There’s one particular scene in Beyonce’s surprise visual album “Lemonade” that sticks with everyone:
Destroying a car is a time-honored tradition in music videos, and but the act has several meanings. As usual with the mystery-shrouded Beyoncé — who does it in a stunning yellow couture dress — no one knows exactly what it symbolizes.
Some might assume it’s anger over infidelity, given the song playing in the background is “Hold Up,” which includes the lyrics “I smell your secret and I’m not too perfect to ever feel this worthless . . . What’s worse, looking jealous or crazy?” Slate wonders if it’s an homage to a film by Pipilotti Rist, a Swiss artist “known for her whimsically mystifying installations, many of which celebrate female joy and sexual pleasure.”
Here’s how artists in the past have used the car-smashing trope:
* Revenge for cheating.
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The most cliche of reasons, but a very real one. How else is a woman supposed to teach her man a lesson? Carrie Underwood perfected this in the opening seconds of “Before He Cheats,” which should scare any guy thinking of buying a fruity little drink for a bleach-blond tramp who can’t shoot whiskey. Unlike others who destroy cars as exciting scenery, Underwood explicitly details how she’ll demolish a vehicle, including a Louisville slugger to both headlights: “I dug my key into the side of his pretty little souped-up four-wheel drive, carved my name into his leather seats . . .”
* To illustrate that you’re “crazy.”
Car lovers apparently freaked out when it appeared that Taylor Swift took a golf club to a vintage AC Cobra in her “Blank Space” video. But don’t worry, it was all special-effects trickery. In this case, hitting such a beautiful piece of machinery is supposed to represent the height of craziness (“any sane person on this planet will protect like it were their own child,” her music video co-star Andrea Denver said of the car), as Swift parodies the way she’s portrayed in the media: a clingy serial dater who falls in love with men too fast and then terrifies them.
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* To make a bigger point.
Calle 13 rapper René Pérez doesn’t just shatter the windows of his own Maserati with a bat in his “Adentro” music video — he pushes the car off a cliff. The rapper told Billboard he wanted a visual symbol about how you shouldn’t get caught up in the material things in life, even if you have a lot of money. “I wanted to send a big message to the kids,” he said. “Instead of asking the producer to get a car to use in the video, I said, ‘I’m going to use my car, I don’t need it anymore.’ ”
Further back, Michael Jackson famously morphed from a panther into a human, then danced on top of a car and destroyed it in the controversial “Black or White” video from 1991. The meaning? Though people complained about the violence, Jackson said “the sequence was only meant to represent the panther’s animalistic behavior.”
Read more:
Beyoncé’s ‘Lemonade’ turns life’s lemons into furious pop
How Rachel Roy embodies a new trend in celebrity cheating scandals
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