Reinvention Through Joy: Beyoncé's RENAISSANCE
Bey is back - and determined to bend the Beyoncé Brand on the dancefloor. A review of her seventh album.
On June 26th 2015, the United States Supreme Court ruled that gay and lesbian couples could get legally married — a momentous occasion that, while brief, signaled the hope that LGBT lives could, one day, be as accepted as heterosexual lives. Four days afterward, Beyoncé, by this point long reclusive from the media circuit, released a short clip on her official Youtube channel. 7/11 Pride runs seventeen seconds and, like the original 7/11 music video, is shot on an iPhone. Beyoncé wears a frilly dress in Pride colors, wears the flag like a cape on another outfit, waves it as a tiny flag on a third, and as she swaps wigs, she looks at the camera with a wide grin. 7/11 would, in retrospect, become the music video that prophesized the TikTok era of quickly edited, loose-yet-tightly-choreographed music videos. 7/11 Pride, in turn, was one very early signal of the music icon’s seventh album that came out this year: Renaissance, act one of a trilogy, is dedicated to her uncle and godmother Jonny and the “fallen angels whose contributions have gone unrecognized for far too long,” as she puts it in her liner notes. Just like the video, this celebration of the LGBT community comes in July. Pride Month can be all year if you set your mind to it!
Renaissance itself takes its time building up — ever the storyteller, Beyoncé sets the stage on I’M THAT GIRL and declares “All these songs sound good.” The song itself is minimal with its percussion only to introduce a dramatic tempo switch in its bridge and a terse declaration that she’s “Un-American” and “needs no friends”. Soon the album segues to the throbbing, propulsive self-love anthem COZY, and just as quickly transitions to early highlight ALIEN SUPERSTAR (however Beyoncé manages to make the single adlib UNIQUE! sound so catchy needs to be studied). Unlike the last albums of the past decade — from 2011’s 4 all the way to the Disney soundtrack The Gift — the opener is not so much a first chapter as it is a loose thematic red thread that traces through the entire album, especially so in its first half. She smells no dishonesty. There is no man she declares her love to in the opener, nor a boy she wants to become. With the swagger of a rapper she declares herself the best to ever do it, that nobody can peg her down, and, yes, her (and the queer people she speaks to and for throughout: her Uncle Jonny receives a shoutout on HEATED, BREAK MY SOUL samples Big Freedia’s Explode, COZY samples from Ts Madison, is produced by Honey Dijon, and directly references the Pride flag; not to mention the numerous slang used that originate from ballroom culture) un-American lifestyle of going underground, to the club where she will freak on the weekend.
This thesis gets repeated thrice over in the album before CUFF IT brings the listener to the roller rink and Beyoncé melts into the song’s mood. The middle stretch, from CHURCH GIRL to MOVE (featuring legendary Grace Jones and Nigerian R&B songstress Tems), break no new lyrical ground for Beyoncé exactly: this woman has been horny her whole career. But it’s the novelty of the musical ground she breaks for herself, from house and its various sub-genres to dance to neo-soul, that keep things exciting as the album leads up to the final section. From Drake reject HEATED segueing to the dark, sensual THIQUE all the way to the Donna Summer-interpolating SUMMER RENAISSANCE, the final is a tour-de-force that hits the listener as hard as the second stretch of her legendary Coachella set did, with no a break to catch your breath. Its most surprising treat is ALL UP IN YOUR MIND, written by A.G Cook and produced by BloodPop, edging the listener to a vision of Beyoncé living sometime in 3022 only to segue to AMERICA HAS A PROBLEM. Taken on their own, every song is, at the very least, polished and catchy; at best, which really can be said about a lot of songs, is transcendent, sexy, almost carnal. As a whole, the cluster of similar-sounding songs do give the impression that Beyoncé is warming up for about three quarters of the album.
In fan spheres the transitions have been lauded, forcing the listener to go from top to bottom of the album rather than shuffle it (maybe something Adele should have considered?) While it’s true that these transitions do create a seamless experience, they also allow Beyoncé to stretch her legs a little. What she started off so masterfully on Homecoming, with its many twists and turns and self-referential samples midway through songs, she continues on Renaissance: I’M THAT GIRL introduces tempo changes and a percussion two thirds into the song; unique echoes all around COZY before ALIEN SUPERSTAR even begins; on ALIEN SUPERSTAR itself, drums clank and give way to strings underscoring a magical, perhaps too centripetal, chorus; AMERICA HAS A PROBLEM features these very cold synths that are reminiscent of Daft Punk clashing against the Kilo Ali sample Cocaine (America Has A Problem) (and, reaching farther back, serve as an incredible update to I Am Sasha Fierce reject Control). But the best transition is midway through a song: the bounce of PURE leading to the euphoric, summery HONEY. Elsewhere songs run on and Beyoncé either raps along, like on HEATED or closer SUMMER RENAISSANCE, or she harmonizes to the end of the song — the 1-2 punch of PLASTIC OFF THE SOFA and VIRGO’S GROOVE — seemingly unconcerned with outros and final choruses. Of course, this isn’t The Fragile; Beyoncé is not speaking through the music, but through her elastic and endlessly expressive voice. These stretches are still careful and exacting, as polished as the surface of a disco ball much like Donna Summer’s Once Upon A Time, but never so jarring as to become altogether inaccessible or too artsy; it’s telling that this album received no visual album treatment. The transitions allow the album to become more physical and less concerned with stories, past, and emotion, than Lemonade was at points. Songs become canvases of joy, bliss, sex, and happiness; what were one-offs on Blow and Rocket on her self-titled stretches now across the entire album. Beyoncé has conceived Renaissance as a place of escape. It’s audible: for 62 minutes, the listener is treated to a sonic dancefloor at every turn, vivid and alive.
Throughout history, the club has been a sanctuary for queer people and queerness writ large. It was in underground clubs in which ballroom culture flourished. The night was where people, free of the burdens of daily life and the harsh, all-revealing sunlight, could be themselves. Throughout her long career, Beyoncé has toyed with alter egos: recall Sasha Fierce, her stage persona; King B for 4; and the pageant Miss Third Ward and Yoncé, meek and hurting inside versus the sexy dominatrix on 2013’s self-titled, respectively. Sometime 2017, Beyoncé hopped onto a song with DJ Khaled and Jay Z named Top Off, on which she got credited with B alone. As Beyoncé’s profile rose to sky-high, nigh-untouchable levels, spectacle itself became attached to her name. Why try her? She is Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter. It’s a weapon as much as it is a shield as much as it is a nameplate dotted in Swarovski crystals. In many ways, we find out on Renaissance, she is determined to bend, maybe even break, this self-prophecy. Much has been said about lead single and centerpiece BREAK MY SOUL’s line of Beyoncé’s “9 to 5” that she quits. Although without the album context, it sounded like Beyoncé inhabited a character — the only new part of this being that this new character, hilariously enough for her, is working class — within the album it becomes clear that Beyoncé’s 9 to 5 is herself, the Beyoncé Brand. Through the record, she is Bey, Yoncé, that girl, or simply an unnamed “I” who is here to have fun. It’s significant that Beyoncé does this with a record that spans house and dance — not only does she reclaim its Black origins, but within the club, she is with her community and free to be anyone (this, delightfully, includes a moment in which she tells an unnamed her to go harder on THIQUE). Like some of house’s greatest names, past and present, she is both the music and the dancer, both the orchestrator of joy and the participant of it. Renaissance becomes the floor on which a community comes and fuses together through sweat and tears. In the process — finally on the other side, as she says it on CHURCH GIRL — , she can look at herself in the third person (Bey is back and I’m sleeping real good tonight) and cheer herself on (collect your coins, Beyoncé). But it’s not as though she is wholly anonymous; the listener can still vicariously live through Beyoncé’s power and might as she sneers Monday I’m overrated, Tuesday on my dick; flip-floppin, flip-floppin ass bitch on HEATED or declares herself one of one on ALIEN SUPERSTAR. She is still Beyoncé when she talks about the Basquiats she owns, the man she hasn’t left behind, but the illusion holds up for most of the record anyway.
Renaissance originates from French and means rebirth1, usually connotated with spirituality. Beyoncé is forty years old, with three children and a husband she remarried. This is her seventh album. Just when one thinks that listening to all six Beyoncé albums, her mixtape, her (slim) unreleased vault and visual experiences is enough to have figured an artist out, she still finds a surprise, a new and previously undiscovered corner of her personality and artistry — shown with so much brilliance and clarity that it’s hard not to be bedazzled by it all. And despite every release being a spectacle, the body of work holding up every single time and being incredibly accessible is what keeps her from veering off the public eye like Michael Jackson and Prince did at certain points. And unlike Madonna, who had also turned to the club past the age of forty, Renaissance is not an album that rejuvenates Beyoncé in the public eye; her #1 in 14 years belies the fact that she has never left the public eye in the first place, only the radio. If anything, this only raised her profile even more. If every album before this one was a refinement of Beyoncé as an artist, vocalist, celebrity, and as a brand, then Renaissance is an exciting new chapter and renewed proof why she is, indeed, one of one. Do some of the old habits shine through from older records? They do; a whole reinvention this is not. Do all of her attempts here work out? HEATED is cute, but perhaps not needed at this position on the album; even Beyhive (Beyoncé fans) originally only talked about Afrobeats offering ENERGY at the start only in relation to its transition to BREAK MY SOUL2. But despite all that it largely fulfills its mission statement of escape and fantasy: a reprieve from this bleak world, from Beyoncé being Beyoncé. Call my girls, put em all on a spaceship, she once rapped on APESHIT, all the way back in 2018. The spaceship has arrived, and we are all inside: a world where bodies are bodies and bodies dance, sweat, and fuse together. Time will tell where this will rank on her discography, but needless to say, this pivot proves yet another high point from an artist that has yet to miss. And to think this is part one of three? Bey is back and I’m sleeping real good tonight.
Renaissance is out via Parkwood Entertainment.
As denoted in The Online Etymology Dictionary
ENERGY is a cute song, please don’t jump me.