Beyonce should stop blaming the other women for her partner’s choices. More than 50 years after Dolly Parton begged another woman to leave her man alone, Beyonce has reprised Jolene. But her iteration of this classic song is a warning. It is a savage, aggressive and antagonistic Jolene. Where Parton pleads, please don’t take my man, Beyonce is having none of it. “I’m warning you, don’t come for my man,” she repeats again and again.
Parton’s Jolene with its sapphic undercurrents acknowledges the beauty of the other woman with her “flaming locks of auburn hair”, “ivory skin and eyes of emerald green”, a smile like a “breath of spring” and a voice “soft like summer rain”. She gives agency to Jolene by acknowledging her power to take away her man. “And I cannot compete with you…”
Beyonce, who is known for speaking her mind and capitalising on woman power, does not waste time with compliments. “You don’t want this smoke, so shoot your shot with someone else,” she sings before reminding Jolene that she’s “still a Creole banjee country bi*ch from Louisianne.” and not to “try” her.
The song is part of Beyonce’s foray to country music with her latest album Cowboy Carter. The star is no stranger to infidelity—her confessional album Lemonade (2016) is wholly dedicated to her husband Jay Z’s straying ways. There is rage, but in the end, there is also forgiveness.
There is no forgiveness in Jolene.
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From Sorry to Jolene
Not everyone was happy when Beyonce forgave Jay-Z, and took him back. And perhaps the wounds have yet to heal. In her remake, the singer dives into marriage and the three children she shares with Jay-Z.
And while she acknowledges the other woman’s beauty, she follows it up with a brutal, “Takes more than beauty and seductive stares / To come between a family and a happy man… We’ve been deep in love for twenty years…”
Beyonce sings from a position of power—but her view is gendered and a tad problematic. She is putting the other woman in her place and asserting herself as the matriarch of the family. There is insistence that she knows her ‘man’ would be lost without her, and no matter what’s happened between them in the past, she knows he has learned his lesson.
In Cowboy Carter, Jolene is preceded by an introduction by Parton herself. “Hey, Ms Honey Bee, it’s Dolly P,” she says in an interlude called Dolly P. “You know that hussy with the good hair you sing about? Reminded me of someone I knew back when, except she has flaming locks of auburn hair, bless her heart. Just a hair of a different color, but it hurts just the same.” The song Parton refers to is Sorry from Lemonade, where Beyonce advised women to put up their middle fingers to cheating— “Wave it in his face, tell him, boy, bye”.
Unlike in Sorry, Beyonce’s Jolene is putting the onus of a man’s infidelity on the woman. The cheating partner himself is excluded from this power play.
But the responsibility to not cheat really lies with the ‘family guy’ instead of whoever the other woman is, even if she has made the first move.
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Blame your man
The ‘mothering’ of a ‘wayward’ man is a problematic trope pushed down the throats of women through popular culture. So its endorsment is not in the best of taste.
Beyonce tells Jolene, “There’s a thousand girls in every room/ That act as desperate as you do,” and it is as if we walked back a few decades on the idea of one woman sticking up for another. Why are we blaming a woman for ‘taking’ the man again?
Blame your man, Beyonce, and have a conversation with Jolene maybe. But a man who wanders is never worth fighting for.
Views are personal.
(Edited by Theres Sudeep)