THE UNAMERICAN LIFE: From Disco to Denim, Beyoncé and the Art of Black Memory
Essay by Ashley Mozingo, MBA
I must start this piece by saying that I began writing it in December 2023. As Beyoncé continued to evolve in her history and art lessons, I had to sit and revisit many times. I hope to contribute to the representation revolution we are witnessing in the United States and around the world in the spaces of Art, Culture, History, and Literature. To encourage conversation about what it means to live at the intersection of creativity, ancestral guidance, and God’s faith on display. I hope you enjoy.
I. Prologue: The Unamerican Life
“My unamerican life” — that lyric spun around in my head like a prayer and a punch at the same time. I felt seen and snatched.
It was the only language that made sense to what I was feeling as an adult citizen of a country actively trying to erase me. A country so afraid of our memory that it criminalizes its own libraries. When Beyoncé dropped Renaissance, it felt like a cultural revival wrapped in glitter and gratitude. I had so many thoughts but didn’t write about it immediately — I needed to sit with it.
I knew Renaissance wasn’t just an album. This was a ritual. A year later, I was finally ready to write about my Renni reflections…then YEE-HAW! Here comes Cowboy Carter, boots first, busting down the saloon doors of American memory with a guitar riff and a braided crown. This is history. American history. And more importantly: our history.
Ah. I could start this piece with BIGGER. But then I get into thoughts that ponder, “When did you get Beyoncé’d?”, in a laughing, loving way. Maybe it was Destiny’s Child's call to be an Independent Woman. Or maybe their call for you to be a SURVIVOR. Maybe it was the self-love proclamation, dictionary addition, belt out that MY body is too BOOTYLICIOUS. Maybe it was Nuclear or Cater 2 U. Maybe it went back further to Blue Velvet upon discovery. Or maybe it was through Carmen, Foxxy Cleopatra, Xania, or Sharon. Hmmm. We could talk for hours probably.
When my Sister Friend approached me with the opportunity to accompany her for the Renaissance World Tour, I don’t think I had to words expressed my gratitude fully. I was beyond thankful and grateful for the opportunity and for simply knowing her as my Friend. I myself was coming off of a rather turbulent few years, losing my grandmother, grappling with a decreased lung capacity from Covid, and an uphill battle with reclaiming my identity from a previous life. I needed a celebration, and God made it so.
“My unamerican life,” ….
I thought of my Great-Aunt Sallie Mae, spooning crushed canned pineapples into her mouth between stories of resistance—how she and her friends once lay across railroad tracks in protest. I thought of my grandparents’ silence and how that silence still wraps around my father’s hands when I ask about his childhood in Newark, NJ. When I once asked where he was when Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. was killed, his voice got quiet. He was five years old. These experiences of my parents, and their parents, and their parents are not far removed from me, nor should I expect them to be. Media would like me to think otherwise.
Those lyrics took me down a rabbit hole of my American experience: the gutting of literacy programs under Bush, how housing is withheld like a privilege, how diversity is this nation’s greatest promise and still its most exploited threat. Those lyrics held all of that: the lie that we’ve arrived, the suggestion that civil rights was a moment, not a movement, and that dignity should be earned.
Even with the heaviness that stems from conversations never had, I think of the sweetness. Grandmothers. Midwives. The way there were hands that blessed the soil of Gaia before the continents had names. When Beyoncé followed that line in Renaissance with “Them big ideas are buried here / Amen” in Cowboy Carter two years later, it fragmented me and illuminated hidden confidence. That’s what art can do. It can call things by name and give language and expression. It can reclaim the hundreds of hands that carried you here. It can say: you’re not imagining it, and you’re not alone. It echoed the American experience that arises down the aisles of FIND YOUR WAY BACK.
II. The Church of Renaissance
When Renaissance dropped, it felt like a global altar call and I made my way down the aisle honey.
CHARLOTTE, NC, USA Renaissance World Tour
By then, I had finally stepped into the fullness of my queerness, a truth I had known since middle school, when I had pretend girlfriends and didn’t yet have the words. The album was a soundtrack that told me I didn’t have to whisper my joy or explain my body. It told me to release. At least that’s what it did for me, newly 30, and loving more than worrying. This album didn’t just affirm my freedom to move through the world; it reminded me that joy is also my birthright. That I can dance in my kitchen with the lights off and feel holy.
That’s the brilliance of Beyoncé: she doesn’t explain the moment, she becomes it. Whether it’s house, trap, bounce, disco, gospel, or something that doesn’t even have a name yet, she moves through genres and suddenly the box no longer fits. We no longer fit.
Beyoncé performs Love On Top With Charlotte NC, USA audience for the RWT.
III. Cowboy Carter: An American Girl’s Wild West
Let’s start by highlighting that Cowboy Carter isn’t a costume.
Beyoncé didn’t go country. She called in Linda Martell. She called in Charley Pride. She brought Southern truth to the front porch and allowed it to sing.
Folks in leather, fringe, and feathers. Guitars twanging behind voices that carry dreams and freedom in them. Cowboy Carter took up space. What I love most about artists like Beyoncé, Kendrick, and André 3000 stepping into unexpected sonic spaces—country, flute-core, avant-garde jazz—is that it models what unbound creativity looks like. They remind us that genre, much like race or gender in America, was never meant to contain the totality of us.
Creativity is a freedom act.
When I listen to New Blue Sun, when I sit with the Americana poetry of Cowboy Carter, when I let Renaissance fill the room, I’m witnessing a lineage of resistance. I'm witnessing freedom practiced in public. That’s that feeling when the Electric Slide calls a unified sway. It’s the volcanic like charge you feel when you look around you, can clearly identify in rhythm and blues your people, and hear/feel these lines blare after a Pharrell Williams production:
Alls my life, I has to fight, niggaaaa
I'm fucked up, homie, you fucked up
But if God got us, then we gon' be alright
V. The Real Culture War: Let Artists Create
Genre-bending in music has always captivated me. It’s a quiet act of rebellion, a refusal to be boxed in by systems that were never built to hold the fullness of Black expression.
Take André 3000’s New Blue Sun, a body of work that asks us to suspend our need for labels entirely. When I was asked on Hip Hop Vibes: The Podcast whether I thought the interstellar hottie had given us a rap album, I didn’t hesitate: Absolutely. The Hip Hop is in the intention and the tracklist itself.
Who decided flutes and wind chimes couldn’t be Hip Hop? Why must Black creativity always be confined to a checklist? We need room. We need reverence.
Let artists make things. Let them wander. Let them play. Stop brutalizing Creators for evolving. Stop mistaking critique for control. The tradition of Black Art is transformation.
VI. Thank You to THAT Girl
I think often about what it means to be a witness. Not just to Beyoncé’s work, but to the memory-work, the resistance, the joy, and the frustration of silenced rationality & brilliance braided through our stories. I think about my Great Aunt Sallie Mae on the tracks, daring a train to come, and about my father as a Black boy in Newark, standing still in the tremor of history in the 60s, 70s, before having me in the 90s. These works from these Creators are not metaphors. They are instructions. They are maps.
When Beyoncé sings about the unAmerican life or the big ideas buried here, she’s not being symbolic; she’s being exact. She’s doing what so many of us have been doing with fewer tools and smaller stages: telling the truth, sharing humanity, and creating.
The Writer, Ashley Mozingo’s, from right to left, Grandmother Sallie Ruth and Great Aunt Sallie Mae
Beyoncé performs DIVA (Thank you Blue Ivy Mngt) at Bank of America Stadium, NC USA
