episode 4: Beyoncé’s Illuminati Mess

[00:00:00] CRISTEN:
Welcome to Conspiracy She Wrote, the podcast where Big Sister is always watching. I'm Cristen Conger.

Last episode started with a Super Bowl, and we're beginning at the big game again. This time it's the 2013 Super Bowl, played in New Orleans at the Superdome. The teams facing off do not matter. The real headliner is Beyoncé. At this point in her career, Beyoncé is already an icon. A month before, she was singing the Star-Spangled Banner at Obama's second inauguration. Her daughter Blue Ivy had just turned one. Now she's performing at her first Super Bowl halftime show.

Midway through the set, Kelly Rowland and Michelle Williams pop up on the stage for a mini Destiny's Child reunion. They start with "Bootylicious," then go into "Independent Women Part 1." You know that call-and-response part in the song?

[00:01:38] CLIP - INDEPENDENT WOMEN PART 1

[00:01:51] CRISTEN:
At the line "rock I'm rockin," Beyoncé makes a diamond shape with her hands, index fingers, and thumbs touching. Her eyes flash left and right playfully. It's a perfectly gif-able moment—and a moment Beyoncé conspiracy theorists will latch onto. The halftime show ends, there's a commercial break, and the football resumes, but then a few minutes after kickoff, half the stadium goes dark. Even the scoreboard shuts off.

[00:02:29] SUPER BOWL CLIP:
All of the lights on the 49ers side of the Superdome are out. It's surreal. They're working on it now; they should have it up in 15 minutes. So if you want to let the benches know...

[00:02:45] CRISTEN:
It's like the Super Bowl's longest blooper. A half hour later, the outage is fixed, and the game picks back up. Who wins? Who cares? Conspiracy heads needed no explanations. For why the lights went out in Nola—it was Beyoncé's fault. Obviously, that hand sign she made during the halftime show was an occult Illuminati pyramid, and the proof was in the power outage.

[00:03:26] MOYA BAILEY:
So there's definitely this idea that there is, you know, a secret cabal of really rich, important people who are actually orchestrating and controlling all of the things that are happening in our world.

[00:03:42] CRISTEN:
Moya Bailey is an associate professor of communications at Northwestern University. 

[00:03:51] MOYA BAILEY:
And there's this idea that Beyoncé, because of her stardom, because of her positionality, must be in this, you know, internal order that's deciding what's happening in our world at all times.

[00:04:05] CRISTEN:
And we know what Beyoncé thinks about this because she told us in the opening line of Formation.

[00:04:14] BEYONCÉ - FORMATION:
Y'all haters corny with that Illuminati mess, paparazzi catch my fly in my khaki fresh. I'm so reckless when I rock my Givenchy dress.

[00:04:24] MOYA BAILEY:
And so she was speaking directly to that idea—that she is in that inner circle—and by saying that, she's really calling it corny.

[00:04:35] CRISTEN:
Also corny? Just how much was read into the hand sign Beyoncé flashed during the Super Bowl halftime show. If you were a fan of Beyoncé at that time, then you knew it was meant for her husband Jay-Z. She was throwing up a rock, making the symbol of Jay-Z's Roc Nation record label and business empire.

[00:05:02] MOYA BAILEY:
And you know, it's funny that you mentioned that hand symbol. I know we're talking about pop cultural figures, but it does take me back to the early days of Michelle and Barack because there was a moment where they did a fist bump, and this was before the fist bump was widely understood. And so there was a whole lot of talk about them doing a "terrorist fist jab." That was the language initially used to describe their connection to each other, and there were, you know, a couple of really, really racist cartoons and images that came out of that particular moment.

[00:05:42] CRISTEN:
Not to mention political conspiracy theories—birthers, anyone?

[00:05:50] MOYA BAILEY:
So again, I think that there's a way that Black cultural signifiers are misinterpreted, especially when they're in a pop culture moment and they're being exposed to communities who aren't familiar. And then there's an assumption that there is something problematic about that behavior—that there's something seedy or conspiratorial in relationship to that behavior.

[00:06:15] CRISTEN:
But of course, it's not just Beyoncé's behavior that gets twisted into conspiracies. It's her entire career and personal life. Take, for instance, the conspiracy theory that the 2001 plane crash that killed R&B singer Aaliyah was an Illuminati plot to make way for Beyoncé. Or similarly, that the 2012 death of Whitney Houston was an Illuminati sacrifice so that Blue Ivy could live.

The conspiracies go way beyond the Illuminati too. Like the one that Solange is really Beyoncé's daughter, even though they are only four years apart. And one of my personal favorites: when "Single Ladies" blew up in 2008, conspiracy theorists claimed it was demonic. Supposedly, if you played the song backward, you could hear, quote, "The world will bow down to Lucifer. The world will not have fun. The world will bow to me."

Grab your red string and follow along.

[00:07:57] MOYA BAILEY:
I think Beyoncé has been so successful at building a brand that reaches across so many different communities. And as a Black woman, I think that's threatening for a lot of people—that Beyoncé has such reach and has people who support her in so many ways. There's a real sense that Beyoncé is in a position to threaten the status quo, as it were.

[00:08:29] CRISTEN:
Does her marriage to Jay-Z factor into that Illuminati mess at all?

[00:08:36] MOYA BAILEY:
I think so. I do think that there's a way that people have given Jay-Z a heightened sense of status. People do recognize him as one of the elite rappers of his time, and so I do think that there's a perception that their relationship is calculated and that there's something there—that he might also be a member of the Illuminati and that their relationship is, again, part of this sinister world organizing that's happening.

[00:09:16] CRISTEN:
But also, Beyoncé's Illuminati mess came with Jay-Z. Classic relationship dilemma, right? Let's remember how everything started. Jay-Z started dating Beyoncé around the year 2000. At that point, he was the bigger star. Jay-Z was on a streak of back-to-back-to-back multi-platinum albums. Beyoncé was still in Destiny's Child. Rumors were already circulating in hip hop that Jay-Z's success was too successful, that he must've made some kind of deal with the devil. And by the devil, I mean the Illuminati. Jay-Z also leaned into it—the Roc Nation hand sign, occult references in lyrics. By the early 2010s, there was a feedback loop in effect. Jay-Z and Roc Nation were capitalizing on the conspiracy theories.

[00:10:41] MOYA BAILEY:
And I would say that without all of the additional charged Illuminati language, there's a lot that we can critique about Beyoncé and Jay-Z, but, you know, that just takes it to another level.

[00:10:56] CRISTEN:
What are you referencing there?

[00:10:59] MOYA BAILEY:
Oh, I mean, I think a lot of things, you know. There's if you look at the timeline in terms of, you know, Beyoncé being significantly younger than him when they first met and kind of the—you know, we're thinking about the age difference. I would say also thinking, too, about just how they've moved as capitalists, as people who are really trying to make a brand. And I do think that there's something about the way we celebrate capitalism from certain people, especially for people in communities that haven't had access to money like that before, but we don't think about the impact of that individual accumulation of wealth and what that means for the world and communities around them. And I don't think that that's, you know, unique to the Carters. I think that's very much how capitalism works in our society. But I do think that it's important to note the impact that that has on young people and how that perpetuates this idea that the most important thing is to get money for yourself, as opposed to thinking about how we actually maybe redistribute wealth, et cetera. So again, the Carters aren't unique in that particular space of glorifying capital, but I do think it's a worthy critique of how they move.

[00:12:28] CRISTEN:
Late-stage capitalism is the real conspiracy. Truly. Up next, Moya connects the dots between Beyoncé conspiracy theories and the pop cultural phenomenon Moya's best known for calling out.

[00:12:58] AD BREAK 1

[00:12:58] MOYA BAILEY:
I define misogynoir as the anti-Black, racist, and transphobic, misogynistic, sexist representations of Black women that exist in popular culture.

[00:13:15] CRISTEN:
We're back, and Beyoncé's not the only Renaissance woman here. Moya Bailey is an acclaimed scholar and author, best known for coining the concept of misogynoir.

[00:13:31] MOYA BAILEY:
Misogynoir is a way to describe that unique intersection of the world—the way that racism comes together with sexism to create an experience that's uniquely problematic for Black women and people read as Black women.

[00:13:50] CRISTEN:
Misogynoir first struck Moya in grad school at Emory University in Atlanta. At one point, she was studying Black women's representation in medical literature from the early 1900s.

[00:14:07] MOYA BAILEY:
And interestingly enough, there were caricatures of Black women that actually mapped onto things I was seeing contemporarily in popular culture about Black women. And so I was thinking about, you know, what has happened that in almost a hundred years, the representations of Black women are still so problematic and haven't shifted that much? 

One common example is the mammy figure. So this idea that Black women are asexual, part of that asexuality being connected to fatness, undesirability—an archetype that's really used to create this idea that Black women are not attractive and therefore not subject to sexual violence. You know, the history of the mammy interestingly corresponds with the end of slavery and also the Reconstruction period where there is a lot of sexual violence that Black women are facing at the hands of white men, but the mammy archetype really becomes this tool to say what? We would never be attracted to Black women. They're not in any danger. They're not being harmed in any way. 

So that particular caricature is one, but then of course we also have this hypersexual Jezebel, which kind of is the opposite of that. This idea that Black women are seductive, and they're always sexual, and that they are in a position where they're trying to constantly seek sexual gratification, that they're a threat to the traditional order, and that Black women can't, of course, then be assaulted because they are hypersexual. So that caricature also creates this idea that white men are just subject to the libidinal desires of Black women that make them behave in predatory ways that they wouldn't otherwise behave.

[00:16:15] CRISTEN:
So broadly speaking, do you see a relationship between misogynoir and these kinds of anti-Black caricatures and stereotypes you're talking about and conspiracy theories targeting Black female celebrities?

[00:16:34] MOYA BAILEY:
Oh, absolutely. I mean, I think we saw this early on with how people responded to and continue to respond to somebody like Michelle Obama. There's this idea of her as hyper-masculine. There was a lot of stuff on the right about her really being a man—you know, all of this language and vitriol about her body and just all kinds of narratives that definitely suggested a distrust, a disbelief, and real hatred for Black women. There's something about Jay-Z that actually, I think, protects Beyoncé in a way from some misogynoir, particularly within the Black community. That being attached to a prominent male figure provides a little bit of cover, you know, even as people are critiquing Beyoncé's choices, there is this tendency for people to attribute some of that to Jay-Z, for good or for ill.

[00:17:42] CRISTEN:
Another kind of flashpoint of Beyoncé conspiracy theories focuses on her—especially her first pregnancy with Blue Ivy. What do these kinds of conspiracy theories that are so hyper-focused on her body tell us about misogynoir and the perception of Black female bodies and also just the roles of Black women?

[00:18:13] MOYA BAILEY:
Such a great question. I really see the hyper fixation on Beyoncé's body as part of the idea that Black women are always commodities themselves—that they're available to the subject or to society as subjects to be, you know, investigated and really, in some ways, cannibalized. There's just this predatory way that people latch onto Black women's bodies. I'm thinking also now of, you know, Serena Williams—that there's just a way that their bodies are always the point of conversation. And of course, this is true for women generally, that there's a way that society feels entitled to women's bodies, but for Black women, that entitlement goes further to questioning pregnancy, questioning, you know, what are people actually able to hold as their own? What can actually be private when you're a public figure?

[00:19:27] CRISTEN:
Beyoncé announced her first pregnancy at the 2011 VMAs. She was on stage to perform "Love on Top," and she was wearing loose black pants and a barely buttoned sequin blazer. Before she started singing, she told the crowd:

[00:19:46] VMA CLIP:
Tonight I want you to stand up on your feet. I want you to feel the love that's growing inside of me.

[00:19:56] CRISTEN:
Once the song ended, Beyoncé dropped the mic—she almost chucked it, really. She unbuttoned her blazer and revealed her baby bump to the screaming crowd. She was laughing, rubbing her belly. The camera cut to Jay-Z—he's clapping and smiling. Kanye West even bops up behind him and shakes him by the shoulders like it was the best news he'd heard in a long time. That was August. Fast forward to October.

[00:20:33] AUSTRALIA NEWS CLIP:
The world went nuts this week after our interview with Beyoncé last Sunday led to fevered speculation about her baby bump and whether she was faking her pregnancy.

[00:20:45] CRISTEN:
Beyoncé was interviewed on an Australian talk show called Sunday Night HD. She was in a kind of form-fitting dress and had to bend over slightly in order to take a seat. As she's momentarily hunched over, her stomach folds in slightly. Or maybe it was her stomach folding over a pair of maternity Spanx—you know how that happens if you're wearing pantyhose. Beyoncé pregnancy truthers descended on it. It whipped up enough tabloid speculation that Beyoncé's PR released a statement. It was brief and basically PR speak for "What the actual fuck, y'all?" Sunday Night HD didn't exactly help the situation either. Instead, the show aired a follow-up with the stated purpose of debunking the rumors.

[00:21:50] AUSTRALIA NEWS CLIP:
We went back and analyzed the tapes—every shot, every angle, frame by frame—to bring you the truth, the whole truth.

[00:22:00] CRISTEN:
But if anything, it just gave pregnancy truthers more footage to debate.

[00:22:08] MOYA BAILEY:
So I really saw Beyoncé trying to negotiate what is hers, what is private, what is allowable in a world where people demand so much from Black women. And that legacy of slavery really informs people's sense of entitlement to Black women's bodies and their reproduction. So the fact that people couldn't see—weren't visually able through photos in the media to understand her pregnancy in a way that made sense to them—created the opportunity for all of these conspiracy theories to develop, as opposed to just saying, "I don't have enough information" or also "That's not my business."

[00:23:01] CRISTEN:
Conspiracy theorists also came for her when Beyoncé was pregnant with her twins. At the 2017 Grammys, a very pregnant Beyoncé sang "Love Drought" and "Sandcastles" off Lemonade. Her costuming, backup dancers, and stage design were full-on fertility goddess. This time, instead of coming for her womb, conspiracy theorists returned to a familiar well—the performance was clearly an Illuminati ritual dance. So corny.

[00:23:45] MOYA BAILEY:
There is this overwhelming sense that if you are a Black woman in public, then you should be open to any kind of investigation by anyone who's curious about you and what's going on with you.

[00:24:03] CRISTEN:
Does this misogynoir that targets Black female celebrities also impact Black cis and trans women, everyday women who are witnessing it?

[00:24:15] MOYA BAILEY:
Absolutely. There's the empathetic feeling of seeing somebody who looks like you going through this—that of course impacts your psyche on the day-to-day. But then it also informs how people treat you. It's not just that these things are happening in the abstract or just happening to that individual celebrity. It has a mirroring effect that impacts the way people are treated in their day-to-day lives. So many of the assumptions that people are making about Black women in popular culture are trickling down and affecting how Black women are treated on a day-to-day basis. So this is why I think people of color and other marginalized groups have been so focused on media reclamation projects—creating the kind of media that they want to see and trying to tell our own stories because so much of what we see in popular culture gets us wrong. So people spend a lot of energy creating images and representations designed to subvert, challenge, and disrupt the popular narratives because those popular narratives end up impacting our day-to-day.

[00:25:41] CRISTEN:
We're going to take a quick break. Then it's back to Beyoncé and horses.

[00:25:49] AD BREAK 2

[00:25:49] CRISTEN:
We're back. And if there is one thing Beyoncé has made abundantly clear in recent years, it's that she is a horse girl. So much so that it aroused a fresh round of conspiracy theories.

When she released the Renaissance album cover in late July of 2022, there was Beyoncé looking like Lady Godiva—nearly naked and saddled up on a silver holographic horse. And that horse seemed to set off a case of what's called apophenia. That's the term for the psychological impulse to look for patterns and infer meanings in them that may or may not be true.

Beyoncé conspiracy heads were seeing a pattern of horses and inferred Armageddon. They did the conspiracy math.

There was the spotted horse Beyoncé was riding in the 2020 movie Black is King—Horse 1.

The next year, in a cover shoot for Harper's Bazaar, Beyoncé poses with a black horse—Horse 2.

Horse number three trots in in June 2022—Beyoncé's on the cover of British Vogue sitting side-saddle on what? A red horse.

An intergalactic renaissance horse makes four.

Ipso non facto: four horsemen of the apocalypse.

This conspiracy theory materialized pre-Cowboy Carter, I should say. A fifth horse is on that album cover, so I'm not sure if that really affects the whole end-times calculus.

[00:28:23] CRISTEN:
What do Beyoncé conspiracy theories and the volume of them tell us about the real power and influence she wields?

[00:28:36] MOYA BAILEY:
I mean, that it's serious—that we can't ignore pop stars and dismiss them as not having a real power in our worlds because people are attributing a level of power and influence to Beyoncé that may be outsized in some ways, but that comes from the fear, I think, of what she can actually do and how her presence really riles people up. So I'm interested to see what that power could look like if it wasn't just in the service of individual wealth attainment for the Carters. Like, what would it look like for that voice to be lent towards, you know, some of the real issues of our time? 

But that's not generally how pop stars work. I don't want to put that on Beyoncé and not actually put that on other pop stars, but I do think that there's something to be said for the real power of influence to get people to buy and purchase that pop stars have. And people's recognition of that power, both at the level of industry—why Beyoncé is able to sell and command so much money is because of her popularity. So in that sense, conspiracy theorists are hitting on something—like, she does have the ability to move money. That is part of her skill set in the music and the things that she creates. They're not misreading that. 

But the way that people assume that that means that she's doing something nefarious—that there is this Illuminati way of running the government, running the world—that's where I wonder what people think is actually happening. 'Cause I imagine if Beyoncé had more power or the power that people think she had, I would hope that things would be very different for Black people around the world if this conspiracy was true, and given her own professed truth and very real commitment to the Black community, I imagine that she would be wielding that power in different ways.

[00:31:03] MOYA BAILEY:
I just want to say that I get why we have conspiracy theories. Like, I think our world is pretty wild if you think about it. You know, if you just take a moment and think about what's happening in the world right now—I mean, I'm thinking about the volcanoes in Iceland and then multiple genocides and all of the things that are occurring right now. It's so overwhelming, and it's hard not to think of it as somehow orchestrated by someone or something. I think there's a tendency to want to make sense out of nonsense, and conspiracy theories help people do that. But they also reinvigorate some of our worst attributes as humans. They really keep us from doing the work of taking responsibility for how we show up and how we contributed to all of the things that are happening. It must be some nefarious actor that we can't see—it must be some, you know, something that we have no control over—when it seems to me like a lot of these things are happening right in front of us. A lot of these things are very clear and apparent if we're just able to look at our decisions around the climate, if we're able to look at our decisions around how we treat others based on our assumptions. And I'm hopeful that this conversation gets people to think about their own role in perpetuating misogynoir and perpetuating ideas that don't actually get us closer to the world we actually want.

. . .

[00:32:53] CRISTEN:
Thank you so much to Dr. Moya Bailey. Her website is moyabailey.com. You should also check out the incredible research lab she leads at DigitalApothecary.org. And why would you not read her book Misogynoir Transformed: Black Women's Digital Resistance?

This isn't the last you'll be hearing from Moya, and we aren't done with Beyoncé either. Next time on Conspiracy She Wrote: In April 2020, Beyoncé and rapper Megan Thee Stallion teamed up for a remix of Megan's viral hit "Savage." It was also an act of charity, with Beyoncé's share of all its sales going to the Houston, Texas nonprofit Bread of Life. That remix raised over a million dollars to help Bread of Life keep feeding local families during the pandemic outbreak. But neither Megan's good deeds nor her superior talent could protect her from the punishment and some wild conspiracy scapegoating.

[00:34:12] SIDNEY MADDEN:
She was a party girl who liked to twerk and liked to have fun and was very comfortable in her sexual agency. That was their main reason for not believing Megan, you know? In examining all this, we're also celebrating everything that Megan has done, everything that she's continuing to do, everything that women in hip-hop are continuing to do because we're the future.

[00:34:40] CRISTEN:
Conspiracy She Wrote is an Unladylike Media production, executive produced and created by me, Cristen Conger. Lushik Lotus-Lee is our producer. Engineering and sound design by Marcus Hahm. Our music is from Blue Dot Sessions, and our theme song is "Tarana" by RGift.