The Absence of Audience in Virtual Music: Appendix B

By Gerald Ens

“We Can’t Hear Them”: Beyoncé’s Inaudible Audience in “All Night”

Beyoncé’s song “All Night” forges healing by (singing about) making “sweet love all night long.”[1] This song bears directly upon the topic of this essay when, in her visual album Lemonade, Beyoncé leads directly into “All Night” with the statement: “the audience applauds but we can’t hear them.”[2] I want to consider this remark because its sentiment about how we come together in love may appear to denigrate audience – ‘they may be there, they may even applaud, but it makes no difference to us’ – even as it communicates something about love, relationships, and friendship (and sex), that many of us find deeply resonant.

This resonance, I think, has to do with the way particularity is entwined with intimacy: it is not relationality in general that makes us human, but my entanglements with this face, this touch, this laughter, these anxieties and joys. When she claims that, while in the throes of love, her and her husband cannot hear the applauding audience, Beyoncé thereby speaks also to the power of this particular intimacy to create a world of its own, where truly intimate private space is not my own but that which I forge in common with intimate others. (This is in sharp contrast to the privative and secretive violation that the entirety of Lemonade responds to and attempts to repair via a reconciliation that must be public, indeed cosmic, because it is personal and must be personal because it is public: her husband’s sequestered world of secret infidelity, an attempt to make a world for himself. Particularly of note is the way Lemonade shows the way this harm is embedded within systems of racial and gendered violence, not as a way to relativize the personal but as a way of intensifying the personal.)

What sounds like an anti-audience sentiment thus appears instead to replace the impersonal audience with the audience of the one intimate other. The first time we see Beyoncé and Jay-Z together in this song, they are goofing around in a self-operated photo booth:[3] it is not that there is no audience, but that Beyoncé and her husband become each other’s audience. The point, powerful and resonant, of saying “we can’t hear them” is that they are enough for each other. Their love is deeper than the shallow needs of egoism – “our love was stronger than your pride” – that resulted in infidelity. Healing comes not from blocking the other out but when “I see your scars and kiss your crime.”[4]

I think this is accurate enough for its part, but there are further layers of nuance to Beyoncé’s art that, again, connect in interesting ways to this essay’s reflection on audience. For one, throughout the visual album Beyoncé insistently connects the bliss of the intimate world of sexual love she celebrates in “All Night” to other, intersecting communities and relationships: relationships with daughter, grandmother, father, and mother in all their complexity are essential to the intimate space she forges with her husband.

Indeed, Beyoncé’s spoken introduction to “All Night” focusses on her grandmother as an agent and source of healing, hardly what we typically associate with the throes of sexual love: “Grandmother, the alchemist. You spun gold out of this hard life. Conjured beauty from the things left behind. Found healing where it did not live. Discovered the antidote in your own kitchen. Broke the curse with your own two hands. You passed these instructions down to your daughter who then passed it down to her daughter.”[5] Beyoncé makes this address to her own grandmother, even picturing her on screen and featuring her spoken words; but ‘grandmother’ also figures here as the broader community and tradition we rely upon to find and foster beauty and healing, as the image of passing instruction down through the generations (as well as the use of traditional African dress and goddess imagery throughout Lemonade) suggests.[6] Observe also that the kitchen is where grandmother works her alchemy: not only a site of intergenerational learning and passing on of tradition, but also the place whose work contains the ingredients of that great community event of eating together. And here I will point out only in passing the prominence of table imagery and of eating together in the lead up to “All Night.” The exorcism we see on screen is not of the bedroom but the dining room table.[7]

The video for “All Night” prominently features a diverse array of couples and families joyfully displaying their love for one another in a series of uplifting candid shots. Beyoncé and Jay-Z are one of these couples, but they are not particularly prominent (they are the fifth couple we see and there are no specific features setting them apart from the other couples and families). The way Beyoncé pictures the intensely intimate sexual world she shares with her husband, where “the audience applauds but we can’t hear them,” is to show other loving couples, where each one basks in the other’s presence. She not only shows therein a certain solidarity and belonging to these other couples but suggests that this broader communion (internally differentiated with particular commitments) is the proper home of the sexual love she has for her husband. In the vision we get here, we do not achieve the intensely personal through a privatizing individualism that seeks to be unencumbered by others, but via a certain kind of erotic community that disciplines our sexual desires in accordance with a more fulsome vision of the good life. Hence, most of the shots that feature Beyoncé and Jay-Z also prominently feature their children. This is also why it is perfectly fitting that a visual album about sexual betrayal and sexual reconciliation prominently features the mothers of black men who have been killed by American law enforcement.[8]

It is remarkable how de-sexualized this video is for a pop song with such explicitly sexual lyrics. The song opens with Beyoncé singing alone in a field, but the moment the words become explicitly sexual the video changes to a scene of children hanging out together (before then switching to the procession of couples I’ve already discussed). This shot opens, in fact, with a close up of one child’s hand upon another’s shoulder.[9] The posture is one of steadfast (faithful) caretaking and comradery – the most profound of sexual postures. And so it turns out that we should not say that the video is de-sexualized, but rather that it is so deeply sexual that it bursts the bonds of privative fantasy, egoistic gratification, and objectification (as well as infidelity) into which our culture has persistently locked sex. And again, this deeper sexuality opens out onto and receives itself from that hospitality that allows children to gather in caring friendship. As the shot pans across the children, it looks as though they have gathered upon an open front porch, one of the most important sites (especially for black women and children in the U.S.) there is for generating community and solidarity.[10] In contrast to the privative space of a backyard, a front porch opens out onto the street I share with neighbours. The front porch, populated by an audience of neighbourhood children, here figures as both the fruit and foundation of a reconciled sexual relationship.

Audience more conventionally understood also plays an important role in “All Night.” For one, Beyoncé has clearly made the visual album as a whole, including this song, for an audience. It is a highly produced performance, made for an audience’s eyes and ears. Indeed, it is revolutionary that Beyoncé made public what is typically so painfully private. Beyoncé directs the line “the audience applauds but we can’t hear them” as much at an audience as at anyone else; it is part of the performance. It is also interesting that it is at the one point where Beyoncé specifically mentions a conventional (and conventionally applauding) audience, where she, seemingly, dismisses the audience.

It is a dismissal and a refusal. Audience matters, but being somebody’s audience is vastly different from being somebody’s husband (just as the love of a husband is different than that of a child or neighbour). But this particular dismissal and refusal still requires the audience, if only to refuse them. The audience must applaud if not hearing them is to mean anything; there must be an audience for whom these words are spoken in order for Beyoncé to thereby signal her estrangement from them. The audience must be present (and even resonant, with desiring bodies) in order for the differentiation between audience and husband to take place, an act of boundary drawing that is particularly important for this song which rebuilds the boundaries of (a) monogamous marriage. Put differently, the boundaries that make intimacy possible are always part of a world that includes and involves all sorts of audiences; there is no straightforward either/or between the public and the private, but only the art and skill of the ongoing boundary drawing that constitute relationships. Such bounded relationships cut across and intersect with various communities. Beyoncé exhibits this art to the highest degree with her particular inclusion and exclusion of audience in “All Night.”

The spoken lead-in to “All Night” includes a brief segment from a speech given by Beyoncé’s grandmother at her 90th birthday party. The clip opens with applauding audience and closes with laughter, approving sounds, and more applause.[11] (51:47). Lemonade here shares a moment with Earth World’s “Be There” project: the audience becomes part of the performance. Audience opens to and receives our speech; it is, broadly speaking, the context that makes it possible for us to receive the wisdom of others. If it is important to repeatedly return to that place where we no longer hear audience, Beyoncé shows also how it is the audience who brings performers to that place.

Notes

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Author’s Acknowledgements

I owe great thanks to Joel Peters who read and commented in depth upon multiple earlier drafts of this essay and helped to compose some sections. Conversations with Joel – both those that have occurred over the years and those that were specific to this project – were critical to the development, crystallization, and formulation of many of the ideas in this essay. Thanks also to Sarah Ens for her superb copyediting and to Andre Forget for some helpful suggestions on a late draft.

About the Author

Gerald Ens is a PhD student in Religious Studies at McMaster University under the supervision of Dr. P. Travis Kroeker. His primary research interests include Christian ecclesiology, Christian ethics, philosophical theology, Mennonite theology, phenomenology, and political theology. His current work brings together theological, ethnographic, and sociological research to examine and constructively engage trends in Mennonite churches from lay to professional leadership models.

Ens’s publications include “Boundaries Thick and Permeable” (Zwickau Press), an examination and constructive proposal for ecclesial boundaries. Ens holds a Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada Doctoral Fellowship and a Harry Lyman Hooker Senior Fellowship.

Ens holds an MA from McMaster University and a BA (Hons) in Theology and Philosophy from Canadian Mennonite University. He has many years of ministry experience in Mennonite Church Manitoba’s camping ministries and will probably preach a sermon if you ask him to.