Beyonce and socioeconomics

She was sounding the alarm on the masculinity crisis before anyone

“To see what is in front of one’s nose is a constant struggle” wrote Orwell. It can take years for writers and politicians to recognise turns that a country has taken, but music and literature often nail it far sooner. Hanif Kureishi’s My Son The Fanatic explained the homegrown jihadis phenomenon years before it exploded. Steven Knight’s Dirty, Pretty Things unlocked the plight of illegal migrants before any newspaper expose. Even a schlagerfest like like Eurovision shows evolutions in countries’ identity, signally new ambitions, alliances or enmities. But today, I’d like to talk about Beyonce.

The crisis of men and masculinity is slowly dawning on policymakers, thanks in no small part to the work of Richard Reeves (‘Of Boys and Men’) and the AEI’s Nicholas Eberstadt (‘Men Without Work’) but it’s a lonely field with few such books. I chaired a CPS debate with both of them last week. The great Dominic Lawson was in the audience and asked about demographics: was the epidemic of male worklessness linked to the declining birth rate?

I’ve just finished reading Edin & Kefalas’ Promises I Can Keep (2009), which argues that marriage rates are falling because of men who are what sociologists call ‘unmarriageable’. But, I pointed out, their book came out ten years after Beyonce explained the entire phenomenon in her Destiny’s Child hit Bills (1999).

“Only you would bring a Beyonce lyric into a debate like this,” said Reeves, who knows me a bit too well from his time in Westminster (he was Nick Clegg’s chief of staff). But I’ve long believed that music can exposes truths long before academics and politicians get there: especially epoch-defining artists like Beyonce.

She is recognised as a singer, an actress and genius pop-provocateur. But she is not credited enough for her role as a sociological seer whose music has always intuitively grasped (and publicly articulated) social, cultural, and political themes. She sings of race, gender and power - and nails points long before mainstream academics or policymakers do. Especially the nuance of the masculinity crisis.

Exhibit A: triflin’ men

These social dynamics we were talking in this May 2025 policy discussion were present long ago, especially amongst lower-income black Americans. This was examined by Chicago University’s William Julius Wilson (‘The Truly Disadvantaged’) but also by a Texas girl group spelling out a) the ways in which men were falling short and b) the refusal of the increasingly-empowered women to accept it.

The economy was changing: lower-income women don’t need a man in the way that, for most of human history, they have needed a man. They have jobs, careers, prospects: an no desire to settle for a a man unwilling or unable to step up. Bills was a 128bpm declaration of these new dynamics.

The narrator recites how the relationship in question in the song started out with promise, with chivalrous behaviour. ‘We started out real cool / taking me places I ain’t never been.” but the situation soon deteriorated. “Now you’re getting comfortable/ Ain't doing those things you did no more,” she observes. And worse, the financial situation was reversing. “You're slowly making me pay for things/ your money should be handling.” When it seemed to slide into dependency of a workless man on his hard-working woman, that was it.

“And now you ask to use my car. Drive it all day and don't fill up the tank! And you have the audacity to even come and step to me. Ask to hold some money from me, until you get your cheque next week.”

Once, the girl would have to settle. No longer. Girls who were once Wishin’ and Hopin’ (as Dusty Springfield put it) were now demandin’ and rejectin’. A man reliant on the earnings of his woman (the example Beyonce used in the video was a hairdresser, like her mum) was not on. To her, it cut to the definition of masculinity.

“When times get hard, I need someone to help me out - instead of a scrub like you, who don't know what a man's about.”

Here, Beyonce cuts to definition of masculinity itself. Taking responsibility. Helping, where required. Not sponging, draining, moaning. Such traits were being derided as ‘hegemonic masculinity’ by gender studies theorists, but Beyonce was saying these qualities were welcome - nay, expected - in men. A man unable to support himself was: well, this clip from the Bills video passes the verdict.

Failure to provide, not committing (‘put a ring on it’) are viewed as failing to achieve manhood, especially in lower-income communities. Black America had fewer qualms about saying so, and Beyonce has no qualms at all.

Great women no longer need great men (as she observed in ‘Independent Woman’ and ‘Run the World’). But that doesn’t diminish what they expect in a man. Resources and generosity are still valued, as she observed in her remake of the Days of Christmas (2001) but Bills is a declaration of ‘what a man’s about’: not tapping his partner for cash, draining her fuel from her car or cash from her card.

Ladies making their own way in the world were less inclined to tolerate emotional immaturity, freeloading tendencies and - most of all - failure to meet basic partner expectations. Such men are described as “unmarriageable” (Edin & Kefalas), “detached from the labour force” (Eberstadt), “socially marginalised” (Wilson). But none have the sting of Beyonce’s trifling.

Putting a ring on it

The economy had changed, with less work for unskilled men - but as Eberstadt pointed out in his landmark 2016 study, a surge in men who did not work at all.

The biggest study revealing ‘large deficits in the supply of potential male spouses,’ came out in the Journal of Marriage and the Family in a Sep19 and headlines worldwide. That was 20 years after Bills summed it up exactly.

By then, Beyonce had long moved on: to the more advanced problem of men who may have resources but refuse to commit (or ‘put a ring on it’). Rather than be left in the lurch, her song advised, women should end the relationship. Here’s Single Ladies (2008).

Here, Beyonce challenges the feminist cliches by pointing out that marriage is there not to enslave women but empower them by extracting a binding commitment from men who, if given the chance, would not commit. Single Ladies (by which she means ‘unmarried’) is not a man-hating, unromantic message. It’s an invitation into romance: just on proper terms. “Pull me in to your arms, say I'm the one you want. If you don't, you'll be alone! And like a ghost, I'll be gone.”

No scrubs

This was an elaboration of the ‘scrubs’ theme first identified in Bills, but it goes back further. Let’s bring in Kandi Burruss, a songwriter who worked on Bills with Beyonce but before worked on the notion of the ‘scrub’ and created a case study with the band TLC.

A ‘scrub’ is introduced as a man who “thinks he’s fly,” “always talkin' about what he wants” but has neither resources, or the ability to signal then. He“ sits on his broke ass….hanging out the passenger side of his best friend's ride/ Trying to holla at me.’ In our discussion, Reeves observed today that women want a man who is not necessarily rich but ‘has his stuff together’.

Most of music and lyrics has had women waiting for their prince charming, but this ratio is reversing. Today, a young man is more likely to be drifting - not in work, employment or training - than a woman.

Kayne and Cee Lo: the gentlemen respond

It’s tough for the men. They do far worse in school, then thrown into a workplace that has never had less use for unskilled men - and then told that they are privileged ones. Reeves said today that the marginal value of men - or the market value of testosterone - has never been lower.

Music also charts their despair. ‘I ain’t saying she’s a gold digger’, said Kanye West in 2005, ‘But she ain’t messing with no broke n****r’. Then five years later, Cee Lo Green’s 2010 cri de coeur. ‘I guess the change in pocket wasn’t enough,’ he concludes. ‘If I was richer, I’d still be with her’.

The academics are cottoning on to this, slowly. The policymakers ignore it, still. In our debate I asked Nicholas Eberstadt why such crucial issues are so seldom discussed. We’re losing empathy, he said: the ability to see each other. But maybe we were just listening to the wrong people. For those really wanting to understand, the clues have been on the dance floor all along.