Lemonade and the limitations put on black art.

After Beyoncé dropped Lemonade last weekend, music journalists began spinning their wheels trying to positively identify Jay Z’s alleged paramour. Lyrics from Beyoncé albums dating back a decade were picked apart for signs the marriage of America’s premiere celebrity couple had been tumultuous from the start.

Central to the entertainment news sleuthing has been questions about how much of Beyoncé’s lyrics on Lemonade, and previous works were true. How much of the album is confessional, and how much of it is genius marketing. The Carter-Knowles team, as the theory goes, took a partial truth and expanded on it to turn lemons into Lemonade. And as we all sip the sweet nectar, the dollars — as the latest theory goes — roll in.

Carving up Lemonade track-by-track, line-by-line for clues to whether the album is a backstage pass to Beyoncé and Jay Z’s marriage and the alleged marital strife misses the point entirely. Lost in our obsession with Rachel Roy and Rita Ora, was what Beyoncé really created: great art.

Watch the movie and listen to the album. This is perhaps the best work of Beyoncé’s career. I won’t dig to far into that. Plenty of people are heaping praise upon Lemonade and deservedly so.

But last week’s news was filled with clickable headlines about the state of their marriage and speculation about the identity of “Becky with the good hair.” The conversation after Lemonade dropped was as much about Beyoncé’s past-his-creative-prime husband as it was about new music from the most popular voice for female empowerment. It became almost as much his moment as hers.

Freedom, self determination, empowerment, all consistent themes in her previous works, and ones which are deployed with laser precision on Lemonade, were drowned out by conversations about whether what set off a fight in that elevator between Jay Z and Solange had anything to do with the lyrics on Lemonade. Yes, this is the age of the Internet, hot takes and listicles. Thorough analysis be damned.

But I think something else is happening here. Beyoncé is operating in an authenticity paradigm which emerged during the Hip Hop era.

Rap’s obsession with “street cred,” Jay Z’s own story of former crack dealer turned pop culture icon, feeds a narrative where black art becomes reportage of the personal, the cultural and the political. And while this is true of almost all art, it is in black art, and one can extend this to almost all artists of color, where questions arise as to whether the creator experienced this first hand.

We expect the black artist to reveal, she must confess; she must offer us a lens with which to view black lives. And most importantly, the black artist must mine the raw materials for this confession, for this reveal, from her own life. The black artist must keep it real.

The black artist detailing the cocaine and crack epidemic can’t be a former corrections officer. He must be a former drug dealer. The former is accused of constructing a fiction, while the latter lived the lyrics. Commentary on epidemic of black killings in Chicago feels unnatural from Kanye West, but appropriate for Chief Keef. One was born into the circumstances which fuel the violence, the other is reacting from the safety of the suburbs. Similarly, it’s important for the greatest voice on institutional racism of our generation to be a man who grew up in decaying West Baltimore. Who better to talk about structural racism than Ta-Nehisi Coates, who was reared in a place decimated by that system?

Mary J. Blige, the Hip Hop generation’s original female singer, lacked the grandiosity of Beyoncé’s artistic vision and her vocal range. But her singing felt real. It felt authentic because so much of it was.

Black artist must be Hunter S. Thompson tagging along with the Hell’s Angels, and not Phillip K. Dick creating futuristic other worlds. These are prescriptions for black art which stifle creativity, and in a very subtle way were on display this week.

Macklemore need not be gay to rap about marriage equality. Eminem is allowed to touch on his own poverty, but he need not craft an entire persona based on where he was born, nor are his lyrics dissected to see where the truth ends and the art begins. He can confess, but he can also embellish. Amy Winehouse, not a black artist but one who appropriated a lot of black music, dealt in pure confession. Still, the veracity of Winehouse’s lyrics weren’t measured by music critics and the media until it looked certain her addictions were going to end her life. Madonna could stretch the limits of contemporary gender norms with not nearly as much scrutiny given to her lyrics as Beyoncé when she vowed to “bounce to the next dick boy.”

Love is painful, love is complicated. But Beyoncé’s very public marriage became tabloid fodder which unfortunately overshadowed her art.

Beyoncé is no stranger to operating within a narrow artistic band with. “Formation” served as proof of mainstream culture’s desire to confine Beyoncé to stories of heartbreak mixed with the occasional feminine empowerment anthem. She was to abstain from politics, lest she be labeled exploitative.

This is not intended to be cover for whatever Jay Z did or did not do. I am not even saying the album shouldn’t be up for interpretation. I am saying when we speculate on this or any album’s authenticity, are we not implying that Beyoncé, or any black artist lacks the magic to create something from nothing or to piece scraps together and make a collage, some of it real, parts embellished and parts fabricated. Aren’t we implying that real life, “street cred” and experience serve as a creative crutch of minority artists and writers?

If she made it all up, is it no longer a great album?