February 13, 2017

How About If We Start Treating Beyoncé Like a Human Being?

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I’m not a music person, so I have no particular personal opinion about Beyoncé’s musical powers. However, I do have an opinion about the increasingly tedious insistence that every time she shows her face publicly she has absolutely crushed, slayed, and otherwise annihilated every other musician currently alive or who has ever lived. I figured the same thing would happen tonight at the Grammys. Sure enough, the Daily Beast’s Kevin Fallon posted a thousand-word review of her performance that is, in tribute to Beyoncé’s reality-warping power, time-stamped an hour before she actually performed. Here’s a sample:

It’s a remarkable feat to resuscitate a nation while simultaneously taking their breath away, but such is the otherworldly power of Beyoncé…spiritual, sweeping…ethereal glow…jaw-dropping…leaps and bounds ahead of all her peers…trippy, spellbinding…a tribute to healing and resilience…Glorious is certainly one word to describe Sunday night’s galvanizing affair…ambitious, artistically audacious…she rises, and she lifts us up with her bold performance…gorgeous, provocative…It was glorious.

I assume the second use of “glorious” is because Fallon ran out of entries in his thesaurus.

Come on, folks. Beyoncé may be the best performer working today—I wouldn’t know—but can we start treating her like an actual human being? This stuff is just embarrassing.

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WE'LL BE BLUNT

It is astonishingly hard keeping a newsroom afloat these days, and we need to raise $253,000 in online donations quickly, by October 7.

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Readers also told us to just give it to you straight when we need to ask for your support, and seeing how matter-of-factly explaining our inner workings, our challenges and finances, can bring more of you in has been a real silver lining. So our online membership lead, Brian, lays it all out for you in his personal, insider account (that literally puts his skin in the game!) of how urgent things are right now.

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