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‘Don’t Hurt Yourself’ by Beyoncé is an angry song, and looking at the song at face value you can clearly see how it alludes to her partner’s infidelity, but if you take a step back and look at the song from a contextual point of view it’s much more than that (1)
‘Don’t Hurt Yourself’ is a rock song, when you think rock music, you generally think White people (white men to be specific) but rock music was actually pioneered by a black woman named Rosetta Tharpe (2)
Since the song is angry and vengeful, it can be interpreted as a “fuck you” to white male musicians who silenced black female musicians and their significant contributions to the origins of rock music (3)
This is made more apparent when, in the song’s visual, after Beyoncé, a black woman, sings “Motivate your ass call me Malcolm X” the song cuts to visuals of black women while Malcom X’s speech plays where he states that “the most disrespected person in America is the Black woman”
She also used this speech when she performed the song as part of her groundbreaking and historic ‘Homecoming’ performance at the 2018 Coachella festival, a performance that celebrated historically black colleges and universities
Beyoncé also performed the song as part of her ‘Formation World Tour’ in 2016, mixing it with ‘Ring the Alarm’; on the right is Black Panther co-founder and political activist Huey P. Newton in 1968, making it more apparent how the song is part of the Black Lives Matter movement
