THE NEW YORK TIMES, MONDAY, AUGUST 3, 2020 N C5JASON FARAGO
Art Critic
It’s been a long road for me and Beyoncé:
We’re now 20 years from the day I leeched
“Bills, Bills, Bills” from Napster. But this
new film is the kitschiest thing she’s done in
a while, and in “Black Is King” her evident
passion for African art keeps getting
drowned in an ocean of melodrama.
Ms. Knowles-Carter, and even more her
husband, often showcase contemporary art
in their videos as markers of their cultural
and economic clout, and in the sequence de-
voted to “Mood 4 Eva,” a Jay-and-Bey duet
with samples from the great Malian diva
Oumou Sangaré, the walls of a hacienda are
hung with a large portrait of Black models
by the American artist Derrick Adams, and
another in the manner of the British painter
Lynette Yiadom-Boakye. I caught multiple
direct quotations of the French fashion pho-
tographer Jean-Paul Goude — most overtly
his cover art for Grace Jones’s “Island Life,”
remade by multiple dancers here in the
film’s best sequence, for the gqom banger
“My Power.”
Other sequences seem to channel (to be
generous) or crib (to be less so) the work of
contemporary African artists. The Ethi-
opian photographer Aïda Muluneh is a clear
influence on several tableaus of African
models posing in bright colors with painted
faces. The film’s recurrent character of a
topless, green-painted dancer seems to be
borrowed from the Nigerian artist Jelili
Atiku, whose 2018 procession “Festival of
the Earth” brought performers slicked with
green to the streets of Sicily. The cinemato-
graphy, throughout, is of a notably lower
standard than the careful lensing of her self-
titled visual album and, especially, “Lem-
onade.” The beachfront posing in “Bigger,”
the opening number, feels uncannily like a
perfume ad.
Traditional African art, or imitations of it,
gets screen time too. Backup dancers in
“Find Your Way Back” sport kanaga masks
topped with crossbars, worn by the Dogon
people of Mali; “Ja Ara E” features a spirit
in a full-body raffia costume, familiar from
Mende masquerades. And there’s a know-
ing flash of a catalog of Yoruba masks and
sculpture by Robert Farris Thompson, the
influential historian of West African art.
Late in “Black Is King” comes a maudlin
apotheosis: The Simba stand-in, sporting a
leopard-print dinner jacket, arises to heav-
en inside Johannesburg’s apartheid-era
Ponte Tower. It’s a sequence stripped of his-
tory, and confirms that we are nowhere
near any contemporary African city; we are
in a cartoon fairyland, still rooted in source
material appropriate, per Disney, for chil-
dren 6 years and older. At least, then, there
is Beyoncé’s endless string of citations, a
rope ladder for those fans of hers ready to
graduate into artistic adulthood.GIA KOURLAS
Dance Critic
The choreographic feat of “Black Is King”
isn’t in its flashes of dancing, exuberant as
they are. Those fleeting infusions of foot-
work and swirling arms leave behind rich
afterimages, but what drives this lavish vis-
ual spectacle is its rush of bodies and how
the whole thing moves: from swift changes
of scenery, which are frequent yet never
frenzied, to boldly spare moments of still-
ness.
One seemingly quiet moment that made
me gasp? An overhead shot during “Brown
Skin Girl,” in which dancers playing debu-
tantes etch a diagonal line across the
screen. The angle gives their voluminous
ball gowns the look of tutus and turns their
white gloves into wings as they slowly arch
back. Opening their arms, they are trans-
formed into beautiful Black swans.
Later in the number, they return, reach-
ing their gloved hands into the center of a
circle. “Keep dancing/They can’t control
you,” Beyoncé sings. It’s simply put, yet so
empowering.
In this celebration of the Black body,
there is music worthy of a thousand dances(and, judging by the credits, 11 choreogra-
phers). In “Already” (performed by Bey-
oncé, Shatta Wale and Major Lazer), we see
the body on a pedestal, with sculptural mo-
ments that range from emphatic to dreamy
as women stand on wooden crates. Like Be-
yoncé, they wear unitards that make it
seem as if their bodies are covered in
scales; finding a hypnotic groove, they shift
their weight from side to side with elbows as
bent as their knees.
They also pause in arresting, stationary
balancing poses, whether kneeling or with a
leg extended high to the side; when Bey-
oncé bends backward, the others wrap
around her body like a pile of tangled
snakes. In another scene, dancers from the
DWPAcademy in Ghana perform a driving
unison line dance with the intense, passion-
ate Dancegod Lloyd front and center. It
points to the mix of African and American
that Beyoncé seems intent on getting right.
But she also looks at her own history. In
the fantastic and fantastical “Mood 4 Eva,”
she and Jay-Z stand before a painting, just
as they did in their video for “Apes**t,” set
at the Louvre; here, instead of the Mona
Lisa it’s a rendering of Beyoncé in Madonna
and Child. Within the song’s scene is an-
other clever twist: a Busby Berkeley-in-
spired synchronized swimming number led
by Black bodies. In that underwater dance,
they slip sideways into the water like jew-
els. Of course, Beyoncé rises from the cen-
ter — the most powerful body of all.
Her dancing is luminous throughout
“Black Is King.” I love the contrast of how
peaceful she remains as her hands perform
a dazzling dance with one wrist flitting over
the other in “Find Your Way Back” and how,
seconds later, her body follows, bowing and
rippling to the sweeping rhythm. In the ma-
jestic “My Power,” she pushes with force yet
not without freedom. She never holds back,
but this time it’s different: It’s as if she’s try-
ing to move beyond her body, and that
brings a line from Childish Gambino’s
bridge in “Mood” to life. She dances with an-
cestors in her step.SOME OF THE MOSTilluminating, purely
pleasurable videos on TikTok recently have
been Larry Scott’s awed observations of
cooking, where the teenager from Florida
looks on as a meal is lovingly prepared al
fresco: hand-rolled pasta dough, spices ar-
ranged by color, a knife assuredly having its
way with a pepper or onion. The recipe vid-
eos have quick cuts, and with each new
move, Scott’s eyes widen. His brow furrows
just a bit while he tries to suss out what’s
being made. He eases into a million-dollar
smile when something catches his fancy.
“Oh,” he says, with a sparkle of realization,
“nice.”
That’s it. That’s the thing.
TikTok is a decentralized medium, but
Scott’s gentle, perspective-slowing reaction
videos have a way of imposing just a touch
of reason to it, and untold joy. Using the duet
— the TikTok function that allows a user to
watch someone else’s video and record a re-
sponse in real time — as his métier, Scott is
an equal opportunity reactor. Dance videos,
romantic montages, a call to arrest the po-
lice officers who killed Breonna Taylor,
weirdo nonsense quasi-art clips, an a cap-
pella group singing Alicia Keys, a rack of
doughnuts getting slathered in glaze: Scott
has nice’d them all.
Under the TikTok handle @larryakumpo,
Scott posts several videos a week. They are
maybe the most calming thing on the inter-
net and, on some days, maybe the only
calming thing on the internet. He radiates
pure equanimity. No matter how eye-pop-
ping the video is, he’s never judgmental —
curious, shocked, secondhand embar-
rassed, maybe a little worried, but he basi-
cally never deviates from the sweetness of
wonder.
And then there’s the “nice” itself, which
he rolls out with the slithering embrace of a
purr. It’s not wry or ironically detached —
it’s the sort of utterance that slips out almost
imperceptibly when you’re overcome by
what you’re seeing. Sometimes he adds an
“oh” or a “yeah” — it’s like psychological
A.S.M.R.
This earnest observational device is a
pushback to TikTok’s infinite scroll. Scott is
a watcher, trapped in the box just like the
rest of us. If we weren’t already obsessed
with our phones, the last few months of iso-
lation have made absorbing endless con-
tent the default national mode. We are pas-
sive in our liminal misery — waiting to be
distracted, entertained, vaccinated, liber-
ated.
Unlike television, which requires a meta-
commentary that’s pithy and interruptive
— think “Beavis and Butt-Head” or “Mys-
tery Science Theater 3000” — TikTok is al-
ready pithy and interruptive, which is why
the most effective sort of metacommentary
slows down its rhythm, encouraging reflec-
tion.
And Scott’s clips are, without fail, beatif-
ically tranquil. Sometimes his hair is tied
up, sometimes it falls in front of his face in a
loose tangle. Often he’s reclined in bed or on
a couch. His face fills up the majority of the
screen, so there’s no ambiguity about how
he’s feeling. When he lets out a “whoa,” his
eyes get big, and he leans back, as if a gust
of wind has caught him off guard, nudging
him gently. When his face broadens into a
smile, it has a way of almost obliterating the
video he’s reacting to with its guilelessness.
When he’s frazzled, which is very, very
rarely, one single worry line creases his
forehead.
Even though the rhythm of his clips is fa-
miliar, Scott meets them with full presence.
In a recent Buzzfeed interview, he said he
did not pre-watch the videos he duets with,
so as to preserve the integrity of his reac-
tion.
In an ecosystem as ruthless as TikTok,
with creators jockeying for likes, followers,
clout and whatever monetary privileges fol-
low those things, Scott’s videos are solely
about encouragement, a dollop of pure love.
(The only time he’s said “not nice” was to a
freestyle by the rapper Smokepurpp that
went viral for its awkwardness.)
Scott started posting videos to the app
last summer — videos about heartbreak,
Frank Ocean, whether he looks like Bronny
James. (He doesn’t.) His observational du-
ets began in March, and the catchphrases
took hold in June, not long after he graduat-
ed from high school. Now he’s got 1.4 million
followers, almost all of which he acquired in
July, as his wholesome nurturing has rap-
idly coursed through TikTok.
As happens often in the erratic and lim-
itless world of social media, Scott’s ascent is
accelerating rapidly. He’s beginning to gen-
erate his own meta-content — other users
riff on his “nice,” and in one post, he talks
about people alerting him to copycats who
lack his “natural flow.”
Still, how much wonder can one young
man express? In July he appeared in a vid-
eo with the Pump Bros, a Hans & Franz of
social media who took Scott and a friend for
a workout session. After watching Scott
work through some triceps kickbacks, one
of them, Will Savery, turns to the camera
and declares, “The ‘oh nice’ guy is getting
swole.” Elsewhere in the video, Savery runs
through barbell curls while Scott looks on
and exclaims: “Oh, nice. Yeah. Nice.”
There is, here, just the tiniest tiny bit of
sourness, a light curdling. The sentience
that comes when a thing you’ve been doing
unconsciously, or at least without much
scrutiny, suddenly becomes a catchphrase,
a meme, a thing. An albatross you’ll carry
for a week or a month or maybe a lifetime.
In order for the “nice” to work, it has to be
moving at a different speed from every-
thing else. It has to be the thing that reori-
ents your sense of time. In its steadfast but
charming resistance, it’s an encouragement
that maybe you, too, should slow down.
Wonder is all around you. Take it in. Nice.‘Oh, Nice’:
TikTok Tranquil
JON CARAMANICA CRITIC’S NOTEBOOKBy slowing down and taking it all in,
Larry Scott makes the internet so soothing.
Larry Scott
regularly posts his
reactions to other
videos on TikTok.PARKWOOD ENTERTAINMENT AND DISNEY+PARKWOOD ENTERTAINMENT AND DISNEY+