Leave it to Beyoncé to have the most poignant performance at the 2017 Grammys, and it wasn't even about the song she sang! Beyoncé's words at the 2017 Grammys were an important microcosm of her life and, especially, of her impending motherhood.
Beyoncé performed “Love Draught” and “Sandcastles” at the 2017 Grammy Awards, but the words she had played over the interpretative video she showed before her performance. Beyoncé just announced that’s she’s pregnant with twins (hooray! Blue Ivy is a big sister!), and I think that Beyoncé wanted to make some important statements about motherhood before she goes off and gives birth to those babies. With the help of her words from Lemonade (including the words of British-Somali poet Warsan Shire), Beyoncé made her 2017 Grammys performance about all different kinds of maternal feelings.
She started with the words featured in the song, “Accountability.”
You find the black tube inside her beauty case where she keeps your father's old prison letters. You desperately want to look like her. You look nothing like your mother. You look everything like your mother. Film star beauty. How to wear your mother's lipstick. You go to the bathroom to apply your mother's lipstick. Somewhere no one can find you. You must wear it like she wears disappointment on her face. Your mother is a woman and women like her cannot be contained.
Beyoncé comes from a long line of strong women, and I think what she’s saying here is that she will continue her own line of strong women with her daughter, Blue Ivy, and with these twins if either of them are girls. Later, Beyoncé channeled the words from “Forgiveness.”
Baptize me ... now that reconciliation is possible. If we're gonna heal, let it be glorious. 1,000 girls raise their arms. Do you remember being born? Are you thankful for the hips that cracked? The deep velvet of your mother and her mother and her mother? There is a curse that will be broken.
There is always a bigger picture with Beyoncé’s music, and it seems like being a mother is on Beyoncé’s mind. Sure, she’s Beyoncé and she’s a global icon, but right now, she’s looking inward to her own maternity, and that’s a beautiful and important statement of her power.
