Core Post 3 - Clayton Vozzella

Thomas Harris’s The Building of Popular Images of course immediately made me think of Beyoncé and the way she so meticulously constructs her public image. Though Harris’s piece talks about film stars, his points apply to music stars too. He opens by asserting that much of Americans’ choice in heroes is determined by the repeated exposure to which celebrities subject us (40). It’s virtually impossible to meet someone in the US who has not heard of Beyoncé; she is everywhere. The running joke is that she and Jay-Z are the royal family of America.

            The advent of Instagram has given Beyoncé a new tool to circulate her own images of herself on her own carefully constructed terms and platform. She is one of the most followed celebrities on Instagram with over 111 million followers. Harris writes that, “The star becomes a symbol to an unseen mass audience whose only contact with him/her is through the indirect means of the media” (40). We feel that we know Beyoncé and that we understand who she is as a person through her self-branding. The idea of Beyoncé as the Queen Bee has materialized over the course of her career, and now she controls the reinforcement of that idea.

            Harris also states: “The totality of this publicity build-up [magazines, radio, TV, merchandise, etc.] is calculated to make the personality better known to a public which will respond by attending the screen hero’s starring films” (40). In this case, Beyoncé creates hype through media to get her public to ultimately attend her concerts, which in today’s music landscape are the prime moneymakers of a musical artist’s career. Let’s take for example, Lemonade. First, she debuted the album’s top hit and first single by performing “Formation” at Super Bowl 50. The following day she announced the Formation World Tour. She then waited until two weeks before the tour to release the album in its entirety, forcing fans to learn every lyric in two weeks. In the two months between announcing her tour and releasing her album, countless images and media circulated globally preparing the world for what was to come. Then she toured the world. With only forty performances, she grossed $210,000,000.

            Her public image as a star also bled into her personal life, as we see in the message of Lemonade. Her husband’s affair became public knowledge and discussion. The announcement of her pregnancy became one of the most liked and talked-about photos on Instagram. And now we follow Beyoncé’s every move. Harris also discusses how stars’ celebrity causes their personal lives to become international news. There’s no question that Beyoncé is one of the biggest stars of our time, and history books will say that she defined an era.