beyonce age |
- Beyoncé says 'having miscarriages' gave her a 'deeper' purpose: 'Success looks different to me now' - Yahoo Movies
- Beyoncé Gives 'Zero F**ks' About Her Weight Fluctuating, Says It's 'Liberating' - Yahoo Entertainment
- It’s Time We Talk About Beyoncé - Yahoo Lifestyle
- From Beyoncé to the big screen: the whirlwind rise of Melina Matsoukas | 1843 - The Economist 1843
| Posted: 09 Dec 2019 08:32 AM PST  Beyoncé Knowles-Carter is giving fans a rare glimpse into her private world. The 38-year-old singer answered questions via social media and email from the Beyhive for Elle's January issue, and shared how "success looks different" these days. One fan asked if she was "disappointed not winning" awards, likely referencing the surprise shutout for Homecoming at the Emmys, or how Lemonade didn't take home the top prize at the 2017 Grammy Awards. "I began to search for deeper meaning when life began to teach me lessons I didn't know I needed," Beyoncé replied. "Success looks different to me now. I learned that all pain and loss is in fact a gift. Having miscarriages taught me that I had to mother myself before I could be a mother to someone else." Beyoncé has been open about how she suffered a miscarriage before the birth of her first child with Jay-Z, daughter Blue, who turns 8 next month. In the 2013 HBO documentary Life Is But a Dream, the entrepreneur called it "the saddest thing I've ever been through." She told Elle that after Blue "the quest for my purpose became so much deeper." "I died and was reborn in my relationship, and the quest for self became even stronger," she continued. "It's difficult for me to go backwards. Being 'number one' was no longer my priority. My true win is creating art and a legacy that will live far beyond me. That's fulfilling." The superstar went on to have two more children, 2-year-old twins Rumi and Sir. Beyoncé admitted even she isn't immune to the challenges of balancing a career and kids. "I think the most stressful thing for me is balancing work and life," she added. "Making sure I am present for my kids — dropping Blue off at school, taking Rumi and Sir to their activities, making time for date nights with my husband, and being home in time to have dinner with my family — all while running a company can be challenging. Juggling all of those roles can be stressful, but I think that's life for any working mom." The "Halo" singer said she is embracing her curves after the changes her body went through during her pregnancies. "If someone told me 15 years ago that my body would go through so many changes and fluctuations, and that I would feel more womanly and secure with my curves, I would not have believed them," she wrote in one response. "But children and maturity have taught me to value myself beyond my physical appearance and really understand that I am more than enough no matter what stage I'm at in life. Giving zero [f***s] is the most liberating place to be. Also knowing true beauty is something you cannot see. I wish more people focused on discovering the beauty within themselves rather than critiquing other folks' grills." Beyoncé, who created the athleisure brand IVY PARK in 2016, had an interesting response when one fan asked if she believes in self-care. "The name of the brand comes from where I built my strength and endurance as a young woman. I ran and trained in the park, and that state of mind has stayed with me all these years later. It's the first place where I learned to listen to my body," she explained. "Many of us grew up seeing our parents act as if they were superheroes. Most women have been conditioned to ignore symptoms and just 'tough it out' and focus on taking care of everyone else before themselves," she added. "I am no longer one of those people. After having a difficult pregnancy, I took a year to focus on my health. I have researched information on homeopathic medicines. I don't just put any prescription in my body. My diet is important, and I use tools like acupuncture, meditation, visualization, and breathing exercises." When she was pregnant with the twins, Beyoncé had toxemia, a life-threatening condition, and was on bed rest for over a month. She ultimately had an emergency C-section. But the pain was well worth it, as evident in another one of her answers. When asked which of all the hats she wears — chairwoman, global entertainer, Queen — brings her the greatest joy, she replied: "Being Blue, Rumi, and Sir's mom." Just don't ask her if she wants more kids or is pregnant. Beyoncé said the one question she hates to answer is "Are you pregnant?" "Get off my ovaries!" she wrote. Read more from Yahoo Entertainment: Want daily pop culture news delivered to your inbox? Sign up here for Yahoo Entertainment & Lifestyle's newsletter.  |
| Posted: 09 Dec 2019 07:14 AM PST  View photos Click here to read the full article. Moving into the new year, you need a spirit guide, right? We all do. And Beyoncé for Elle's January cover is it — the singer-mogul-mom's take on body image alone will shift your perspective in a powerful way heading into a fresh 365 days. Wipe your insecurities clean with Bey's words about tuning out people's constant comments on her appearance and how she's finally arrived at "the most liberating place to be" when it comes to body positivity. Speaking to Elle about everything from motherhood to her new IVY PARK x adidas collection, Beyoncé opened herself up for a rare "Ask Me Anything" with her Beyhive. Not surprisingly, one fan wanted to know how the superstar handles the relentless scrutiny over her appearance and weight fluctuations. And as Beyoncé tells it, getting to the mental space she's in now about her body took time. "If someone told me 15 years ago that my body would go through so many changes and fluctuations, and that I would feel more womanly and secure with my curves, I would not have believed them. But children and maturity have taught me to value myself beyond my physical appearance and really understand that I am more than enough no matter what stage I'm at in life," she shared. More from SheKnows So, where exactly does that leave Beyoncé when it comes to her attitude toward other people's opinions? "Giving zero f**ks is the most liberating place to be," she shared. "Also knowing true beauty is something you cannot see. I wish more people focused on discovering the beauty within themselves rather than critiquing other folks' grills." Best of SheKnows Sign up for SheKnows' Newsletter. For the latest news, follow us on Facebook, Twitter, and Instagram.  View photos  |
| It’s Time We Talk About Beyoncé - Yahoo Lifestyle Posted: 10 Dec 2019 05:00 AM PST  If anyone asks you where you were the night Beyoncé changed the game, they're only referring to one night. It's not the night she first shut down the Super Bowl stage surrounded by dancers in Panther-esque berets. Nor is it the night she made history as the first African-American woman to headline Coachella: The night refers to December 13, 2013 — when the singer stopped the world with the surprise drop of her self-titled album, Beyoncé. Two years after releasing 4, the Houston native's fifth studio album managed to not only define part of the last decade but also change the music industry landscape and simultaneously shifted fan culture as a whole. On a Thursday evening, as Kerry Washington's Olivia Pope said "it's handled" during Scandal's winter finale as if to foreshadow what was coming, Beyoncé went quietly into the night and transformed the universe. As midnight arrived, fans noticed that Queen Bey uploaded new music onto iTunes. If you were lucky, you saw The Read's Crissle West, actress Francesca Ramsey, and Cannaclusive founder Mary Pryor emphatically reacting to the release in real-time on social media. Or you were studying for finals only to stop and watch, then rewatch the visuals that accompanied every single track on the album. At that moment, the BeyHive arguably became the celebrity stan sphere's most powerful and impressive fan club because listeners corralled around the new release earning the singer the number one spot on the US Billboard 200 chart just days before the holiday season. As of early November 2019, the project has spent 185 weeks on the charts. "What Beyoncé managed to do is break the release cycle all music execs had been trained to abide by and fans have come to anticipate," says Brandon Littlejohn, a digital marketing manager at Atlantic Records. "Bey simply said, 'here,' then dropped the mic. That did in 24 hours what some artist's entire album rollouts could never do. She managed to cut everyone's ability to offer a critique about her body of work because we all got access to it at the same time." Adding, "Part of its power was in the visuals and the sheer shock and awe that she'd record and shoot all of this content and that the BeyHive, who stays ready for everything, was absolutely clueless. The audacity to dream of dropping a project like that – in complete mystery – is one thing but building the right team and keeping the right team is where the magic happens." Beyoncé was not the first artist to drop a surprise album. Radiohead did that with their 2007 album, In Rainbows. But the magnitude of Beyoncé, catapulted the trajectory of the songstress' stardom to new heights while affirming the gospel that mothers have been preaching since birth — you really can do anything you put your mind to. "I've always been a fan of Beyoncé because I was a huge Destiny's Child fan," says Jasmyn Lawson, a dedicated BeyHive member and Netflix's Strong Black Lead Editorial Manager. "[But] when she went solo, I don't think anyone, including she, could even dream of the megastar she would become." "I think about the New York Times, 'Solo Beyoncé: She's No Ashanti,' headline all the time but my fandom changed after [the] self-titled [album] dropped — the surprise [of it all] and the way she proclaimed her womanhood made me a full-on stan. I don't think I've slept the same since December 13th, 2013. And I no longer argue with people about why she's the greatest entertainer alive." With four world tours, another visual album, a surprise joint project with her husband, JAY-Z, a live album, and a movie soundtrack, the 38-year-old has not missed a beat since that fateful night in 2013. And neither have her fans. The kids might say, "the devil works hard but Kris Jenner works harder" — but dare I argue that Beyoncé and the BeyHive work the hardest. The singer releases projects that are on the pulse of culture while her fiercely protective fans don't stop until they know every song or dance move, are ready for each surprise announcement and study the deliberate intention of Queen Bey's actions to gather any intel about what they think she might do when they least expect it. Her unexpected way of dropping projects has galvanized an entire generation of fans to not only stay ready but immerse themselves in her artform. Three years after self-titled, Beyoncé dropped the lead single, "Formation" from her sixth album, Lemonade in February 2016. A mere hours later, as the songstress performed at the Super Bowl, fans recited lyrics word for word, had the choreo down pact, and flooded social media timelines with copycat looks because the impact was that major. In April of that year, Lemonade was released exclusively on Tidal. On the three-year anniversary of the album's drop, it was made available on Spotify and Apple Music — reintroducing it to the Billboard charts — giving more fans on-demand access to Yonce's catalog. Part of the magic behind her influence is that even when Beyoncé isn't publicly visible, her fans galvanize around her work to keep it relevant. The Twitter page, BeyLegion, has upwards of 300,000 followers waiting for all the latest news on the singer. Some 135 million people follow her on Instagram, where they get photos from days, weeks, and sometimes years after they were taken, and rarely without captions or context. There have been college courses and a reading syllabus crafted to approach feminism through the lens of her artistry. A Beyoncé Mass worship service was created to foster an empowering conversation about Black women with her music and personal life as a guide. Dance classes are devoted to her most iconic choreography to songs like "Single Ladies" and "Love On Top." After she remixed Maze featuring Frankie Beverly's 1981 song, "Before I Let Go" for an entirely new generation of listeners, fans birthed a viral sensation with the #BeforeILetGoChallenge because, why not? While the BeyHive attempts to decipher when her seventh solo studio album will arrive, one fact will remain. From the past decade, there is only one undisputable name and night that helped shape this decade of pop culture — and that moment belongs to Beyoncé. Originally Appeared on Teen Vogue  |
| From Beyoncé to the big screen: the whirlwind rise of Melina Matsoukas | 1843 - The Economist 1843 Posted: 15 Nov 2019 08:41 AM PST From the outside, Matsoukas's rise to success seems almost frictionless. She got an agent as soon as she finished her postgraduate studies. Her first proper music video was for "Money Maker", a bombastic strip-club anthem by rapper Ludacris and R&B singer Pharrell Williams in 2006, which topped every chart. She felt in over her head. She was so nervous that her initial moodboard resembled something out of "A Beautiful Mind". "It was a mess," she says. But the resulting video brought her to the attention of Jay-Z. When he met Matsoukas at a party in 2006, he turned to Beyoncé and declared, "She's the next one." Matsoukas responded to Beyoncé by saying, "I'm coming for you!" She laughs at her younger self's boldness. "I know, I'm corny." A month later Beyoncé came for her. The fourth, fifth, sixth and seventh music videos Matsoukas ever made were for one of the biggest stars on the planet. Small wonder, then, that Whitney Houston, Solange, Lady Gaga, Katy Perry and J.Lo all came for her too. The work was dynamic, beautiful and fun. And she had a knack for making her subjects feel at ease: in 2007, she somehow convinced Snoop Dogg to dance in an unbuttoned shirt in "Sensual Seduction". Though she was in high demand, Matsoukas began to chafe at the medium's limitations. She wanted her work to be part of the central conversations about American life, to help people see the world differently. Yet too often she found herself called upon to deliver flash and swagger. "Music videos as a medium were really looked down upon and it was hard to get an opportunity," she said. Eventually her opportunity came: Issa Rae asked her to sign on as executive producer and director of her television series "Insecure". Rae was a little concerned that Matsoukas's style might be too glamorous for the more mundane settings of her show, but Matsoukas took as much care to depict the substance of twenty-something black life as she had with Beyoncé's glamour and confidence. She tooled around LA with Rae, seeing her hangouts, exploring the atmosphere of different neighbourhoods. She ultimately created a setting for the show that struck a balance between cosmopolitan aspirations and mundane realities. We all wanted to move in. Her next proposition was different again. Lena Waithe, now an Emmy award-winning screenwriter and actress, approached Matsoukas to direct an episode in the second series of "Master of None", a comedy-drama which already had a loyal following. Matsoukas was reluctant: episodic directors are given little creative freedom and she is a self-professed control freak. But the script of "Thanksgiving", which drew on Waithe's own experience, offered the chance to portray a story previously untold in TV drama: the coming out of a black lesbian. The episode won an Emmy and cemented the creative relationship between Waithe and Matsoukas. "There was immense trust. She really gave me that story and let me take it where I wanted to," she says. When Waithe wrote the screenplay of "Queen & Slim" she took it to Matsoukas. The pair went backwards and forwards over ten drafts. Finally Matsoukas felt like she could paint her own picture of black life in America. "I feel like this film is the first time where it's all on me, all of my influences, all of my life is in that frame, in those frames, in that film. One of my good friends saw it and she said…'It's so you'." The world in which "Queen & Slim" begins is brutal and ugly. Slim is played by Daniel Kaluuya, an Academy Award nominee for "Get Out". Jodie Turner Smith, a newcomer, plays Queen. As the film opens, the two are enduring a not-terrible, not-scorching Tinder date at a diner in Cleveland, Ohio. Since the pair are dark-skinned people in America, they can't even get through their awkward first date without systemic racism intervening. Catastrophe occurs when Slim accidentally fires a gun and kills a police officer. When Matsoukas was scouting for locations, she drove through the neighbourhood in Cleveland where Tamir Rice, a 12-year-old black boy, was shot by a policeman in 2014. She found herself in the middle of a police operation. At least six black people were pulled over by the police. When she saw one of them getting out of a white Honda Accord, she thought "That's Slim! That's him right there." (In the film Slim drives a white Honda Accord.)  The couple in the film flee on a road trip that Matsoukas refers to as a "reverse slave-escape narrative". In the early 19th century, the Underground Railroad ferried fugitive slaves from southern states to the free states in the north. Queen and Slim travel in the opposite direction: to New Orleans and then on towards Cuba. Early viewers likened the film to "Bonnie and Clyde", a comparison that Matsoukas resists: "I feel like we can't just ever be ourselves. We always have to be compared to some white archetype…It's not about criminals." "Queen & Slim" is far more varied than that. There are elements of magical realism and ragged news footage of protests that recall Black Lives Matter rallies. The road trip traverses so many landscapes – the frozen and the warm, inner city and bayou – that the film's subject becomes America itself. Across it all is written the experience of black Americans. This is a world in which the personal is constantly trying and failing to escape the political; where, as both Matsoukas and Waithe put it, "two black people [are] trying to love while the world is burning down around them." The film itself reconciles this tension. Matsoukas sees "Queen & Slim" as fundamentally a "love story", albeit one that is set "against the backdrop of a really racist system and institution". The very existence of such a story, she says, serves "to honour all the people who lost their lives to police brutality and who aren't here". Matsoukas trains her camera on scenes from black history that have long been overlooked: a juke joint where Queen and Slim dance the night away draws inspiration from a project by Birney Imes, a photographer who captured underground dance clubs across the South in the 1980s. In another moment of stolen freedom and joy, Matsoukas puts Kaluuya atop a white horse in tribute to her maternal grandfather, Carlos, an Afro-Cuban preacher and musician who rode in rodeos in Harlem and the Bronx. Again the political reference is oblique, invoking the "Yeehaw Agenda", a recent attempt to recover the contribution of African-Americans to the story of the West.  Matsoukas lingers on moments of great intimacy. She shot home interiors in the style of Deana Lawson, an artist who makes even the most threadbare possessions seem luxurious. She lights black skin so that it glows, a trick she learned from Barry Jenkins, who directed "Moonlight" in 2016: "Nobody knew how to shoot black people before Barry Jenkins," she says. She is particularly attentive to hair: Queen's braids being taken out as she tries to disguise herself; a close-up of gelled baby hairs; Slim having his locks lopped off. The risk of such an approach is that it can verge on pastiche, making black culture twee in the same way that Wes Anderson did for hipsters. Occasionally these moments tend towards the clichéd: Slim's haircut could have been taken from the cover of Beyoncé's and Jay-Z's latest album. But cumulatively they accord dignity and respect to the particulars of the black American experience. Over the past five years Hollywood has begun to invest seriously in black film-makers for the first time since the 1990s: Waithe, Jenkins and Ryan Coogler, who directed "Black Panther", a ground-breaking black superhero film in 2018, have all found critical and commercial success. Matsoukas sees her fellow black creatives as a mutually supportive community. The practical implications of this become clear to me when we go for lunch at her regular spot, a soul-food joint called My Two Cents. Matsoukas found it through Instagram and, on her first visit, ended up staying for 11 hours. Now she cooks weekly with Alisa Reynolds, the chef-proprietor ("It's annoying that she's both so talented as a film-maker and such a good cook," says Reynolds). But Matsoukas is more than just a friend with a shared interest. She's helping Reynolds develop a tv show about comfort food around the world. "People need a black chef like her to have a cooking show, don't you think?" In the lead-up to the "Queen & Slim" premiere in November, Matsoukas and her team carefully chose locations in which to preview it: they showed it in the Fort Greene neighbourhood of Brooklyn, whose community of African-American creatives was celebrated in 1986 in Spike Lee's first feature, "She's Gotta Have It". Then they went to Howard University, a historically black college, during homecoming week. She wanted the film to feel "for us, by us". The LA screening took place at the Underground Museum. Matsoukas was toasted by her good friend, Solange, who welled up as she asked the crowd to support the film. Afterwards Matsoukas posed for photo after photo.  At that screening I realised that the moments of recognition by African-Americans of their own experiences – when Queen goes hard at Slim as a form of flirting or Slim crosses himself before eating – are themselves a form of solidarity. Even the bleak finale (it's not a spoiler to say this doesn't end well for the protagonists) can, in some lights, be seen as optimistic. "I'm not saying only black people get it, but, like, you understand who didn't get it," says Matsoukas. But she wants, and needs, the film's message to resonate with a wider audience. "I hope that it humanises us," she says. "I hope that they are able to relate to…what it feels like, even just a little bit, to be a black person living in America today. It's really infuriating that we have to live that way, constantly in fear, constantly on the run, constantly searching for our freedoms. I want to give them understanding of why we laugh at times, why we cry at times, why we dance, and hopefully they'll show their love and appreciation for black culture, while allowing us to own it." We'll soon find out whether she has been successful. "All of my decisions really come from authenticity, creating a narrative that feels true to the black experience," she says. "And if I base my choices in authenticity, I cannot go wrong." She pauses, thinks, waits for confirmation, maybe reassurance. "Right?" she asks me.• "Queen & Slim" is released in Britain in January  |
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