Music Video
The accompanying music video for "Suga Mama" was released to British music channels in April 2007. It was shot in black-and-white and was co-directed by Melina Matsoukas alongside Knowles for the B'Day Anthology Video Album, which was released the same month; "Suga Mama" was one of eight videos shot in two weeks for the video album. It begins with Knowles sitting in a chair, wearing men's clothing and smoking a cigar. She gets up and begins to pole dance. The remainder of the video presents Knowles dancing on top of a sugar cube, dancing with backing dancers whose faces are partially concealed, lying in a circle of light, and riding a mechanical bull. Knowles said she is meant to "slowly become a woman" during the video, adding "Well, a sexier woman – I'm always a woman."
Knowles rehearsed the pole dancing using two ballet bars, which was when it was decided to add a pole above her head to form an arc. Though she is from Texas, she had never previously been on mechanical bull. There were no problems during warm-ups, but the man operating the bull during the video shoot programmed it to go faster, causing Knowles to fall off when she tried to perform tricks such as lifting up her foot, leaning back and turning around. To minimize the time Knowles spent on the bull, the director shot the sequence at twelve frames per second (see frame rate) and Knowles sang twice as quickly, but it wasn't until 4:00 am that they completed work.
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