The Goddess as the Sublime: Anxiety and Exhilaration in Beyonce's 'Single Ladies'

This glorious pagan production manages to be both tasteful, tasteless, and transcend taste altogether. Viewing this clip you see the Sublime in its present cultural incarnation.

Notice the long chords represent anxiety underneath the song and whirring sounds?

Here is a song which can be understood by a toddler and an old-timer. Everyone gets the sense of the song - everyone. It is quintessentially human.




Notice the dance. If you try it out for yourself you feel the meaning of the song. The meaning is: anxiety and exhilaration blur into a single motion of the core of the body-muscles. The body is not about sex but about society - the body belong to society. That is the Sublime invention of the body in Beyonce's 'Single Ladies'.

It is not a Lunar song, not Venusian. Note how relations reflect on inner feelings, rather than on other people? Lunar. Notice how the constant motion of dancing moves in and out of darkness and luminosity? Lunar. Finally, note the three dancers represent the 3 Fates in motion - the weaving and bobbing motions symbolizing the power of the Divine Feminine to shape, cut short, and create human life.

Beyonce herself symbolizes the Lunar Fate that cuts, shortens human life - Hecate, the Dark Side of the Moon. And by doing so she symbolizes the female power to create and end relationships. Simultaneously she cuts us off from reality - the dream of 'Single Ladies' is lunatic, a strange, giddy, emotional high. She signals the capacity of the moon to inspire dreams and reflections, ideas and images, by secluding oneself from everyday life, and also the lunar capacity for distraction and dazzlement at the modern era. And as such, 'Single Ladies' is very much the image of the moment.