BEYONCÉ, I WOULD HAVE PUT A RING ON IT

"Beyoncé is the most beautiful example of womanhood and the best lady I've never met." This is what I declared to some friends at a bar recently, tipsily, giddily.

Why am I so completely fascinated with Beyoncé? Sure, she's hard to escape these days: her lovely self is splashed on magazine covers at news-stands, promoting her new album "I am...Sasha Fierce" (as well as her turn as Etta James in the otherwise forgettable "Cadillac Records"). "Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It)", her latest hit single, can be heard pumping out of cars and bars everywhere, sometimes with videos of the gloriously salacious accompanying dance.

But back at the bar that night, some friends (male, interestingly) quickly countered that her latest album was not very good, and that "Single Ladies" is a decidedly anti-feminist song. But really, such criticisms are silly. To reduce Beyoncé to the sum of her parts (a Jay-Z-loving, leg-baring, song-stealing, daddy-listening, bubblegum pop-singer) is to underestimate her.

But what makes her such an "unstoppable force"? Take "Single Ladies": sure, her marriage platform doesn't exactly seem progressive. "The wild R. & B. vampire Sasha is advocating marriage? What’s next, a sultry, R-rated defense of low-sodium soy sauce?" quipped Sasha Frere-Jones in last week's New Yorker. But it's a powerful and even empowering song about not being merely the object of desire, but a woman with needs, practical and otherwise. Against the hard-line repetition and beat of the song, she offers a rallying cry for single ladies and a warning to men who think they can woo without consquence. It's declarative, but also unabashedly feminine. Even the way the title is written out "Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It)" seems comfortably at odds with itself. The video is so ridiculously awesome (even as parody-fodder) that the phrase "shoulda put a ring on it" should probably enter the vernacular in some way. I'm trying to use it at least once a day.

As Julia Turner says in this Slate gabfest, Beyoncé is clearly "engaged in the question of what its like to be a modern woman". This is certainly evident in her somewhat whiney ballad "If I Were a Boy" (and much-derided accompanying cross-dressing video), and can be traced back to her time as lead singer of Destiny's Child. There is something mindful about her choices, her persona. She comes across as an adult--in control in a way that few young female performers seem to be. She can oscillate between aggression and fluff without choosing a side. In a way, she is a manifestation of the most glamorous version of our own inner paradoxes as women.

She seems content to keep things complicated--sexual, strong, feminine, impressive--all while generating huge commercial appeal. The "Knowles empire is delicately balanced on one of the thinnest-known edges in pop feminism: as unbiddable as Beyoncé gets, she never risks arrant aggression", observed a very impressed Frere-Jones.

Beyoncé is a great American hybrid. A rare and striking beauty with a commercial yet soulful sound, she works tirelessly and (seemingly) fearlessly, constantly reinventing her public persona without stooping to convention or sensation. The effect is so modern, so American and refreshing. It helps explain why she's captured classic American songstresses so well, in both "Dreamgirls" and "Cadillac Records". And why it was so moving (despite the huffing of some critics) to watch her serenade another great American hybrid, Barack Obama, on his inauguration night.

"The right blend of smoothness and grit", said Frere-Jones of Beyoncé's performance of "At Last". A pretty good description of Beyoncé, too.

Picture Credit: Bennowich (via flickr)