On Saturday night Beyoncé dropped her highly anticipated HBO special and a full-length album both titled Lemonade. Filled with lyrics and imagery that tell the tale of a woman scorned, it seemed to many amateur observers to be a working through of the rumored infidelity of her husband, Jay Z. Less than 24 hours after the album dropped, social media has been rife with theories about the state of the Carter-Knowles marriage, and has centered on Rachel Roy, the fashion designer and ex-wife of Jay Z’s former business partner Damon Dash. As of Sunday, Roy’s cryptic Instagram comments, had driven Beyoncé’s ferociously loyal fans into overdrive.
There are lyrics throughout Lemonade that obliquely point to an affair at the center of. . .someone’s marriage—whether the work is autobiographical, or a the result of a songwriter doing character work is an argument many of the loudest Web class has mostly chosen to pass right over. (You can read a pretty complete rundown here.) But the lines that grabbed the most attention come from the track “Sorry.” Beyoncé sings, “He only want me when I'm not on there / He better call Becky with the good hair.” Just a few hours after Lemonade aired, Roy posted a photo on (her now-private) Instagram that read, “Good hair don’t care, but we will take good lighting, for selfies, or self truths, always. live in the light #nodramaqueens.”
That was all the Internet needed, given that Roy had previously been connected to rumored Beyoncé-Jay Z marital strife back in 2014. At the time, tabloids cited Jay Z’s close friendship with the designer as the reason Solange Knowles attacked him in the elevator of Manhattan’s Standard Hotel after that year’s Met Gala.
Roy may have posted her response to get out in front of the Lemonade backlash, but she possibly wasn’t prepared for the coordinated efforts of Beyoncé fans. The designer’s Wikipedia page came under attack and the comments on her Insagram post turned into such a bee-emoji-crowded frenzy, she locked her account down. Roy did post a comment on Twitter obliquely calling out the Beyhive for online bullying.
Roy probably should have seen that coming, but an unforeseen consequence of the online dust-up is that Food Network star Rachel Ray (who does have good hair, by the way) is getting caught in the crossfire with several people confusing her for Roy.
One of the most popular memes springing up around Lemonade Saturday night centered on how uncomfortable, shocked, and in trouble Jay Z must be after Beyoncé may have aired her personal process of turning the lemons of infidelity into Lemonade. (Chapters in the HBO special identified stages of that process as “Denial,” “Anger,” “Apathy,” etc.)
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