NME’s Columnist Katherine Ryan On: Beyoncé And Black Holes

Sorry, I really tried not to write about Beyoncé this week. By the time you read this I’m sure there’ll be countless ‘Beyoncé Super Bowl’ thinkpieces up on the femsites. In summation of those: Yes, Beyoncé performed ‘Formation’ a day after releasing it and is an absolute weapon who emboldens women, black people and, most dangerously, black women. This angers some men, white people and, most dangerously, white men. She nearly fell over dancing and that’s the clip that the media focused on even though she ultimately DID NOT FALL OVER and she never will #YAS #QUEEN #SLAY etc. Also, my dad thinks the song is called ‘Information’ and please, nobody correct him.

Speaking of powerful black phenomena, I do not understand last Thursday’s big announcement about the detection of gravitational waves. I’ve read many articles, but there’s just no part of it that makes even a little bit of sense to me. You know how some people say that all the secrets of the universe are right in front of us but we just don’t have the capacity to see them? It’s like that; like explaining World War One to a goat. Like smelling out of your elbow. I’m just never going to get it.

A team of scientists heard and recorded the sound of two black holes colliding a billion light years away. I listened to the ‘chirp’ and I’m pretty convinced that whoever was guarding the microphone accidentally took it to the toilet and was too embarrassed to admit the truth. Where do I begin with this? WHAT IS A LIGHT YEAR? It’s got nothing to do with time. It’s 9 trillion kilometres. Show me the genius that decided to give that unit of length an allotment of age? It takes light in a vacuum (what’s it doing in THERE?) a year to get that far. Big deal! You don’t see me calling my boyfriend’s dick ‘half a second long’. Oh, I was born 5.3644444e-10 light years from London. Fuck off.

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Black holes (space vaginas) are bottomless gravitational pits from which not even light can escape. What kind of Kanye-level arrogance causes someone to say shit like that without ever having been inside one? Somehow, a black hole is HEAVY, with a mass 29 to 36 times that of our sun. HOW ARE YOU WEIGHING THE SUN? Stars give off energy and when they collapse, I guess they suck in energy and grow by absorbing everything in their path. It’s what makes Celebrity Big Brother so entertaining. Those people are black holes.

According to Einstein, when two of them knocked into each other it created ripples in space-time, and now that we’ve listened to this noise it means he was right. Go ahead and read about it but I’m warning you, it’ll make your eyes bleed. Wake me up next year when the chirp is playing the Super Bowl.

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