Beyoncé in ‘Formation’: Entertainer, Activist, Both?

On Saturday afternoon,Beyoncé released “Formation,”her first new song since 2014, on Tidal and YouTube in advance of her Sunday appearance at the Super Bowl 50 halftime show at Levi’s Stadium in Santa Clara, Calif. The song’s subject is familiar Beyoncé self-affirmation, and the video is among the most politically direct work she’s done in her career, with implicit commentary on police brutality, Hurricane Katrina and black financial power. Jon Caramanica, a pop music critic for The New York Times, Wesley Morris, The Times’s critic at large, and Jenna Wortham, a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, discussed the song’s sound, the video’s look and the way that Beyoncé increasingly blends the aesthetic and the political. Here are excerpts from their conversation:

JON CARAMANICA Beyoncé is nothing if not meticulous, and that’s clear from the timing of the release of “Formation,” 24 hours before the Super Bowl, where she’s scheduled to share the halftime show with — and completely annihilate — Coldplay.

Beyoncé has a history with the Super Bowl: her 2013 halftime performanceat the Mercedes-Benz Superdome in New Orleans was perhaps the greatest of the modern era.

In “Formation,” she returns to that city; this time, she’s in scenes that suggest a fantastical post-Katrina hellscape, but radically rewritten. She straddles a New Orleans police cruiser, which eventually gets submerged (with her atop it). And at the end of the clip, a line of riot-gear-clad police officers surrender, hands raised, to a dancing black child in a hoodie, and the camera then pans over a graffito: Stop Shooting Us.

This is high-level, visuallystriking, Black Lives Matter-era allegory. The halftime show is usually a locus of entertainment, but Beyoncé has just rewritten it — overridden it, to be honest — as a moment of political ascent.

JENNA WORTHAM This video feels like the ultimate declaration from Beyoncé that the tinted windows are down, the earrings are off and someone’s wig might get snatched, judging by the scene in the hair store about 1:22 minutes in.

She wants us to know — more than ever — that she’s still grounded, she’s paying attention and still a little hood. I think she wants us to know that even though she’s headlining a mainstream event like the Super Bowl, she has opinions and isn’t afraid to share them, nor is she afraid to do it on a national and global scale.

It’s easy to think that releasing a video is a soft way to make such a strong statement, but Bey has always been about using striking visuals, clever lyrics and high-impact narratives to express her point of view.

As always, a Beyoncé surprise drop operates across multiple vectors, and “Formation” isn’t just about police brutality — it’s about the entirety of the black experience in America in 2016, which includes standards of beauty, (dis)empowerment, culture and the shared parts of our history.