“I still think she’s a wonderful singer and performer, and some of the music on Lemonade is fantastic. But I have to be honest, I preferred the old Beyoncé. The less inflammatory, agitating one. The one who didn’t use grieving mothers to shift records and further fill her already massively enriched purse. The one who didn’t play the race card so deliberately and to my mind, unnecessarily. The one who wanted to be judged on her stupendous talent not her skin color, and wanted us all to do the same.” – Piers Morgan, The Daily Mail (25 April 2016)
It sounds as if Morgan is saying he wishes Beyoncé weren’t behaving so “black”. That isn’t to say that Morgan is merely waxing nostalgic here, pining for an era when Beyoncé made her name on Destiny’s Child cuts like “Say My Name” all over again. Still, there was a time in his mind when Beyoncé was “safe”, when she was “less inflammatory, agitating”.