We’re excited to publish our analyses of “APES**T” (16 June 2018), a music video featuring Beyoncé, Jay-Z, Da Vinci’s Mona Lisa, and dancers in the Louvre.1 For us this video’s issues are timely. Thank you to the JPMS editors, especially Robin James, for so swiftly bringing our work to press.

Beyoncé is part of our cultural imagery, partly thanks to her music videos. Music video remains undertheorized even though some clips reach a kind of mathematical-sublime hit count: Luis Fonsi’s “Despacito” ft. Daddy Yankee, for example, has 5.5 billion views. Music videos on YouTube are how young people most commonly consume popular music.2 The genre’s aesthetics are shared with many other forms of moving media, including commercials, YouTube videos, trailers, political ads, and audiovisually intensified segments of post-classical cinema. Beyoncé is important to us for many reasons, including how her work speaks about performance, race, gender, sexuality,...

You do not currently have access to this content.