Not that she particularly needs me defending her.

Woke up this morning to headlines on Twitter “Beyonce Slammed For Sampling Shuttle Tragedy” and “Beyonce: Sampling the Sounds of Tragedy for Pop Music“.  “Inappropriate in the extreme.”

Beyonce chose to start a song on her new album with the following words: Flight controllers here looking very carefully at the situation. Obviously a major malfunction.

It sounds pretty dire. Sampling sounds from the Challenger disaster? Not cool, you might think.

And yet… Beyonce is around my age. We are the age group for which the Challenger disaster was a harsh lesson in Things Go Wrong. Americans are fond of preserving in children the naive belief that life is like the movies- good guys win, bad guys lose, and everything will come right in the end.  Challenger smashed that belief in a puff of smoke that shouldn’t have been there. The words Beyonce sampled were the confirmation that no, the thing that was wrong wasn’t us kids watching not knowing what a shuttle launch was supposed to look like. Things go wrong. People die.

I decided maybe I should hear the song. So I found it on YouTube. And I did something I think the outrage folks didn’t: I listened to it without watching the video.  That sample at the beginning changes the whole direction of the song. Without it, it could be just another love song. With it, a few things jump out in the lyrics: Your love is bright as ever, even in the shadows. In the darkest night, I’ll search through the crowd. We don’t have forever.  The repeated Lights out.

Maybe this isn’t a breakup song or a song about a bad relationship, as the outrage brigade thinks. It sounds to me like a song about loss, about death did us part. Things go wrong. People die. And whoever is left has to find a way to go on.

Beyonce is a grown woman who’s been working in music long enough to know what she was doing. And it sounds like what she was doing is a little smarter than the outrage brigade is willing to credit her for.