Beyonce performs onstage during "The Mrs. Carter Show World Tour" in Los Angeles.
Kevin Mazur/Getty Images
The "monoculture" has supposedly been dead for at least a decade, but it ain't necessarily so. World-devouring pop music phenomena do still exist, but today that universe is made entirely of Beyoncé — a Michael Jackson/Madonna/Prince figure whom everyone who cares about popular culture is supposed to grapple with and have big thoughts about.
And so, like every one of her albums and videos of the last half-decade or so, "Lemonade," the hourlong "visual album" that dropped on Saturday, has galvanized the entire thinkpiece-industrial complex, a function of both the economics of digital publishing — them clicks, tho! — but also because the biggest pop star on Earth is making art that increasingly invites and maybe requires a million considerations and reconsiderations.
When Beyoncé addresses the public at all now, it's with statements like this: out-of-the-blue and at once searingly candid while being meticulously, preposterously choreographed. "Lemonade" is about black women, and black feminism, and her family's particular history down in the Delta, and her troubled marriage and motherhood. The mothers of Trayvon Martin and Mike Brown make appearances. A young black man considers what President Obama has meant to his identity. Serena Williams twerks.
That's not even a tenth of what happens here — it's all too much and not enough and gorgeous and mesmerizing and messy. And it's complicated by Beyoncé's particular position on several different cultural stages all at once: an inconceivably wealthy pop demigoddess offering herself up as a figure of familiarity, wish-fulfillment and a template for actualization — and, of course, tending to the important business of selling the "Lemonade" album and her forthcoming tour.
So yeah. There are a million threads to pull here, and some writers out there will inevitably try to do the most and take them all on at once. (You brave, brave fools.) But if you're feeling compelled to dive into that ocean of essays about what "Lemonade" means, I'd like to point you to Rachel Kaadzi Ghansah's fantastic consideration of Beyoncé for NPR's The Record from 2014, titled "How Sweet It Is To Be Loved By You: The BeyHive."
In it, Kaadzi Ghansah wrestles with the way Beyoncé's celebrity and her, uh, "dedicated" fandom (the aforementioned "BeyHive") rests against her embrace of feminism. That descriptor sounds way drier than the piece reads. Kaadzi Ghansah goes to a Beyoncé concert in Brooklyn and embeds with some of her fiercest fans to makes sense of their relationship to her:
[Beyoncé], like most black women, must work hard but, unlike most black women and girls, is endlessly well-defended. She will never be homeless. She will never be broken. ...While her fans' lives might be pocked with disappointments and failures, somehow their Queen's life has largely avoided this. There are people who like to say hyperbolic, vapid things like, if you hate Beyoncé you must hate your life. Beyoncé is such a symbol of triumph that these people are willing to overlook her extremely problematic ties to the worst forms of capitalism (Pepsi, Wal-Mart and Barneys). But recently I've come to realize how much the Hive's deep, at times blind investment in her isn't so much about loving her one ton of talent but rather their defense of her place on the pedestal. They are in love with what she transmutes. What she is allowed to be. And Beyoncé does this more earnestly than the majority of singers today: she performs for them, shows them what a woman in successful control of her life sounds like. This is why they root for her. She gives her fans hope — as Tina Turner once did for women in the '80s — a sense that they, too, might win at life and vanquish the hurt. Beyoncé is the rare exception who has beaten the odds, despite her being a woman, and despite her being a black woman.
A few days after Beyoncé's album came out I was invited to join more than 40 women in a conference call about the album. Did I come in love? Adrienne Maree Brown, the facilitator of the call, asked me when I revealed I was on assignment. I replied that I came in sisterhood. Which is the word that kept circling in my head as I listened, almost awed into silence by these women, many of them women of color, who just wanted to be rapturous over the black woman who almost shut down Christmas. For one hour all that these women wanted was a private space to say "Beyoncé is my sister and I love her."
Seriously, go read the whole thing, it's so worth your time. And when you're done, come holler at us on Twitter, 'cause we're gonna need your help making sense of all this.
A protester holds up a picture of 12-year-old Tamir Rice in a December 2014 demonstration in Washington, D.C.
Jose Luis Magana/AP
The city of Cleveland agreed Monday to pay $6 million to settle a civil rights lawsuit brought by the family of Tamir Rice, the 12-year-old boy who was shot and killed by a police officer on Nov. 22, 2014.
The city did not admit any wrongdoing in the killing of Tamir, who was holding an air pellet gun and walking outside a recreation center when he was shot by Officer Timothy Loehmann.
Cleveland mayor Frank Jackson held a press conference following the settlement announcement. He said while the legal side of this case has been handled, "there is no price that you can put on the life lost of a 12-year-old child."
"Regardless of fault or facts or anything, it should not have happened. And believe me, if I had my rathers, I wouldn't be standing here in front of you today, talking about this. If I had my rathers, it would not have happened. But that's not the case, is it?"
Cleveland will pay out $3 million this year and $3 million next year, according to an order filed in U.S. District Court in Cleveland on Monday. As the Two-Way has reported, Tamir's family filed a wrongful death lawsuit against the city and police department in December 2014.
"Tamir's estate has been assigned $5.5 million of the settlement amount. A Cuyahoga County probate judge will decide how the amount will be divided. Samaria Rice, Tamir's mother, will receive $250,000. Claims against Tamir's estate account for the remaining $250,000. Tamir's father, Leonard Warner, was dismissed in February as a party to the lawsuit."
In a statement, the family's attorneys said despite the settlement, there was "no such thing as closure or justice" in a situation like this one.
"Nothing will bring Tamir back," said attorneys Jonathan S. Abady and Earl S. Ward. "His unnecessary and premature death leaves a gaping hole for those who knew and loved him that can never be filled."
Loehmann and his partner were responding to a 911 caller who said there was a man pointing a gun at people. The caller had told the dispatcher he believed the person to be a juvenile and that the weapon was probably fake. Those details were not relayed to the officers.
NBC News described the event and reposted the surveillance footage in its report of the settlement Monday morning:
"A police cruiser raced in front of a Cleveland recreation center and rolled up alongside Rice. One of the two police officers inside the car jumped out and fired his service weapon twice. Rice, who earlier had been flashing around a toy pellet gun, crumpled onto the snowy soil."
Reaction to the boy's death was a leading narrative as the Black Lives Matter movement emerged in recent years. Outrage increased in December 2015 when a grand jury declined to bring criminal charges against both officers involved in the fatal shooting.
"Simply put, given this perfect storm of human error, mistakes and miscommunications by all involved that day, the evidence did not indicate criminal conduct by police," Cuyahoga County prosecutor Timothy McGinty told reporters on Dec. 28.
McGinty, who had been roundly criticized over his handling of the Rice case, lost his seat in the Democratic primary March 16.
A scene from the fan film "Prelude to Axanar," featuring starships that, according to Paramount and CBS, violate their "Star Trek" copyrights.AXANAR PRODUCTIONS
Star Trek, the venerable sci-fi franchise that turns 50 this year, has long been known for the dedication of its fans. In the late 1960s, when the original TV series was threatened with cancelation after two seasons, a letter-writing campaign brought the show back for a third year. After the show was canceled the following year, fan conventions kept the Trek dream alive, screening rare clips and “blooper reels” which, in that pre-VCR, pre-YouTube era, allowed them to explore the frontiers of their favorite show.
Fans at those conventions also shared fan fiction: mostly mimeographed stories that created new adventures for the characters that left TV two years shy of completing their “five year mission.” Over time, fan fiction evolved and became a multimedia genre, and even as Star Trek was revived and developed as a major media property encompassing a dozen motion pictures and hundreds of TV episodes, fan-produced films became a mainstay of YouTube and other video sites.
Today’s fan films, like written fan fiction, occupy a legal gray zone. While some can potentially be considered satire or commentary, and therefore, legally permitted works, many can easily be classified as unauthorized exploitation of copyrighted material—and could be shut down by the copyright’s owners.
For the most part, Paramount Pictures and CBS, which jointly own the copyrights associated with Star Trek, have turned a blind eye to non-commercial fan productions, and have even seemed to encourage them. James Cawley, a fan producer who built detailed reproductions of original Star Trek sets in hisupstate New York studio, had a cameo in J.J. Abrams' 2009 Star Trek film. Paramount also borrowed props from Cawley's studio for use in the series Star Trek: Enterprise, and named a ship in one episode theTiconderoga, a reference to the fan producer's hometown.
Fan efforts have also been embraced by many in the “official” Star Trek creative community; fan films have featured dozens of cast members from Paramount's productions, including original series stars Walter Koenig, Nichelle Nichols and George Takei, and actors from many other Trek outings, ranging from Star Trek: Voyager’s Tim Russ to Alan Ruck, who played hapless starship captain John Harriman in Star Trek: Generations (but is, of course, best known for playing hapless teenager Cameron Frye in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off). One fan series includes Chris Doohan, the son of the actor who played Scotty in the original series, taking over his father's role. Even Majel Barrett Roddenberry, wife of Star Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, reprised her role as the voice of the U.S.S. Enterprise’s computer in a fan production. Writers like original series legends D.C. Fontana and David Gerrold (best known for the classic episode “The Trouble With Tribbles”) have contributed scripts to fan films.
For years, fan producers formed a close community, trading tips and cast members, sharing props and studios, and engaging in friendly competition over things like the accuracy of their sets, their interpretations of classic characters and the quality of their productions. And their productions became increasingly more polished as digital technology allowed them to create CGI space battles and elaborate green screen sets, and do sophisticated editing and post-production work on affordable computers. To produce these ever-more sophisticated films, fans turned to crowdfunding, in some cases raising hundreds of thousands of dollars through platforms like Kickstarter and Indiegogo.
As the fan films began working with budgets that rivaled those of some independent movies, and successfully recruited cast and crew members who had worked on commercial Trek properties, one nagging question kept coming up: When will someone go too far and draw the ire of Paramount and CBS? As Hollywood news site The Wrap put it last August, after the fan film Star Trek: Axanar—which its producer said would be as good as something “coming out of the studio”—raised over $1 million through its crowdfunding campaigns, “the seven-figure bankroll raises questions about just how ‘fan’ the project is and at what point it poses a threat to the authorized franchise.”
Axanar’s budget and boasts may have been too much for Paramount and CBS, and in December, the two companies sued Axanar Productions, claiming that its work "infringe[s] Plaintiffs’ works by using innumerable copyrighted elements of Star Trek, including its settings, characters, species, and themes." The suit named the production company, studio head Alec Peters, and “Does 1-20,” an unnamed group that could expand to include personnel such as director Robert Meyer Burnett, an industry professional who had previously produced featurettes for CBS' Star Trek Blu-ray releases.
In this sample from one of CBS/Paramount's legal filings, the plaintiffs highlight similarities between the "U.S.S. Enterprise" as depicted in "Star Trek" and the version that appears in "Prelude to Axanar." The original is on the right.PARAMOUNT/CBS V. AXANAR PRODUCTIONS ET AL., AMENDED COMPLAINT
In its lawsuit, Paramount and CBS cited the fact that the Axanar team referred to their project as a “fully professional, independent Star Trek film” that raised over $1 million, adding that the producers “enjoy a direct financial benefit from the preparation, duplication and distribution of the infringing AxanarWorks.”
Indeed, Axanar Productions boasted of plans to use its studio to produce other films and actively defended its broader ambitions. Unlike other fan producers, who largely volunteer their time, Axanar's Peters paid himself a salary of $38,000 in 2015. Axanar also built a merchandising business, offering everything from scale models of ships featured in its films to Axanar-branded coffee on a “donor” website.
Rather than fold up his tent, Peters fought back, and brought on pro bono lawyers to defend his right to produce the film, saying that it’s a non-commercial production, is covered under fair use doctrines, and that the suit is too vague and broad, claiming ownership of things like the fictitious Klingon language. In the meantime, production on Axanar was halted, leaving a 20-minute teaser, Prelude to Axanar (which is also a subject of the lawsuit), as the nascent studio’s only product.
Paramount and CBS may be particularly sensitive at the moment to unauthorized works designed, as the Axanar team put it, to “look and feel like a true Star Trek movie.” The studios are gearing up for the July release of the latest film in the series, Star Trek: Beyond, along with a major merchandising blitz in conjunction with the film and the franchise’s 50th anniversary. Based on the combination of ticket sales and licensing, Star Trek properties could bring in close to $1 billion this year. And in 2017, CBS will launch the sixth live-action Star Trek TV series, with a risky online-only model designed to anchor the network's CBS All Access streaming service; if successful, the new series could add over $400 million to CBS's bottom line next year.
As the suit has progressed, it has has split the once tight-knit fan film community. Some fans believe that Peters is going too far.
"There is no question in my mind that CBS owns Star Trek," fan film producer James Cawley recently commented in a popular Star Trek forum. "They have been very gracious to allow us to play in their sandbox for many years," he wrote, adding that "if CBS says, stop making fan films, we would abide by their wishes and say thank you." In a seeming comparison between Axanar's ambitions and more traditional fan fiction, he commented: "I don't rent my sets, I don't charge for anything, and I certainly have never gotten any salary for playing Trek with my friends" and, "I did it for nothing but the love of the game, if and when it ends at least I can say I played by the rules I was given when I cross the finish line."
Meanwhile, Peters has taken on his erstwhile compatriots, pointing out to the Trek news site 1701News that he’s built a professional team: “They're not fans who are voice actors, or Elvis impersonators who have a hobby and have always wanted to play Capt. Kirk.” (Cawley, who played Kirk in several of his own productions, is also an Elvis impersonator, while another fan producer and Kirk actor, Vic Mignogna, is a voice actor.)
The suit has also highlighted rifts among those affiliated with the official Star Trek productions. Star Trek: Beyond director Justin Lin took to Twitter to defend Axanar, writing: "This is getting ridiculous! I support the fans. Star Trek belongs to all of us." However, Rod Roddenberry, son of Trek creator Gene Roddenberry, and an executive producer on CBS' forthcoming Star Trek series, commented to an interviewer that, while he's "a fan of fans keeping Star Trek alive," fan producers have to "follow the rules and do it right," or "there's going to be prices and penalties to pay."
Fallout from the case has already hurt other fan productions. Mignogna's latest installment of his Star Trek Continues series is far behind in its crowdfunding goals, and the producer told fan site The Bronze Review, “there are a lot of scared folks out there, afraid to donate to a fan production due to the climate now.” In late April, another fan project, Star Trek: Federation Rising, was canceled, after its producer said he was contacted by CBS executives, who “advised me that their legal team strongly suggested that we do not move forward.” In a Facebook posting, producer Tommy Kraft thanked CBS “for reaching out to me, rather than including us in their ongoing lawsuit against Axanar."
Kraft also announced plans to produce an original science fiction film, completely devoid of any Star Trekintellectual property. If there’s a silver lining to the current situation, it may well be based on plans like Kraft’s. One only need look at the history of fan-fiction author Erika Mitchell. After writing a set of stories featuring characters from the popular Twilight books, Mitchell, under the pen-name E.L. James, reworked her tales and removed all references to Twilight. The resulting work, the Fifty Shades of Grey series, has since sold more than 125 million copies worldwide, has been adapted as a major motion picture and has earned Mitchell over $100 million.
Perhaps freedom from Paramount and CBS’s properties, could, in the end, allow former Trek projects to boldly go where no fan film has gone before.
It's odd that we think of nostalgia as a feeling to indulge in. We play an old record, listen to a favorite sketch, relive a scene from a film—things that many might be doing now, given the recent deaths of Prince and David Bowie, Victoria Wood and Ronnie Corbett and Alan Rickman. Odd, because nostalgia is a kind of pain. The root of the word is shared with neuralgia, nerve pain, except that nostalgia is literally "home pain". It's an acute longing for the familiar.
This is what celebrity deaths stir up in us: the loss of what's gone. And because celebrities often once captured powerful hopes and emotions in their music and performances, their deaths can be genuinely unsettling.
Their passing—prompting repeats on the radio and images on screen—can also stir up unfinished business hidden in the depths of our psyches. That can reignite a residue of unmourned emotion left from a different category of deaths: those who were very close to us, perhaps a parent, a partner, a child.
Sigmund Freud was onto this dynamic. He detected a risk when we lose someone with whom we are intimately bound. The risk is that with those deaths, we lose too much. We can't comprehend what's gone. The gap is overwhelming and consumes us in a miasma of grief from which it feels there's no escape.
The philosopher, Michel de Montaigne, caught the horror of this experience when he wrote of the early death of his closest friend and soulmate. "We were halves throughout. By outliving him, I defraud him of his part. I am no more than half of myself. There is no action or imagination of mine wherein I do not miss him."
Freud described this experience as a shift from mourning to melancholia—or depression, as it would be labeled now. It's as if we enter a state of mind in which everything is blackened by emptiness, absence, departure. We can't mourn the loved one because that person was, in a way, the whole of life to us. The residue of that ache may linger for years.
Then, someone famous dies. Suddenly, mourning becomes possible. The icon meant a lot but, unlike a parent or partner or child, was not half of us. And so it's a loss that can be felt. It precipitates an outpouring of grief—the death of Diana comes to mind —that is as much an unblocking of the deeper melancholia as it is sadness at the departure of the celebrity. The tears are real. But they are about more than the shock of the immediate news.
What this suggests to me is that there is a kind of art to mourning, though one we are hindered with today. We're not very well served by our culture because it tends to keep the genuine tragedy of death at bay.
You see it in the trend to hold celebrations for a life rather than funerals. The urge to do so is understandable: there is a time to give thanks. But there is also a time to mourn, and that might be denied.
Or death becomes hidden from us because, due to increased longevity, it happens mostly to those who are old—homed and hospitalized out of sight. That's perhaps why this year's celebrity deaths among stars who are relatively young is shocking. We've forgotten that death is found in the midst of life.
Wisdom-based traditions advise practicing mourning. Socrates said that philosophy is learning to die. Buddhists meditate before skeletons. Christians keep Good Friday. And it's good advice. Lesser losses—even the end of the day, the final page of a good book, the browning of the cherry blossom—can be opportunities to practice the fact of demise. They won't be overwhelming as big deaths can be. But we may still recoil from them and reach for a distraction rather than experience the difficult feelings. Maybe it's wiser to linger.
That's perhaps the departed celebrity's final gift to us: a moment to live their deaths and so know some of the feelings around our own. It's nostalgia in a healing sense: an embrace of life in all its tricky fullness.
