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If you pay any attention to our spirits writing, you know we love whiskey. And when it comes to whiskey, we have a special place in our hearts for bourbon. While rum is on the rise nationally, this corn-centric, highly sippable, American classic is still absolutely booming. The increasingly crowded marketplace is dominated by names like Pappy Van Winkle, Wild Turkey, and Blanton’s (though you’d be a fool to ignore the upstart independent distilleries on the scene).

As with any popular spirit, there are a lot of over-hyped bourbons on the market. On the flip side, there are also a good number of under-hyped expressions. Bottles that deserve more love than they currently get. When Alfredo Arroyo, bartender at Joe’s Café in Santa Barbara, California thinks about underrated bourbons, one immediately comes to mind.

“Buffalo Trace,” he says. “It’s now rated the best American small distillery, but still sold at a good price.”

Since we’re all eager to stock our liquor cabinets and bars with underappreciated, high-quality bourbons, we decided to get more insight from professionals like Arroyo. So we asked some of our favorite bartenders to tell us their picks for the most underrated bourbons on the market.

Old Forester 1920

Melissa Reigle, beverage manager and head bartender at Byblos in Miami

Old Forester is underrated and historic. It has been continuously distilled and blended in the US for 150 consecutive years (yes, even through the Prohibition).

If you want to taste what they were distilling and aging during Prohibition (under the guise of medicine), pick up a bottle of the 1920’s expression. At a whopping 115 proof, you won’t be disappointed with this hot medicine.

Jim Beam

Nestor Marchand, director of food and beverage at Plunge Beach Resort in Lauderdale, Florida

My underrated bourbon pick is Jim Beam. Everyone is looking at the premium bourbons. Jim Beam quality, at its price level, is hard to find.

Booker’s

Reggie Maharaj, beverage manager at The Peninsula Beverly Hills in Los Angeles

In my opinion, the most underrated bourbon is Booker’s. It’s specially bottled, uncut and unfiltered. They do very little advertising or social media, but I love this bourbon.

Old Grand-Dad Bonded

Shawn Brown, general manager of Wine World in Miramar Beach, Florida

My underrated bourbon of choice is Old Grand-Dad “Bottled in Bond.” It’s reasonably priced, drinkable over ice, and a solid value.

Stagg Jr.

Cory Richardson, bar manager at Hook & Barrel in Myrtle Beach, South Carolina

There are tons of great underrated bourbons out there that most people just haven’t heard of yet. Elijah Craig has been one of my favorites over the past year, as well as higher proof options like Stagg Jr. amazing flavor profiles on both of those options.

Bulleit Blender’s Select

Reniel Garcia, bar director of Havana 1957 in Miami

My pick is Bulleit 100 Proof Blender’s Select. This bourbon is 50 percent alcohol and it hasn’t been diluted or is only lightly diluted after removal from the barrels. It’s good neat, holds up on the rocks and gives a spicy rye kick to any bourbon-based cocktails you make with it. It’s a great bourbon for bartenders and in-home drinkers alike. It’s very approachable.

Warbinger Warmaster Edition

Mohammed Rahman, bar director at Kata Robata in Houston

With every celebrity trying to diversify their portfolio by jumping into the adult beverage market, most of these partnerships can look like a mere money grab from both parties. Enter Sespe Creek Distillery with their partnership with UFC heavyweight champion Josh Barnett to present “Warbinger Warmaster Edition.” A small-batch cask strength mesquite-smoked whiskey created by Master Distiller David Brandth Ph.D. Using new techniques to produce a product that tastes aged yet has only been treated for days to weeks.

This is definitely a must-try… if you can find any at the moment.

Buffalo Trace

Seamus Gleason, bartender at Hotel Jackson in Jackson Hole, Wyoming

There’s no more underrated bourbon than Buffalo Trace. This Kentucky straight bourbon hits every time. Sweet with a hint of tang that doesn’t get overly sour.

Evan Williams Black Label

Robert Swain Jr., owner of On the Rox Bartending Service in the British Virgin Islands

100 proof and only about $15 a bottle, Evan Williams is definitely not so popular, but well deserving of praise. Easy to mix with a basic chaser, for a cocktail, or just on the rocks. And let’s be honest, for 15 bucks you won’t be mad if you forget your bottle at the office party.

Four Roses Yellow Label

Kurt Bellon, general manager and beverage director at Chao Baan in St. Louis

Four Roses Yellow Label is my preferred bourbon of choice for any occasion. For its reasonable price and high quality and smoothness, it’s a solid choice when building an Old Fashioned, Manhattan, Paper Plane or even just on the rocks or neat.

Old Forester 86

Tim Wiggins, co-owner and beverage director of Retreat Gastropub in St. Louis

Old Forester 86. I love the earthy and nutty quality of Old Forester. It has enough backbone to stand up in classic cocktails and also works really well in fruit-forward tropical drinks.

Elijah Craig Small Batch

Jeremy Allen, beverage director of MiniBar Hollywood in Los Angeles

I’m a fan of a lot of Heaven Hill cheapies, which aren’t that cheap anymore, like Elijah Craig, Evan Williams, and Henry Mc Kenna 10 year, but I am pretty sure it’s hard to spend money on Kentucky Whiskey right now without supporting racist or exclusivist policies, and the red white and blue new label on Evan Williams is a big red flag.

This might be the year to vote with your dollars and switch back to Tequila.

In a recent ranking of the best Arcade Fire songs, Steven Hyden laid out what we’ve all been thinking since Funeral dropped in 2004:

With Arcade Fire, I have learned to entertain two thoughts simultaneously in my head.

Thought No. 1: “This is one of the most important, most popular, and, at times, best indie-rock bands of the last 20 years.”

Thought No. 2: “Even when I really like this band, they can also be extremely irritating.”

Hyden dives into this conundrum and more with co-host Ian Cohen on the first offering of Indiecast. In the episode, Hyden and Cohen dive into the Canadian outfit’s discography, zeroing in on the band’s sprawling opus The Suburbs, a decade after it was released. In 2011, Arcade Fire stunned the world when they took home the Album Of The Year award at the Grammys for the album, the first time the band ever took home an award at the ceremony. It left many people wondering, “Who is Arcade Fire?” 10 years later, Arcade Fire’s catalogue is one of the most divisive in modern indie.

New episodes of Indiecast drop every Friday. Listen to the Episode 1 above and subscribe wherever you listen to podcasts here. Stay up to date and follow us on Instagram and Twitter.

Everyone tends to have a defining moment when they first felt sexually or romantically attracted to someone and it’s usually in their early teens.

Someone gives you an intense feeling that you’ve never had before and, while some know exactly what it means, for others, the realization may come in hindsight.

When it comes to gay, lesbian or bisexual people, the moment they realize they may not be straight happens at a median age of 12. Gay men tend to come to this realization a little earlier than lesbians or bisexuals with 38% reporting that they “were younger than 10 when they first felt they were not heterosexual.”

via Pew Research

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media.giphy.com

LGBTQ+ Twitter users are sharing the moment they realized they may not be straight by using a meme from the Nickelodeon show “Drake & Josh” that ran from 2004 to 2007.

The meme is taken from a 2006 episode, “Mindy Loves Josh,” where Megan Parker (Miranda Cosgrove) looks up the symptoms of a skin disease on a computer, at one point taking a sip from a soft drink can and commenting “Interesting.”

The meme became popular in 2015 when Tumblr user commongayboy posted meme based on the scene which gained over 112,200 likes and reblogs in three years.

Last week, the meme evolved on Tumblr when someone posted a photo of a shirtless Clark Kent (Tom Wellington) from “Smallville” chained up with his arms over his head with the comment “12-year-old me realizing I’m gay.”

The post made its way to Twitter where it received over 33,000 likes and inspired countless people to use the meme to share the moment they first realized they may be gay, lesbian or bisexual.

The posts are a fun way for people to share how they came of age while referencing pop culture from a few years back. They also give people reason to pause and reflect on the moment in their lives when they first realized experienced sexual attraction.

However, the interesting thing about sexuality is that it can change over time. The types of people we were first interested in as a teenager may be vastly different from those we find attractive at 50.

In fact, studies show that one’s sexual orientation can change dramatically over the course of a lifetime.

Here are some of the best “12-year-old me realizing I’m gay” memes.

Snoop Dogg sparked conversions among hip-hop fans this week when he declared that Eminem isn’t one of the ten best rappers of all time. He made the claim during a recent Breakfast Club interview, but now, he has shown some love for Eminem.

Sharing a photo on Instagram of them on stage together at Coachella in 2012, Snoop captioned his post, “Slim shady wit silky slim, gang gang.”

Snoop didn’t exactly seem to disparage Eminem during his Breakfast Club interview, and even had praise for him, saying, “Eminem! The Great White Hope! White rappers had zero respect in rap [before him].”

However, he then went on to say, “[Dr. Dre] has probably put Eminem in the position where he could be labeled as one of the top ten rappers ever. I don’t think so, but the game thinks that he’s top ten lyricists and all that that comes with it. That’s just because he’s with Dr. Dre and Dr. Dre helped him find the best Eminem that he could find. […] There’s just some n****s in the ’80s that he can’t f*ck with. Like Rakim, like Big Daddy Kane, like KRS-One, like LL Cool J… shall I go on? Like Ice Cube.”

Snoop has had praise for Eminem before: After Em’s Trump-bashing freestyle at the BET Awards in 2017, Snoop said, “He’s a real n****. That’s all I’m gonna say. That’s what real n****s do, he did what he was supposed to do. It feels good to have a white man say what we’ve been wanting to say for a long time and make it stick.”

For years, The Office has dominated Netflix as one of the most-watched series offered by the streaming giant. Despite the fact that the sitcom went off the air back in 2013, viewers can’t get enough of the Scranton-based workplace comedy. So when the show makes the leap to NBCUniversal’s Peacock in January 2021, the brand new streaming service plans to up its game by offering never-before-seen content that The Office fans hopefully won’t be able to resist.

“We will be reintroducing The Office in a more complete way, incorporating elements that were not part of the original broadcast,” Peacock chairman Matt Strauss told Bloomberg on Thursday. While the exact details of the unreleased content wasn’t disclosed, we’re guessing it will pique the interest of diehard The Office fans. It’s also a similar move to HBO Max’s strategy for Friends, which is yet another NBC hit that reeled in viewers during its time on Netflix. However, due to the pandemic, Friends arrived on HBO Max without a highly-anticipated reunion special, which is still in the works.

As for why The Office is such a massive draw for streaming viewers, our own Jason Tabrys spoke with Brian Baumgartner, who played Kevin on the hit show and recently launched An Oral History Of The Office podcast. From his inside perspective, Baumgartner hopes to solve the puzzle of why the show continues to endure even in an increasingly crowded pop culture landscape:

“The question that was interesting or most interesting to go back and explore was simply why is The Office — seven years since we filmed our last scenes in the finale — still the most-watched television show? What has happened and what happened early on, in the creation of the show, that formed the show that has not just survived and which has a legacy, but which actually thrives and increases in viewership and… including new shows that are on the air now, by any metric you can measure, more people are watching The Office now, then not only ever before, but more than any other show that exists today.”

An Oral History Of The Office podcast is available on Spotify.

(Via Bloomberg)

Anybody who thought the vinyl resurgence was just a fad was mistaken: The industry has experienced a legitimate revival. As a result, music fans are interested in physical media in ways they may not have if the decades-old medium hasn’t made a comeback. That doesn’t mean everybody is listening to just their parents’ old music, though. That’s part of it, sure, thanks to rereleases that present classic albums in new ways. A vital part of the renewed vinyl wave, though, is new projects being released as records, of which there are plenty.

Whatever you might be into, each month brings a new slew of vinyl releases that has something for everybody. Some stand out above the rest, naturally, so check out some of our favorite vinyl releases of July below.

Taylor Swift — Folklore

Taylor Swift’s surprise new album, Folklore, has gotten perhaps the most comprehensive vinyl release of any album in 2020: She dropped eight unique vinyl editions of the album, each with different cover art and colored vinyl.

Get it here.

Abba — Abba: The Studio Albums

Abba was unarguably Sweden’s biggest musical export of the ’70s, and now their storied discography is available in one vinyl collection. All eight studio albums are represented here, each in vividly colored pressings that complement the original artwork.

Get it here.

Yaeji — What We Drew 우리가 그려왔던

Uproxx’s Caitlin White notes of Yaeji’s latest, “It’s exactly her intuitive ability to move between languages, and genres — house, hip-hop, pop — that makes When We Drew feel like the next logical step for pop’s best and most interesting impulses.”

Get it here.

Peanuts Greatest Hits and Peanuts Portraits

Charlie Brown and the rest of the Peanuts gang were defining characters over the span of multiple decades, and a big part of that was the music. These two new vinyl releases let fans re-live some of the specials’ classic compositions, and how adorable is that Snoopy record?

Get Peanuts Greatest Hits here. Get Peanuts Portraits here.

Paul McCartney — Flaming Pie Archive Collection

Paul McCartney’s tenth solo album is one of his most beloved, and now it’s available in several expansive editions. Included in these editions are goodies like a 128-page book, an art print portfolio, and more.

Get it here.

Hans Zimmer — Live In Prague

Hans Zimmer is responsible for some of the most epic and iconic music in cinematic history, and hearing him perform it live is a marvel. He likely won’t be touring any time soon, so this 3-LP release of a show in Prague is the next best thing (or better, since you won’t have to find parking outside the venue).

Get it here.

John Mayer — Continuum (Vinyl Me, Please Reissue)

Continuum was John Mayer’s strongest showing as a bluesman of his career at the time, and Vinyl Me, Please’s rerelease of the album is appropriately colored to reflect that. Aside from the slick-looking pressing, the audio was remastered and the release comes with an exclusive art print.

Get it here.

Blu & Exile — Miles

Blu & Exile take their time between albums, and after an eight-year gap, they resurfaced in 2020 with Miles. The effort was worth the wait, as it runs for 90 minutes and features the duo at their finest.

Get it here.

PJ Harvey — Dry and Dry Demos

PJ Harvey is in the midst of a rerelease series, and this month brought Dry, her 1992 debut. Some early editions of the album’s original run came with an exclusive collection of demos, and now for the first time, that set is available as a standalone release.

Get it here.

Spoon — Telephono and Soft Effects EP

Spoon is also at the start of a series of re-issues, and they’ve kicked things off with a pair of formative releases: their 1996 debut album Telephono and the EP that followed the next year, Soft Effects. Spoon leader Britt Daniel notes of the series, “Some of these albums haven’t been available on vinyl or CD in years, and in some places they never actually came out.”

Get it here.

Omar Rodríguez-López — The Clouds Hill Tapes Part I – III

Omar Rodríguez-López has been recording and releasing music on a virtually non-stop basis for decades, and now he’s back with a huge collection. The packaging here is clever: The slipcases feature photographs of the tapes on which these songs were recorded, and putting the vinyl in them gives the illusion of wound tape.

Get it here.

Soul Asylum — Let Your Dim Light Shine

Following the release of 1993’s Grave Dancers Union and the album’s hit single “Runaway Train,” Soul Asylum released Let Your Dim Light Shine, which actually out-charted its predecessor and managed a peak at No. 6 on the Billboard 200. This re-issue of the album (pressed on coke clear with blue swirl vinyl) is an exclusive one, as only 700 copies were made.

Get it here.

Some artists covered here are Warner Music artists. Uproxx is an independent subsidiary of Warner Music Group.

Outspoken rapper Noname has never been shy about sharing her opinion on big cultural moments. The biggest thing happening in pop culture right now is, of course, Beyonce’s visual album Black Is King, which premiered on Disney+ overnight and has had social media buzzing ever since. Noname contributed to the buzz with a controversial observation of her own — one which once again has placed her at-odds with Beyonce, whom she’s criticized in the past for their diverging views on capitalism and pro-Blackness.

While many are celebrating Black Is King as a powerful ode to Blackness, Noname’s viewpoint strays away from outright praise. Instead, she loaded her applause with a sarcastic condemnation of what she feels is an indulgent exhibition of excess wealth. “We love an African aesthetic draped in capitalism,” she wrote. “Hope we remember the Black folks on the continent whose daily lives are impacted by US imperialism. If we can uplift the imagery, I hope we can uplift those who will never be able to access it. Black liberation is a global struggle.”

She followed up with a pair of retweets highlighting anti-government protests currently taking place in Zimbabwe, including retweeting an Associated Press post reporting that a prominent Zimbabwean writer had been arrested during the protests.

As usual, it appears her purpose was not to tear down Beyonce but to highlight how ongoing struggles for social and systemic reform are often sublimated by feel-good imagery and powerless posturing. While there will undoubtedly be those who find encouragement, enlightenment, and purpose in Beyonce’s uplifting messaging, for Noname, it’s more important that the fight is on the ground, raging on every day — including in African nations that Beyonce highlights, but doesn’t investigate, in Black Is King.

Saweetie has had a busy 2020 so far. After finding herself at the center of some Harley Quinn-related uproar, she has dropped new music here and there. In March, she guested (as did Trina) on Mulatto’s remix of “B*tch From Da Souf,” which she followed by sampling Too Short on “Tap In” and dropping a homemade “Pretty B*tch Freestyle” video. Now she is closing out July by giving an assist to an up-and-comer: Saweetie joins Dallas rapper Tay Money on “Bussin 2.0.”

The new version of “Bussin,” from Tay’s 2019 album Hurricane Tay, sees both rappers flexing all over the track. On her verse, Saweetie boasts about her desirability and the success she has achieved at a young age, saying, “Pretty and thick so get what I want / He wanna know how I look in a thong,” and, “Fresh out of the college, making millions of dollars / That sh*t turn me into / A whole brand new b*tch.”

Tay, meanwhile, brags about her large posterior — “Ass busting out the frame / Ain’t nobody else in my lane” — and artistry — “They thought this was a gimmick / It’s too catchy to forget it.”

Saweetie isn’t the first big-time collaborator Tay has bagged, as DaBaby and YNW Melly both featured on Hurricane Tay.

Watch the “Bussin 2.0” video above.

Your Netflix may have just been shortened considerably if you like to Sonic The Hedgehog your way through TV shows and movies with playback features that will let users control the speed with which their content is played. Playback features have long been available on audiobooks and some podcast apps, and even YouTube allows videos to be slowed down or sped up using similar features. But Netflix had held off until recently, when it appears to have added some features for one of its many ways to watch the service’s streaming properties.

According to The Verge, Netflix introduced new features for Android phone users who have the Netflix app, making good on a news item from back in 2019 about potential new playback speeds coming to the streaming service:

Netflix will allow anyone on an Android mobile device to stream at either 0.5x or 0.75x speeds for slowed-down viewing and 1.25x or 1.5x speeds for faster watching. Those are slightly fewer options than YouTube, which allows people to slow all the way down to 0.25x speeds, and speed up by twice the normal playback speed. Playback speed options are also available on downloaded titles that people have saved for offline viewing.

The Verge also quotes a Netflix spokesperson, who said the company has “been mindful of the concerns of some creators … It’s why we have capped the range of playback speeds and require members to vary the speed each time they watch something new — versus fixing their settings based on the last speed they used.”

There are a lot of caveats here, obviously, starting with the fact that it’s a mobile-only option for downloaded content. It’s also currently an Android-only feature, but it does prove that it’s possible and likely to become available on other platforms as the kinks get worked out. The feature reportedly rolls out starting tomorrow and will be available globally shortly after that, and Judd Apatow and Aaron Paul probably still won’t be thrilled with the news. It’s unclear how many people will use the technology, or even know that it’s possible, but for some who have longed to watch Ozark‘s slow burn play out a lot faster, they now have their chance.

(Via The Verge)

Beyonce’s highly-anticipated visual album Black Is King debuted on Disney+ in the wee hours of the morning today, bringing with it a deluge of praise and adulation for the Houston-bred star. The project, which was inspired and accompanied by the deluxe edition of Beyonce’s The Lion King: The Gift companion album, took about a year to complete. About three months of that was probably just spent on doing Beyonce’s hair.

Beyonce has previously had tremendous success with the visual album format, going all the way back to her 2007 release of B’Day Anthology Video Album, which contained 13 videos from her second album B’Day. She evolved the concept in 2017 with Lemonade, the first time all of the videos from one of her albums were presented altogether as a “film.” Black Is King follows this format, with the addition of a simple storyline paralleling that of The Lion King, thanks to choice quotes taken from the live-action remake of the Disney classic.

The film has a lot on its mind, combining stunning imagery shot on-location throughout the African continent with spoken word clips from poets, activists, and orators on the subject of Blackness and how it relates to a world that rarely embraces everything Blackness means. It contains cameos from Beyonce’s close family and friends, including her mother, her children, her husband Jay-Z, her former Destiny’s Child musical partner Kelly Rowland, and a plethora of collaborators from The Gift album, from African stars like Shatta Wale and Busiswa to contemporaries Pharrell Williams and Jessie Reyez (although it looks like not even Beyonce can get Kendrick to leave Manhattan Beach these days).

Here are five observations from Black Is King.

“Africa” Is More Of An Idea Than A Place In Black Is King

Ahead of the release of Black Is King, some observers voiced concerns that its imagery exploited and exoticized the many, many cultures and traditions of the continent, flattening them into a Wakanda-esque ideal. Watching the film, it was hard to shake that sense, as the scene jumped from country to country — there were shots of soccer stadiums in South Africa juxtaposed with Nigerian streets — without any sense that they were different places with disparate cultures and histories and complicated relationships, even with each other.

Without any words or throughline to contextualize the Pan-Africanism movement, seeing all these cultures mashed together to celebrate a supposed shared origin made it hard to take it seriously as a statement on the drive toward one united Africa. As a Black person in America, it can be difficult to struggle with the sense of disconnect from our culture and our history. I don’t know if that means we can gumbo together other folks’ unique and rich traditions and slather them on as a remedy for our stolen lineage.

However, it was wonderful to see the beauty and wonder of the Motherland, both natural and manmade. The camera highlights architecture, art, fashion, progress, and tradition, lingering on glorious panoramas of the windswept countryside and looking up at statues of prominent leaders. Beyonce highlights the wealth that the continent contains, shooting the “Mood 4 Eva” video in a palatial estate, and on “My Power,” shares her platform with female African artists who would otherwise be overlooked by the American mainstream and even patriarchal African societies.

Black Is King Connects Africa To Freedom And America To Bondage

Despite being shot in Africa, Black Is King has plenty to say about America. The speaking clips throughout the film directly address the plight of Black Americans, from toxic masculinity to the exhaustion of existing under oppressing stereotypes. A Black debutante ball, a tradition of the Southern United States, is highlighted in the clip for “Brown Skin Girl,” highlighting America’s fraught relationship with Black beauty.

It’s in these moments that Black Is King most effectively connects its messaging with its imagery. Black Americans often take inspiration from African heritage, even when the connection is hazy, wistful, or barely there, because it’s the one place we see our skin colors — which come is a very broad variety — hailed as beautiful, meaningful, or worthwhile. America has to be forced, coerced, and shamed into acknowledging us, while many traditions in Africa, so opposite to Westernized ideals, value the very things America demeans.

One voice in the film speaks to the narrow range of boxes or boundaries Black people can fit into in America. While the country is never explicitly mentioned, it’s easy to recognize in the rhetoric. By juxtaposing those words with the astonishing array of diversity — even within Africa and Black people specifically — Black Is King dismisses those boxes. There is so much more to us than that.

Beyonce Is The Highlight Of The Film

Let’s face it: Beyonce projects are, primarily, about Beyonce. That’s why we like them.

Pardon me while I diverge for a second, but… you know those articles about scientists putting together algorithms to discover the ideal human face? Listen, every time one of those things churns out anything that is not just Beyonce, throw all the research in the trash. Somebody forgot to carry the one or something. There was a glitch in the matrix. Beyonce is the ideal human. It’s truly unfair. Did her parents sacrifice a cat at midnight or something?

Anyway, Black Is King is at its best whenever Beyonce is doing something. For all my complaints about the form not quite serving the stated function, Beyonce herself is magnetic and engaging and charismatic anytime she’s on screen, which makes the few times she’s not the focus the only moments the energy seems to flag (more on this later). This includes the songs in which she’s just doing background vocals or something.

Beyonce puts her concerns at the forefront; this is essentially why Black Is King exists. Beyonce, like much of the country, has gone through something of an awakening in the past few years, searching for a connection back to the Motherland. While for me, it may seem clunky (I had that moment well over 20 years ago and remember it as something of a cringe point in my life), it’s meaningful to her and to her legions of fans, as are the characters she stocks the film with: her husband, her daughter, her mother. Everything revolves around Beyonce; this is her universe and Black Is King is her way of inviting us in — and keeping us at a safe distance, as she has done on prior projects.

The Film Is A Celebration Of Blackness

The foundation of the film, truly, is a celebration of something that it often feels isn’t celebrated enough. The timing of its release seems critical, maybe even coincidental, but really, it would have been regardless of when it was released. All across the globe, darker-skinned people suffer terrible discrimination and oppression. That’s why there were Black Lives Matter protests in places like the UK, in the Middle East, and even in Africa. Being Black is being condemned to second-class treatment the world over, for no reason other than the color of your skin, the shape of your nose, the size of lips, or the curls of your hair.

Which is why Black Is King occupies itself primarily with the power of Black bodies in motion, of Black expressions of joy and resilience and everyday labor. There are closeups of Black folks looking austere and of them smiling. Beyonce flexes and struts through the videos for “My Power” and “Find Your Way Back” (which may be singlehandedly keeping the Swarovski company in business), looking glamorous and detached and ferocious. Black people are used as a human chess set, probably my favorite shot in the whole thing. There’s a Black synchronized swimming team, which checks so many “you don’t see that every day” boxes and contains so many layers of meaning, I could write an entirely separate essay on it.

There’s even a nod to the Biblical story of Moses, which feels like it’s at odds with literally everything else the film is trying to say, but makes sense because of how closely tied to Black identity the Christian religion is. The film is about Black families (I can’t tell if Jay-Z is a hostage or having the time of his life, but I suspect that’s the realest depiction of fatherhood there could be) living their lives, from the capitalistic abandon of The Carters to the simple day-to-day of the average citizen of Lagos or Johannesburg.

The Lion King Connection Waters Down The Film’s Impact

Remember how I said the weakest parts of the film are the ones where Beyonce isn’t in them?

There ultimately had to be a tie-in. This thing lives on Disney+, it’s based on an album Disney probably helped pay for to promote the live-action remake of its award-winning, nostalgia-inducing movie, which also happens to star Beyonce in a role as its main character’s mother.

It was a valiant effort, but its muddled messaging (are we supposed to forego city life to return to huts in the wilderness?), sort of mediocre acting, and rote familiarity make the 90-minute runtime seem to drag. Thematically, it doesn’t really tie the videos together, leaving the sense that they’d have worked just fine as a typical anthology, a la Lemonade.

We have already sat through the story of Simba, Mufasa, Nala, and Scar twice since the ‘90s, with the remake changing the setting to make it a little more realistic. Black Is King goes a step further in anthropomorphizing its main characters, making them human and placing them in a bizarre, abstract re-telling of the narrative in fast forward, skipping ahead in great swaths that force the major plot points between the music videos we actually came to see.

With the huge trend in re-releasing albums as deluxe versions resulting in this very film, hopefully we can see the same trick work in reverse, with a pared-down version of the film minus the hacky subplot. That, I would stay up late for all over again.