okay so the skinny jeans didn't work out for me so well …

We knew why she wouldn’t confirm why she won’t affirm her marriage to Jay-Z, now we can postulate why she can’t continue to attend church

Okay it’s a slow day. I was just reeling over news that Goodyear is trying to force the hand of the city of Akron by suggesting that eminent domain could be used to acquire over 600 acres of homes in East Akron so they can build an even larger headquarters and include yet another bland shopping mall, you know to give something back to it’s citizens. Wow, and I think they’ll pull it off because Akron is in such dire economic straits they’ll do whatever it takes to encourage someone to come to the area, or prevent someone else from leaving. It wasn’t the town I grew up with, because clearly things weren’t so great even then, but it surely isn’t the town that it once was or has the potential of being.

If you’re like me, and living at best what can be considered an amoral lifestyle where you still have somewhat of a conscious but aren’t in church and aren’t thinking about going anytime soon this news may get your attention. According to EURweb.com, an Internet celebrity news site, if you can call it that, Beyonce can’t go to church because of her fame, and of course she won’t confirm that she and Jay-Z are married, which of course isn’t really news at all. She’s quoted as saying that God will understand if she misses Sunday service.

The girl comes under a lot of criticism for saying stuff that isn’t entirely politically correct, like she did when she suggested that she only makes music for black people. Apparently a lot of her White fans took issue to that, not unlike the way that Oprah Winfrey lost a core group of her audience by endorsing Barack Obama. But was that really the case, did most people even know that she made that comment, or what it meant exactly, and was the 70% drop in sales of her last album in spite of that or because of the real truth, that they realized that the record wasn’t that good?

I’ve always felt like Beyonce was the reincarnate of Diana Ross for a younger generation; stealing pages from her playbook, positioning herself for fame in a similar fashion but like Diana Ross I ended up liking some of her work and can’t argue that she is one hell of a performer. But I think that her real success has been on the strength of those performances, and doubt that she has really reached her peak artistically and delivered that timeless album, such as Diana did with Diana (1980), a record that was arguably a classic due to the influence of her producers but also because she had met new fans exactly where they were at for that time.

Beyonce has yet to create such a record. Much of where she is at now is owed to the strength of the songs she penned for Destiny’s Child, and it may be a while before we can truly see her apart from their shtick, in which she is still sort of doing what she did with them, just with her own backup dancers. Of course that’s a totally different argument you can digress into, the real issue is whether or not fame can get in the way of your spirituality and supplant it or force you to think that you don’t need it, or whether or not it just amplifies your own personal beliefs about God that you would have if you were broke, and you’re not just looking for yet another loophole to stay away from the altar.

To her own defense, Beyonce is still young at 26 and is in that precarious position that if she had of grown up in the church she would either be deeply committed to it by now or would be rebelling against it wondering what life was like outside of it. It’s like having been in the routine of doing something that your family and the culture and society you’re in says that you should do, without having a deep commitment towards doing it yourself for your own personal reasons. Also, when you grow up under a certain system of beliefs you tend to feel defined by it and if you haven’t tried anything else you may feel inhibited or restrained by it, and what we’ve seen with her close relationship with her father and his micromanagement of not just her career but life in general sort of suggests some empathy for what she is going through.

It’s something you tend to see with other stars whose parents were closely involved in their careers where the child wants to emancipated from their parents. When you’ve worked so hard to be great from such an early age and don’t really get to experience life as other kids would your outlook tends to be a bit warped anyway. Surely this will give some ammunition to those from the DC days that never forgave what happened back then with the original members to have even more reason to hate Beyonce but this should give pause to those going to church out of a cultural obligation because that’s what they know and not so much because they really want to go for themselves to reflect on why they’re going, or not, and why it is important that they go, or not, at least some perspective on what it really means.

When Beyonce inserted foot into mouth back in 2006 I figured all she really meant was that she was making music for African-American that was more rooted in the traditions of Black music and that her White fans just happened to appreciate it, but they weren’t necessarily her target audience. There isn’t anything wrong with that perspective whatsoever, and reflects the true nature of where African-Americans stand in the larger scheme of mainstream popular culture anyway. I never really saw where Beyonce was teetering on the fence and trying to create a product that you could consider to be on the cultural fence anyway, and that or assumed that her White fans had a deep appreciation for the authenticity of her product, as far as Black pop music goes; doesn’t necessarily mean that she needed to articulate that position though but everyone makes mistakes.

I’m still a bit upset about by hometown that seems diminished and a shadow of it’s former self. It’s unfortunate that it has come down to this, bitting off pieces of crumbs from the table, a few thousand jobs here or there in a city of hundreds of thousands where there are many with the skills to do great work but not the opportunity to do so in a city they had grown to love and hate. Maybe we can get Beyonce to do what Ciara did and start a dance program the youth, it’ll be great press, and she can put her fame to good use …