Making Jay Z ‘Eat the Cake’ by Mark Anthony Neal

Making Jay Z ‘Eat the Cake’ by Mark Anthony Neal | NewBlackMan (in Exile)
For a moment, imagine if Phineas Taylor Barnum & James Anthony Bailey—the proprietors of the Barnum & Bailey Circus—were involved in a long-term same-gender loving relationship, in which their private lives, by necessity and invention, broached their public business of creating the “greatest show on earth.” 
To think of Beyonce Knowles-Carter and Shawn Carter as the Barnum & Bailey of the early 21st century should not count as either critique or affirmation. The duo sells “entertainment” at the highest levels, where their fantasies (and ours) about what might or might not occur in their private and not-so-private sexual lives is open for mass consumption on multiple platforms; the “greatest show in bed” apparently.
But let’s be clear, we do not know any more about Ms. Knowles-Carter and Mr. Carter’s lives than they allow us to believe—and even desire.   To think that there aren’t long-term sexual partners, married or un-married, who do not desire the spectacle of sex that Ms. Knowles-Carter and Mr. Carter have packaged sonically and visually, and most recently on the Grammy stage, is to miss what has always been one of America’s most bountiful cash-and-carry commodities. 
How else do you explain CBS’s decision to broadcast a Cinemax late-night exclusive at the top of the 8:00 pm hour on a Sunday?  I’m no prude—I’m all for consuming sexual desire—just wasn’t quite prepared to explain to the 11-year-old what “Beyonce” was doing on that chair and why she was wet.  Though it should not go without remark, that we’ve never seen two grown married Black Americans in that space, in that way, and with so much spectacle.  Black folk have rarely been allowed to be fully grown and fully sexual—or raunchy, even inappropriately so—on national television in prime-time.
Yet the reality of who Ms. Knowles Carter and Mr. Carter are, as grown married Black Americans, speaks palpably to the challenge of being who they are, and wanting to extend their respective brands in an era in which they, and the married Black American couple currently living in the White House, are the most visible and consumed married Black Americans in the world.   
Of course Mr. Carter has a responsibility to present language that’s a little more precise , that doesn’t simply rely on a well-worn trope from a film that was released 21-years ago, if he’s going to sell that fantasy of a drunken, raunchy and presumably consensual and recurring sexual encounter with a long-term partner.
To be sure, the centering of Tina Turner in this moment with regards to Mr. Carter’s “eat the cake, Annie Mae” lyric from What’s Love Got to Do with It? (1993), the film adaptation of Ms. Turner’s autobiography I, Tina (1986), may have less to do with Ms. Turner and more to do with our own triggers.  The scene in the film is a choreographed and highly stylized fictional account of one of a series of acts of domestic partner violence by the late Ike Turner, that occurred almost two decades before they appear on screen—or 40 years ago.
Notably the dramatic physical violence that occurs in that scene did not happen, though that doesn’t make Mr. Turner’s insistence that Ms. Turner “eat the cake” any less abusive.  Ms. Turner has likely, long made peace with the depictions of violence in the film, though not necessarily the real violence that occurred in her marriage to Mr. Turner. 
Nevertheless the line about “eating the cake” has long been bandied about in Black popular culture, particularly in the comic realm, to the point it might be thought of as public domain. What makes Mr. Carter’s use such an issue at this point?
What’s Love Got to Do with It was released at a moment when African-American marriages were thought to be fraying—the beginnings of the social panic around the DL—and  the very concept of the Black family was under assault.  This most memorable scene from the film—released a year after the good Huxtables went gently into the good night—became one of the most visible examples of the so-called pathology and  “Crisis of Black Male-Black Female Relations,” as hundreds of on-campus forums would attest throughout the decade of the 1990s.  
What gets triggered in Mr. Carter’s citation of movie dialogue, is not only the reality of domestic partner violence, but also our anxieties about Black marriage, as embodied by figures like Ms. Knowles Carter  and Mr. Carter.
The idea of Beyonce and Jay Z is as much a fantasy as “Drunk in Love.”  We may never know what exactly Ms. Knowles-Carter and Mr. Carter’s intents were with the song or why they fully felt the need to share as they have.  Though many have read Ms. Knowles Carter’s deliberate lining of her husband lyrics when he performed the controversial verse during the Grammy performance as some co-signing of domestic partner violence, it seems more likely that she was simply closing ranks around her husband who has been scoured—and perhaps, deservedly so—for his lyric.

Yet do we think that Mr. Carter is any more culpable here than Lawrence Fishburne was for performing the late Mr. Turner’s acts of violence? If public opinion is a barometer, then Mr. Carter may have to eat his own cake.

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Mark Anthony Neal is Professor of African & African American Studies at Duke University. The author of several books including the recently published Looking for Leroy: Illegible Black Masculinities(NYU Press, 2013), Neal is also the co-editor of the acclaimed That’s the Joint: The Hip-Hop Studies Reader (Routledge), now in its second edition. Neal is the host of the weekly webcast Left of Black, which is produced in conjunction with the John Hope Franklin Center for Interdiciplinary and International Studies at Duke. You can follow Neal on Twitter at @NewBlackMan