If you didn’t see Beyoncé’s Lemonade when it premiered on HBO in April and/or haven’t sprung for it on iTunes or Tidal yet, Bey threw you a bone today by dropping the music video for “Sorry” separately on YouTube.
“Ashes to ashes, dust to side chicks”: Beyoncé releases the music video for “Sorry”
Caroline Framke wrote about culture, which usually means television. Also seen @ The A.V. Club, The Atlantic, Complex, Flavorwire, NPR, the fridge to get more seltzer.
Lemonade — both the album and its accompanying film, with music videos and interstitial poems — tracks a woman grappling with her husband’s affair from the suspicious beginning through the torturous middle to the surprisingly peaceful end. As the third track on the album, “Sorry” stands in for the “apathy” stage of her wrenching grieving process.
In the video, Bey sprawls casually across a tall throne. She scoffs and sings that she’s “not thinking ‘bout you.” All the while, tennis champion Serena Williams dances and twerks defiantly to the thumping beat.
But the best part about Beyoncé posting “Sorry” on its own might be that she keeps in Warsan Shire’s gorgeous spoken-word poetry that introduces the song in the film:
So what are you going to do now that you’ve killed me?
”Here lies the body of the love of my life, whose heart I broke, without a gun to my head. Here lies the mother of my children, both living and dead.
Rest in peace, my true love, who I took for granted, most bomb pussy, who, because of me, sleep evaded.”
Her shroud is loneliness, her god was listening. Her heaven would be a love without betrayal.
Ashes to ashes, dust to side chicks.
To be clear: She ain’t sorry.
