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T HE NEW YORK TIMES INTERNATIONAL EDITION TUESDAY, JULY 30, 2019| 15culture
Beyoncé flexes both her musicianship
and her cultural leverage with “The
Lion King: The Gift,” her companion
album to the state-of-the-art remake
of “The Lion King.” It’s her latest
lesson in commandeering mass-mar-
ket expectations, as she bends “The
Lion King” to her own agenda of
African-diaspora unity, self-worth,
parental responsibility and righteous
ambition.
Beyoncé was an obvious choice to
be cast in an anointed blockbuster:
the 25th-anniversary update of “The
Lion King,” the 1994 animated Disney
parable set in Africa. Its story of a
young lion fleeing and then reclaiming
his birthright had already generated a
1997 Broadway adaptation — still
running — and movie sequels. Bey-
oncé has a voice role in the new ver-
sion as the brave, conscientious lion-
ess Nala; she also, of course, sings on
the soundtrack.
On the official soundtrack album,Beyoncé joins in a remake of “Can You
Feel the Love Tonight,” the Oscar-
winning song that ended the original
“Lion King,” and caps the existing
soundtrack songs with her new one,
“Spirit,” a dynamic secular-gospel
exhortation to “Rise up!” Beyoncé
wrote and produced “Spirit” with the
British producer Labrinth and with
Ilya Salmanzadeh, a member of Max
Martin’s Swedish songwriting stable;
it’s also on “The Gift.”
But “The Gift” goes much further.
With Beyoncé as executive producer
and a songwriter and performer on
most tracks, it’s essentially an alterna-
tive soundtrack album, tied to the plot
of “The Lion King” (and interspersed
with dialogue snippets) but decidedly
more Afrocentric and more attuned to
women’s strengths and experiences.
On “The Gift,” the movie’s plot points
are springboards for songs like “Keys
to the Kingdom,” “Scar” and “Already.”
The album’s first full song, “Bigger,” is
at once maternally protective and
acutely aware of generational cycles
and, as the video clip emphasizes,
ecological interdependence: “You’re
part of something way bigger,” Bey-
oncé sings, adding, “I’ll be the roots/
You be the tree,” as a somber beat
gathers under churchy keyboard
chords. She follows “Bigger” with a
paternal counterpart: “Find Your Way
Back (Circle of Life),” with Beyoncérecalling a father’s lessons on a track
that samples the Nigerian singer Nin-
iola.
Like many other Disney projects set
outside the United States, in 1994 “The
Lion King” fudged the specifics of a
distant (from Hollywood) place with a
well-intentioned but hazy first-world
perspective; Africa is just Africa, with-
out particular cultures, countries or
regions. (It’s also unquestioningly
celebrated as a patrilineal monarchy.)
The wildlife and landscape of “The
Lion King” suggest the Serengeti
plains of Tanzania and Kenya, and its
African names and words are in the
Swahili language — all East African.
Meanwhile, the movie’s music islargely non-African, steeped in Holly-
wood and Broadway idioms, with an
orchestral score by the German com-
poser Hans Zimmer (reworked for the
2019 version) and wordplay-loving,
musical-theater-style songs by two
Englishmen, Elton John and the lyri-
cist Tim Rice. At key moments in the
1994 soundtrack, the South African
musician Lebo M. (Lebohang Morake)
provided South African-style choir
arrangements and his own vocals,
including the indelible opening incan-
tation in “Circle of Life.” He gets far
more prominent billing in the remake.
Untethered to previous productions,
Beyoncé has rethought “The Lion
King” as 21st-century global pop, fre-
quently drawing on Africa. Her
throngs of collaborators include musi-
cians, singers and producers from the
United States, England, Sweden, Ni-
geria, South Africa, Ghana and Camer-
oon (though not East Africa). It’s a
canny, forward-looking move, both
musically and with an eye to an inter-
national market that’s increasingly
receptive to African innovations and
non-English lyrics. Beyoncé even sings
in Swahili at the end of “Otherside,” a
ballad invoking life after death.
American and British songwriters —
Paul Simon, David Byrne, Peter Gabri-
el, Carlos Santana — have all found
renewal in African music, as jazz musi-
cians did before them. With “The LionKing: The Gift,” Beyoncé joins their
ranks soulfully and attentively, seeking
full-fledged fusions. She mixes (appar-
ently) personal thoughts and archetyp-
al ones; she savors musical hybrids
and rhythmic challenges; and she digs
into every line she sings.
Internationalism reigns. “My Power”
— with Beyoncé alongside Tierra
Whack from Philadelphia, Yemi Alade
from Nigeria, and Nija, Busiswa,
Moonchild Sanelly and DJ Lag fromSouth Africa — is built on the deep
bass thuds and jittery double time
percussion of the South African dance
music called gqom. In “Water,” Bey-
oncé and Pharrell Williams are joined
by Salatiel, a songwriter from Camer-
oon, in a bouncy, sinuous track with
leaping vocal inflections that also
includes a credit for a Ghanaian song-
writer, Afriye. The track for “Mood 4
Eva,” Beyoncé’s and Jay-Z’s latest
celebration of their luxurious life,
transforms a sample from the Malian
singer and songwriter Oumou San-
garé.
Some of the album’s guest perform-ers have racked up tens of millions of
streams worldwide without extensive
recognition — yet — in the United
States. Prominent among them is a
Nigerian contingent that draws on the
crisp, computerized rhythms that are
known internationally as Afrobeats
(and are clearly related to reggaeton’s
ubiquitous dembow rhythm via West
African-Caribbean roots and internet
cross-pollination).
The album includes the Nigerian
stars Burna Boy (who gets a song of
his own, “Ja Ara E,” that suavely
warns, “Watch out for them hyenas”)
and Mr Eazi (who shares “Don’t Jeal-
ous Me” with Tekno, Lord Afrixana
and Yemi Alade, and “Keys to the
Kingdom” with Tiwa Savage, all fellow
Nigerians).
Wizkid the Nigerian songwriter who
collaborated with Drake on the world-
wide hit “One Dance,” duets with Bey-
oncé to praise the beauty of a “Brown
Skin Girl”; the track also has the voice
of Beyoncé’s and Jay-Z’s daughter Blue
Ivy Carter.
Each song on “The Gift” is a coali-
tion, almost always a trans-Atlantic
one. And the African elements are at
the core of the music; they’re not
souvenirs or accessories. Unlike the
movie that occasioned it, “The Lion
King: The Gift” is no remake or reiter-
ation, no faraway fable. It tells a story
of its own.Beyoncé at the London premiere of “The Lion King.” Internationalism reigns on her album “The Lion King: The Gift,” below, which is decidedly more Afrocentric than the film’s soundtrack.GARETH CATTERMOLE/GETTY IMAGESBeyoncé draws on Africa, seeking fusions
Soulfully and attentively, she
savors musical hybrids and
rhythmic challenges, and she digs
into every line she sings.ALBUM REVIEWHer alternative soundtrack
to ‘The Lion King’ delivers
21st-century global popBY JON PARELESAt 23, F. Scott Fitzgerald — a sudden
celebrity with the success of his first
book, “This Side of Paradise” — told
the press that his ambitions were to
write the greatest novel of all time and
to stay in love with his wife forever.
Fitzgerald died young, at 44. In the
years left him, however, he produced
an abiding American classic, “The
Great Gatsby,” and never stopped
loving his wife, Zelda. And as St. Tere-
sa of Ávila wrote, “There are more
tears shed over answered prayers than
over unanswered prayers.”
Despite their mutual preoccupation,
the Fitzgeralds’ marital unhappiness
was legendary, and proved to be the
great quarry for Scott’s literary imagi-
nation. In photographs, the couple
resembled each other, with soft faces,
sulky mouths; they looked like bad,
beautiful children — and behaved with
joyless destructiveness, smashing up
everything in arm’s reach. There were
appalling scenes at airports, hospital-
izations, suicide attempts. Their
daughter was sent to live with Scott’sliterary agent. Friends grew leery of
giving the couple their home ad-
dresses. In 1930, Zelda was first hospi-
talized after a breakdown (the diagno-
sis was schizophrenia, but there is now
a prevalent belief that she suffered
from bipolar disorder), and she would
remain institutionalized for much of
her life, dying in 1948, in a hospital fire.
Various versions of the couple’s
letters have been published over the
years, but “Dear Scott, Dearest Zelda”
claims to contain the fullest collection
of Zelda’s side of the correspondence.
The editors, Jackson R. Bryer and
Cathy W. Barks, write that “the new
letters, placed chronologically with
those collected previously, allow us to
view their relationship in a more even-
handed manner than heretofore has
been possible.”
Did your eye snag on “evenhanded,”
as mine did? Suspicious little word; it’s
only ever deployed with partisan in-
tent. But there are only partisans when
it comes to the Fitzgeralds’ marriage.
There is Hemingway’s opinion of Zelda
as a succubus envious of her husband’s
talent and determined to lead him to
ruin. More recent perspectives on
Zelda cast her as a proto-feminist
heroine whose gifts were overshad-
owed by the famous man in her life. In
the case of Zelda, there was outright
appropriation — Fitzgerald famously
lifted passages from her letters and
diaries for his fiction — and when
Zelda wanted to write a novel based onher breakdown (later published as
“Save Me the Waltz”), the same terri-
tory he was exploring in “Tender Is the
Night,” their marriage combusted.
The editors of this collection and the
Fitzgeralds’ granddaughter Eleanor
Lanahan, who contributes an introduc-
tion, want absolution for Scott, but
where is he in this book? He was never
a dazzling letter writer, and his letters
are wan and few compared with Zel-
da’s, often dictated to a secretary.
So read this book for Zelda, even if
you’re weary of the cultural obsession
with her. Better yet, if you’re disinter-
ested entirely and perplexed by the
cultural fascination.
I had a vague sense of her as the
prototype for Fitzgerald’s lovely, reck-
less heroines, and that he had cribbed
material from her, including Daisy
Buchanan’s line in “The Great Gatsby,”
upon learning she had given birth to a
daughter: “I hope she’ll be a fool —
that’s the best thing a girl can be in
this world, a beautiful little fool.” I was
anticipating someone doleful, dis-
tracted — not this funny, hard-boiled
observer of her own life whose letters
read like short stand-up sequences.
From an early note to Scott: “You
know everything about me, and that’s
mostly what I think about. I seem
always curiously interested in myself,
and it’s so much fun to stand off and
look at me.”
She remains this way: arch, amused,
self-mocking, writing parodies of thekind of simpering love letters expected
of young women. “Men love me cause
I’m pretty — and they’re always afraid
of mental wickedness — and men love
me cause I’m clever, and they’re al-
ways afraid of my prettiness — One or
two have even loved me cause I’m
lovable, and then, of course, I was
acting.” She has no secondhand im-
pressions or turns of phrase — every-
thing she writes and thinks feels tart,
original, lightly distressing.
A great many of these letters were
written while Zelda was institutional-
ized. At first glance, it seems obscene
to deem them “love letters,” these
pleas for pocket money and visits, herdesperation for meaningful work.
“Lonesome,” she writes four times in
one short note, and again in letter after
letter. She demands to be let out of the
institution: “Please. Please let me out
now.” “Every day more of me dies.”
“The longer I have to bear this the
meaner and harder and sicker I get.”
But then, a mercurial shift in mood.
“Do you still smell of pencils and some-
times of tweed?”
Ardor is her mode, and Scott her
“sungod.” “Don’t you think I was made
for you?” she writes. “I feel like you
had me ordered — and I was delivered
to you — to be worn. I want you to
wear me, like a watch-charm.” In these
letters — mostly written from institu-
tions in Switzerland, North Carolina
and Maryland — she sat in her room,
yearning for and conjuring up her
husband: the way he held his ciga-
rettes (“way down, wedged between
your fingers”), his smell (“the delicious
damp grass that grows near old
walls”), the look of his wrist emerging
from his sleeve.
Her life never creeps into the letters;
little can be gleaned about the institu-
tions in which she often made her
home. She scarcely mentions her doc-
tors or treatments, which were report-
edly barbarous. She doesn’t inquire
about the world, the war, her friends.
She croons only one song — “darling,
my dearest”; “dearest, my love.” “If
you will come back I will make the
jasmine bloom and all the trees comeout in flower,” she writes. There will be
clouds to eat, and bathing “in the foam
of the rain — and I will let you play
with my pistol.”
They never did very well when he
did come back, however. Her symp-
toms, including intolerable eczema
over her whole body, would worsen;
there were bitter fights. Their love
flourished mainly in these letters, full
of her intense longing for nights of
“soft conspiracy,” for Scott at the sea-
side all “salty and sunburned,” his legs
sticking together in the heat.
It’s a peculiar fact that “The Great
Gatsby,” a fairly bitter, even furious
novel about class and disillusionment,
murder, bootlegging and corruption, is
so often remembered only for its par-
ties and shimmering love story.
Strange, too, is the misapprehension
when it comes to Scott and Zelda. We
recall their raucous early days, their
extravagant unhappiness, but after
reading these letters what strikes you
is their steadiness, a shocking word to
apply to them. They could not handle
early success, Bryer and Barks write,
and after a point they did not live
together. Fitzgerald took up with the
writer Sheila Graham in his final
years. But that bond with Zelda proved
stubborn and sturdy,and survived it all.
In their last letters, they are still loving
and vexing and shoring each other up.
“Happily, happily foreverafter-
wards,” Zelda once wrote. “The best
we could.”A stubborn and sturdy love
BOOK REVIEWDear Scott, Dearest Zelda:
The Love Letters of F. Scott
and Zelda Fitzgerald
Edited by Jackson R. Bryer and Cathy W.
Barks. Illustrated. 400 pp. Scribner. $22.BY PARUL SEHGALPATRICIA WALL/THE NEW YORK TIMESРЕЕizations, suicide attempts. Theirizations, suicide attempts. Their
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