Critical Theory, The Frankfurt School, and Beyoncé

 

The Frankfurt School viewed mass media as part of the culture industry and the manipulation to the public for passive consumption. According to Adorno and Horkheimer, mass-produced entertainment distracts people from critical engagement with reality which can keep a group of people compliant in their current structures. The compliance can create a false reality, where people accept the status quo without questioning it. Frankfurt School thinkers were influenced by Antonio Gramsci’s concept of hegemony, where ruling classes maintain power not just through force but by controlling cultural and ideological narratives, which today can be seen as the media.

Beyoncé’s Renaissance World Tour 2023 is a powerful example of how she not only acknowledges, but actively resists the kind of media control that the Frankfurt School’s Critical Theory warns about. During the tour and one of her outfit change breaks, the message “whoever controls the media, controls the mind” flashes up on the screen. Her tour served as a space where she reclaims media narratives, challenges dominant ideologies, and creates an alternative vision of Black and queer empowerment, body positivity, and artistic liberation. The Tour embodied resistance to control in media by centering marginalized communities, reshaping beauty standards, and redefining power through music and performance. The Frankfurt School’s theorists would argue that Beyoncé, as both a cultural producer and media figure, is actively disrupting dominant narratives in several ways. 

Adorno and Horkheimer criticized mainstream media for making audiences passive consumers rather than active participants. The Renaissance Tour did the opposite—it turned Beyoncé’s fans into active participants in the experience, even the documentary about the tour included a large amount of audience and fan participation and the importance of how Beyoncé wanted her fans to feel. Her encouragement of fan interaction like,the infamous mute challenge, dance breaks, and voguing segments, shows how she breaks the one-way communication of media control and transforms the audience into an engaged, autonomous collective. In this way, Beyoncé doesn’t just acknowledge media control—she actively dismantles it and replaces it with her own liberated vision.

How do you think the guys of The Frankfurt School would react to Beyoncé’s tour, and how she uses the media today?