Drunk in Love, Rendered in Yellow Circles

A guy named Jesse Hill took Drunk in Love, stripped the visual track, and rebuilt the whole thing using only emojis—those dense little ideograms we deploy when words feel like too much effort, or when we’re feeling things we’d rather not type in full. The result is a short, unofficial music video that is sharper than it has any right to be.

What’s strange is that it works. The emojis map onto the song’s arc in ways that feel almost editorial—desire rendered in cartoon symbols, ecstasy in yellow circles, the whole thing cycling through the vocabulary of a phone keyboard. It’s ridiculous and committed simultaneously, and somewhere in that combination it reminds me of something I already knew: Beyoncé’s material holds up under almost any interpretation. Even filtered through absurdist fan-made form, the song doesn’t lose its center. That’s not nothing. That’s actually quite a lot.