
social media? Do you want the kids to follow you down? Sure?
I got kicked off my other Twitter account, So now
my Twitter is not Kevin already at not Kevin. You
got kicked off your Twitter? Yeah, because I made a
joke about the president or I I pretended to be

(01:03:39):
the president and said I wasn't a very good president,
and so they got me for impersonating. Oh gosh, yeah,
to be very careful on social media these days, well,
I guess all days not Kevin already are you are?
It's Twitter? The only place you're on that's mostly and
you can find me from on the other places from Twitter.
So awesome. Thank you so much for being here, Kevin, No,

(01:04:01):
thank you, it's my dream. Talking about Beyonce is good
any day, and then talking to you about her is
next level. So thank you. I appreciate that Beyonce is
undeniably great and over the years, her unwavering dedication to excellence,

(01:04:25):
to to surpass what anyone has ever done before is
so incredibly inspiring. And Beyonce just makes you want to
work harder. Beyonce makes you want to just jump higher
and sing higher, and and and just and just do
it better. And so I'm just really excited that I

(01:04:46):
got to dedicate a podcast to the Queen, and I
hope you guys all enjoyed it. And guys is ginger
neutral f y? I uh yeah, I love Beyonce. I
love heavens take on her and I can't wait to
see what the Queen has or is next. Thank you

(01:05:14):
for listening to The Laverne Cox Show. If you like
what you hear, please rate, review, subscribe, and share with
everyone you know. You can find me on Instagram and
Twitter at Laverne Cox and on Facebook at Laverne Cox
for Real. Join me next week with my guest and
author of The Color of Law, Richard Rosti. We'll be

(01:05:34):
discussing legalized residential segregation in the twentieth century and the
ongoing effects of these policies. You don't want to miss
it until next time, Stay in the Law. The Laverne
Cox Show is the production of Shondaland Audio in partnership

(01:05:56):
with I Heart Radio. For more podcasts from Shondaland Audio,
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