A couple days ago, when Beyoncé’s Lemonade had been out for about a week and Radiohead was ramping up the promotion for “Burn the Witch,” I wrote a tweet comparing the two albums’ cryptic rollouts. Quickly, a Twitter user responded: “The difference between Beyoncé and Radiohead is that the latter are musicians and the former is nothing but a dancer.”
The debate about musicians who write their own songs/play their own instruments versus those who don’t is age-old (well, about 50 years old; nobody cared before the Beatles), and it was especially prevalent during the debate about whether Beyoncé or Beck should have won the 2015 Album of the Year Grammy.
But it will happen again. Beyoncé and Radiohead will inevitably be compared. And to many pop fans, Radiohead represents a critical discourse still dominated by white guys playing rock (Both criticisms are valid). Beyoncé fans will shit on Radiohead and vice versa. And much of the discourse will have to do with the fact that Radiohead plays its own instruments and writes its own songs while Beyoncé only sings and employs small armies of songwriters and producers.
I won’t even mention how I feel about either artist I write about here. But let me just lay down the law: in the mainstream music industry, it does not matter who’s playing what, and this in no way affects the quality of the art.
It’s one thing in DIY genres like punk. But this is the mainstream. Discourses on authenticity are largely moot unless you’re straight-up lying, like using ghostwriters or claiming to be the “realest” when you’re a white Australian pretending to be a black woman. These have nothing to do with musicianship anyway.
Here’s a question: if Beyoncé’s “Formation” was credited to Beyoncé, Khalif Brown, Jordan Frost, Ashton Hogan and Mike WiLL Made-It, would you enjoy it more?
Some of the best pop has come from artists channeling emotions put to paper by other writers. Was Elvis really so lonesome? Do the Crystals’ “Then He Kissed Me” or the Supremes’ “Baby Love” sound any less joyful when you know they were written and played by a bunch of hired goons backing up singers?
Don’t get mad at Bey. Maybe get mad at the baffling system for crediting artists. It’s hard to know if Bey wrote anything on Lemonade because her name appears in the writing credits of each song for royalty purposes. I’d like to know which lines are hers and which are, say, The-Dream’s. Then I could get a better grasp of who she is as a songwriter and be sure the quirks in her songs spawn from her vision rather than that of some dude in Sweden.
If you don’t like Beyoncé, think up a better criticism than “she doesn’t play her own instruments.” There are many valid criticisms to be made about her lyrics, her production and her politics. Maybe you just don’t like pop, which is fine. But let the lady sing. And, to paraphrase my anti-rockist hero David Greenwald at OregonLive: “For the record, Beyoncé does play an instrument: it’s called her voice.”
