Beyoncé

About

Beyoncé Knowles is an American singer-songwriter who rose to fame in the late 1990s as the lead singer of the R&B trio Destiny’s Child. Following the group's disbandment in 2005, the singer began performing and recording as a solo artist, soon establishing herself as one of the best-selling music artists of all time, with more than 118 million solo records and 60 million records with Destiny’s Child in sales, as of October 2013.

Online History

As early as June 2003, Beyoncé's first fan site, Beyoncé World^[12] was founded by a fan named Rick as a place to share breaking news and high quality pictures of the artist. In 2012, the new administrator of the site moved its domain to TheBeyonceWorld.com,^[13] which remains to be one of the top Beyoncé fan sites as of October 2013. In February 2006, Beyoncé launched her personal website, Beyonce.com,^[9][10] where she began posting updates as well as MP3s and videos of her work. On October 1st, 2007, an official Beyoncé fan page was launched on Facebook^[11], which has accrued more than 52 million likes as of October 2013. On November 12th, 2011, the /r/Beyonce subreddit^[17] was created.

The Single Ladies Dance

The Single Ladies Dance is a viral dance sequence featured in the video for Beyoncé's 2008 single "Single Ladies (Put A Ring On It)" (shown below, left). It was directed by Jake Nava, and choreographed by Frank Gatson and JaQuel Knight and premiered on MTV's Total Request Live on October 13th, 2008. The first parody of the video appeared on the November 15th, 2008 episode of Saturday Night Live featuring Justin Timberlake and two of the show's male cast members performing the dance (shown below, right). This sketch sparked dozens of parodies and as of October 2013, there are more than 183,000 search results for "Single Ladies parody"^[4] on YouTube. A year after the video was originally released, it was uploaded to YouTube where it gained more than 75 million views within a month.

Kanye West at VMA 2009

Kanye Interrupts, also known as “Imma let you finish,” refers to an on-air mishap which occurred during Taylor Swift’s acceptance speech for Best Female Video at the 2009 MTV Video Music Awards, when Kanye West suddenly stormed the stage and took the microphone from the singer to declare that Beyonce had “one of the best music videos of all time.” Later that evening, when Beyonce went on the stage to receive the Video of the Year award for "Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)," she decided forgo her acceptance speech and invited Taylor onstage to finish hers instead.

Drunk in Love

On December 13th, 2013, Beyoncé released her self-titled fifth studio album exclusively online via iTunes, introducing "Drunk in Love," a song marked by heavy influences of trap beats, deep bass lines and racy innuendos, as one of her two lead singles. On December 16th, the BeyonceVEVO YouTube channel uploaded the black-and-white music video for the track, which features Knowles and Jay-Z having a romantic outing at a Florida beachfront (shown below). Within the first three months, the video gained over 105 million views and 70,400 comments.

Lemonade

Beyoncé's "Lemonade" is the sixth studio album and the second “visual album” released by American singer and songwriter Beyoncé. Upon its premiere as an hour-long special on HBO in late April 2016, the album instantly earned critical acclaim for its innovative methods of storytelling and high production value, as well as fan speculations about its autobiographical allusions to the marriage between the artist and her husband, Jay-Z, in a similar vein to the reception of "Drunk In Love" from her first self-titled visual album.

On April 16th, 2016, Beyoncé announced the upcoming release of Lemonade with a preview video and trailer on her official YouTube page, although the accompanying description didn't reveal much about the nature of the project, aside from its scheduled premiere date and time on HBO. The preview video received over 3 million views in the week between its release and the premiere of Lemonade on April 23rd.

In anticipation of the event, which also coincided with the season premiere of Game of Thrones, HBO announced that its internet streaming app, HBO Go, would allow people to sign up for a free 30-day trial. The music from the visual album was later released as a stream on Tidal, for which people could also sign up for a trial. Originally, the music was not going to be released anywhere else, but due to popular demand, Beyoncé agreed to release it on iTunes and Amazon for download at midnight on Sunday, April 24th.

Related Memes

Haters To The Left

Haters To The Left is a catchphrase used to dismiss negative people from a conversation. Though the phrase itself was not uttered until March 1st, 2007 in an episode of the American sitcom 30 Rock, it was inspired by the lyrics of Beyoncé's 2006 single "Irreplaceable" (shown below). The song's lyrics begin with "to the left, to the left, everything you own in the box to the left." The phrase has since become a popular tag on Tumblr^[1], Instagram^[2] and Twitter.^[3]

Unflattering Beyonce

Unflattering Beyonce is a photoshop meme based on humorously times photographs taken of Beyoncé during her performance at Super Bowl XLVII on February 3rd, 2013. After BuzzFeed posted a compilation of the photos from Getty Images on February 4th, they received a request from Beyoncé's publicist to take down seven of the photos for being "unflattering." The following day, BuzzFeed shared a redacted version of the letter in a post illustrating why the photos should not be removed. The takedown request resulted in much unwanted attention from news media outlets, resulting in threads containing photoshopped versions of these photos on a number of online communities including Reddit and the BodyBuilding.com forums.

Beyoncé's Illuminati Sign

Beyoncé's Illuminati Sign refers to a triangle-shaped hand gesture made by Beyoncé during her Super Bowl XLVII performance that some viewers construed as a reference to The Illuminati, a purported secret society consisting of world governments, corporations and celebrities. Throughout the performance, thousands of tweets were made suggesting she was part of the mysterious group, which greatly increased in frequency (shown below) after she flashed the sign, which had been previously associated with her and her husband Jay-Z to represent his record label Roc-A-Fella Records.

Beyoncé In Brunswick

Beyoncé in Brunswick refers to a hashtag and single topic blog created following a photoshoot with Beyoncé in Brunswick, Melbourne, Australia on October 24th, 2013.^[6] After a number of local fans caught Beyoncé posing outside an authentic old house in the area, photos of the shoot began to quickly spread around social media. After the singer left the area, the gathered fans went up to the porch and began mimicking her poses for their own photos, which were shared on Twitter^[7] and Instagram^[8] with the hashtag #BeyonceInBrunswick. Fans also began to use the hashtag to make jokes about the local things Beyoncé should partake in while she was in the area, many of which were turned into image macros (shown below) for the blog Beyoncé In Brunswick^[5], which was created that day by Richard Higgins and Matt Kelly of the comedy troupe The List Operators.

Reputation

Beyhive

Beyhive is the term used to describe fans of Beyoncé, coined sometime prior to August 2006 when the it began appearing on the gossip message board Lipstick Alley.^[15] In early 2011, Beyoncé embraced the name and added a section on her website titled The Beyhive^[16] to share fan photos. In November 2011, Beyhive was added to Urban Dictionary^[14] and it has since become a popular hashtag used by fans to connect with each other on Tumblr^[18], Twitter^[19] and Instagram.^[20]

Beyonce Voters

On July 1st, 2014, during an episode of Outnumbered Fox news host Jesse Watters commented that Hillary Clinton was being critical of the supreme court Hobby Lobby decision which allows employers to not cover their employees contraception under their health plan, in order to court "the Beyoncé vote." He clarified the nickname came from Beyonce's song "Single Ladies," as the demographic he was referring to was single women.

On July 8th, 2014, Sarah Coughlon,^[26] a student at Harvard University, created the single topic Tumblr blog titled Beyonce Voters^[25] in response to his comments. The Tumblr features photos of female politicians and judges with Beyonce lyrics overlayed on top of them. The Tumblr was covered by several websites including Buzzfeed^[27] and Feminsting.^[28]

Personal Life

Beyoncé Knowles-Carter was born on September 4th, 1981. She recorded her first album with Destiny's Child in 1996, with whom she released six full-length albums. She began acting in made-for-television films in 2001, followed by her first major motion picture gig in July 2002. In 2003, she began her solo career with a guest spot on the song "'03 Bonnie and Clyde" (shown below, left) with her future husband Jay-Z, followed by her debut single "Crazy in Love" (shown below, right), which spent eight weeks on the top of the Billboard Hot 100 charts. She married Jay-Z on April 4th, 2008 and their daughter, Blue Ivy, was born on January 7th, 2012. Outside of her career, Beyoncé is also very active in politics and is a staunch supporter of President Barack Obama. As of October 2013, she maintains active social media accounts on Tumblr^[21], Instagram^[22] and Twitter^[23] where she has more than 12.8 million followers.

First Pregnancy Announcement

At the end of a performance of her song "Love On Top" during the MTV VMAs in August 2011, Beyoncé dropped her mic, unbuttoned her blazer and showed off her baby bump, revealing she was five months pregnant (shown below). At the time of the reveal, 8,868 tweets per second were sent about the news, breaking the record for most tweets per second during a single event.^[24] She held the record until December 9th, 2011, when a screening of the Japanese film Castle in the Sky yielded 25,088 tweets per second.

Second Pregnancy Announcement

On February 1st, 2017, Beyoncé posted a photograph of herself to her Instagram page announcing that she was pregnant with twins. In the photo, she is wearing a veil in front of a flower arrangement holding her pregnant stomach. As of February 2nd, the post, shown below, has over 8.5 million likes, beating the record for the most-liked post ever on Instagram by over 2 million.^[31] Beyoncé also shared several photos taken during a photoshoot of her being pregnant to her website.^[32]

The announcement was met with widespread excitement on social media, as fans and celebrities expressed their congratulations. Some jokingly expressed that Beyoncé was contributing members of "The Resistance" against Donald Trump. The announcement also sparked photoshops and jokes on Twitter, some of which were compiled by The Daily Mail.^[33]

Twins Birth Announcement

On June 18th, 2017, Beyoncé's father, Matthew Knowles, announced the birth of her and Jay-Z's twins to fans on Twitter. Knowles tweeted a picture of a birthday card that said, "Happy birthday to the twins. Love, Granddad." The tweet was captioned, "They're here." On Twitter, the post received more than 12,000 retweets and 29,000 likes within the first 24 hours.^[34]

Beyonce's fans were dismayed by Knowles' announcement, insisting that he did not have the right to share the news before Jay Z and Beyoncé. This comes on top of hostile feelings toward Mathew Knowles as Beyoncé's former manager. Furthermore, Beyonce's representatives have yet to comment or confirm the twins' birth.

Several news outlets covered Mathew Knowles' announcement, including BuzzFeed,^[35] Billboard,^[36] The New York Post,^[37] The Los Angeles Times^[38] and more.

Search Interest

External References