Black is King

Disney shows little sign of relenting in providing reasons to sign up or stick with its streaming service Disney Plus, and post-Hamilton, that reason is Beyoncé’s latest visual album, Black is King. The choice of platform is of course not coincidental, as Black is King is heavily inspired by 2019’s live-action remake of The Lion King, to which Beyoncé contributed. It’s worth noting that the record, intended to incorporate and celebrate both African and Afro-diasporic musics, arrives at a particularly apt time as the world continues to reckon with the fact of systemic anti-Black racism.

Of course, it uses excerpts of various songs from the record, beginning with the mellifluous, Debussian tones of “Otherside”. Right away, the stark counterpoint between the intimately mic’d piano and the space-in-time lapse on screen pries the senses wide open, inviting the audioviewer to wonder and dream. This sets the stage admirably for Beyonce’s opening monologue.

At 0:20 this takes a step back to more ethereal electronics as the monologue continues, and a vaguely sinister-sounding chorus of strings stirs beneath. Some of the lines in this montage sequence are vaguely recognizable as belonging to The Lion King’s script—“and never return”, for example—but like a dream, these elements are disparate. The audioviewer may well be left reassured that this is no sense a retread of The Lion King’s plot—instead, it seems to be a look at how the broader thematic elements and emotional turns might play out with human actors.

At 0:54 we reach the third act of the trailer, with a shout synched to the studio title card. We hear another memorable line coming from The Lion King—“The question is, who are you?”—and we get in response guest emcee Tierra Whack’s lines from album cut "My Power", followed by a montage of various visually stunning and undeniably artistic scenes, with an individuality that provides multiple answers to the question. The powerful percussion of the track also suits itself well to the stylings of a typical modern trailer, ending on the proverbial high note.

The trailer ends, most interestingly, with the visual of a person hurtling towards earth like a meteor but synched to the sound of a lion’s roar. It positions much of the rich storytelling and meaning of that sound effect in an entirely new visual context; we don’t need to see any of the _Lion King’s _characters, nor indeed any of its visuals, to understand how it is being interpreted or interwoven into Beyoncé’s visual album. The use of the selected lines of dialogue, and these almost subliminal, choice sound effects are exactly subtle enough.

— Curtis Perry