Beyoncé Proves Herself Peerless With ‘Renaissance’
“Liberated, livin’ like we ain’t got time,” Beyoncé shouts on “Heated,” the eleventh track on her masterful Renaissance album. She’s right. We really don’t have time. Covid still has us in a chokehold, monkeypox and polio are preparing for an imminent double-header, American politics is a wasteland, inflation is crushing us, and the planet is dying. So, what does Beyoncé suggest we do? Dance. A lot. All night and into the morning.
An odyssey that touches the bar, the club, the church, underground balls, and the dance floor, Renaissance is an unrelenting reclamation of joy. “I finally found the urge to smile / Swimmin' through the oceans of tears we cried,” she belts on the rattling “Church Girl.” Our present times color the singer’s seventh solo studio album with themes of survival and strife, but Renaissance’s scope is much larger than that. Dedicated to her beloved late Uncle Johnny, Beyoncé’s Renaissance can mean anything. It’s a history lesson, a tightly choreographed heist of restoration, a ball that pulses through the ungodly hour, a reflection on her storied, unparalleled career, and a good ass time.
Renaissance is a free-wheeling sonic patchwork of Beyoncé’s past albums combined with the best production of her career. This is a once-in-a-lifetime artist firing on all cylinders. The album artwork for Renaissance, which features a scantily clad Queen Bey perched atop a disco ball horse lovingly nicknamed “Reneigh,” recalls the silver gleam of the outfits Bey and her Destiny’s Child bandmates donned on the Survivor album cover. The two albums are about solidifying faith, rising above tremendous challenges, and finding joy wherever it may reside, the reference feels intentional. “Plastic Off the Sofa,” with its Marvin Gaye-esque harmonies and sensual instrumentation, recalls Beyoncé’s Dangerously In Love R&B roots, while the hyperpop stunner “All Up In Your Mind” brings to mind her flirtation with Europop on I Am… Sasha Fierce’s “Sweet Dreams.” Her eponymous surprise album pulses through the aggressive sexuality of “Thique,” and “Cuff It’s” brassy ebullience is a clear member of the 4 family tree. Moreover, the semi-autobiographic nature of Lemonade can be felt in tracks like “Break My Soul,” and the stanky funk of B’Day adds body to “Virgo’s Groove.” Even her non-studio albums lend a hand to the Renaissance sound. The pounding afrobeats of The Lion King: The Gift ricochets across “Energy,” and the braggadocious raps of Everything Is Love help round out “America Has A Problem.” It’s only fitting that Beyoncé’s first solo studio album in six years is both a literal rebirth of her past records and an utterly fearless expansion of her core sound.
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Renaissance is relentlessly Black, relentlessly queer, and relentlessly Southern. More importantly, it’s relentlessly all of these things at the same time. Even more importantly, these identities are held not only in the arrangements and production choices, but also in Beyoncé’s singular voice. On the outro of the Drake-penned “Heated,” Beyoncé emulates her take on the extravagant tones of ballroom’s most iconic emcees. Balancing villainous vanity with tongue-in-cheek cockiness, Beyoncé chants “Whiskey 'til I'm tipsy, glitter on my kitty / Cool it down, down, down, my pretty” and “Like stolen Chanel, lock me up in jail / Cuff me, please, 'cause this ain't fair.” She manipulates her tone like never before, transitioning from girlish glee (“Thique”) and gritty snarls (“All Up In Your Mind”) to good old-fashioned sanging (“Plastic Off the Sofa”), straight rapping (“America Has A Problem”) and mystical emceeing (“Alien Superstar”). With “Energy,” Beyoncé traces the cyclical history of wordless exclamations and expressions in Black music. She bridges hip-hop ad-libs (“Then I uzi that doozie, shot, shot, shot”) and interpolations of classic R&B vocalizations (she alludes to the “la la las” from Kelis’s “Milkshake”), while a sample of Big Freedia’s “Explode” simultaneously evokes the raucous virility of bounce music and the onomatopoeia-centric language of choreography. Beyoncé’s voice contains countless histories that swirl in a synergism that is as labyrinthine as it is celestial. Renaissance is vocal performance art — the progeny of an artist who never stops studying her instrument.
And yet, for all of the kaleidoscopic capabilities of Beyoncé’s voice, she understands the importance of passing the mic. Ts Madison’s voice booms across “Cozy,” in which Beyoncé paints a lyrical picture of Danial Quasar’s LGBTQ+ progress flag, with lines like “I’m probably one of the Blackest motherfuckers in this house / I’m that Black.” House legend Foremost Poets opens “Alien Superstar” with a calm warning, while drag icons Moi Renee and Kevin Aviance and are doubly sampled on “Pure / Honey,” a vogue tapestry that finds Beyoncé letting artists who live and breathe that culture leading the way. Prominent ballroom figures like DJ MikeQ and Kevin Jz Prodigy are also sampled on “Pure / Honey” by way of their 2011 track “Feels Like.” As much as Renaissance is a reinvention for Beyoncé, it consciously and humbly offers itself up as a safe space for a large segment of the singer’s fanbase: Black queer folk.
Renaissance excels because Beyoncé went straight to the source to gain a foundation for her own innovation. The superstar’s latest album is a fierce rejection of the negative feedback loop of pastiches that have inundated pop music in recent years. The album’s credits reveal the whole story. Honey Dijon, a Black trans dance music icon, appears twice for her production contributions to “Cozy” and “Alien Superstar,” and Big Freedia’s voice commands attention on “Energy” and “Break My Soul.” Chicago house pioneer Green Velvet also has a writing credit on “Cozy.” Detractors will attempt to use the lengthy list of Renaissance credits as proof of a lack of originality or artistic ability, but, in actuality, that list is a much-needed history lesson. Genius is rarely, if ever, singular. The list of names that contributed to and influenced Renaissance is emblematic of the pertinence of collaboration in art.
The sturdiest foundation that Renaissance builds on is that of gospel music. For Beyoncé, her gospel is the obliteration of dichotomized existence. A rapturous Sunday service built on the base of Saturday night’s sweaty catharsis; the gospel backbone of Renaissance infuses the record with yet another layer of holy nuance. “Break My Soul,” with its emancipatory backing choir, signals the significance of gospel’s presence on the album. “Church Girl” which marries a sample of The Clark Sisters’ “Center Thy Will” with rowdy NOLA bounce, is the convergence of the secular and the spiritual. In fact, the song is a declaration of the innate symbiosis between the two states. Whether your altar is a kiki ball or a church pew, “Church Girl” celebrates the wholeness of the human experience. In Beyoncé’s Renaissance, dropping it like a “thottie” is “God’s work” in the sense that the divine reveals itself in countless ever-evolving ways. Wherever you find and make your church is unique to you — a concept first introduced on the album through “Alien Superstar” and its samples of Danube Dance’s “Unique” and Barbara Ann Teer's "Black Theatre" speech. Renaissance is a revival.
“Church Girl” samples one bounce track (Showboys’s “Drag Rap (Triggerman)”), interpolates another (DJ Jimi’s “Where They At”), and uses elements of a funk song (James Brown’s backing vocals from Lyn Collins’s “Think (About It)”), but its gospel foundation ties each building block together as the song charts the evolution of Black American music stylings and the evolution of a years-long relationship with the church as an institution. Yes, church girls can dance all night and emancipate themselves from judgment because they, like everyone else on this planet, were “born free.” The forceful traditionalism and conservatism of the Black church can often stifle many of its most devoted members, and “Church Girl” is an unparalleled moment of release for those that find themselves caught in the throes of a binary that is as unholy as those who sit back and judge others while their own shit smells like the most rancid New York City garbage trucks. “I’m gonna love on me / Nobody can judge me / But me.”
The strength of the album’s gospel current allows the record to flow like a DJ set beyond the immaculate mixing and sequencing. Beyoncé’s transcendent riffs and ad-libs at the end of “Virgo’s Groove” emulate a worship leader overcome with the most powerful wave of anointing that the congregation has seen all day. “Summer Renaissance,” the album’s triumphant closer, concludes with a call-and-response breakdown that is straight from the urgent intensity that characterizes a revival service. “Summer Renaissance’s” gospel breakdown also recalls the days when R&B artists used to close their albums with a gospel cover. As a part of Destiny’s Child, Beyoncé is an unforgettable member of that tradition with moments like the Grammy-winning group’s cover of “Amazing Grace” on 1999’s The Writing’s On The Wall or the "Gospel Medley” that concluded 2001’s Survivor. Beyoncé’s Renaissance contains multitudes, and a re-centering of the incomparable impact of gospel music is one of them.
Outside of the album’s forays into Chicago house and Detroit techno, Renaissance explores the interlocked histories of those genres, funk, and disco. “Cuff It” features an Olympic-level lineup of Nile Rogers on guitar, Sheila E. on percussion, Raphael Saadiq on bass, and, of course, Beyoncé on vocals. “Summer Renaissance,” which bears a title that references the season as well as music legend Donna Summer, pulls from Summer’s iconic “I Feel Love.” Few songs are as historic as “I Feel Love,” yet Beyoncé’s “Summer Renaissance” refuses to crumble under that weight. “Summer Renaissance” is simultaneously a reclamation of dance music’s Black roots and a callback to Beyoncé’s first album where she sampled another Donna Summer classic (“Love to Love You Baby”) on one of her first hits as a soloist (“Naughty Girl”). Renaissance’s closer also features a lyrical allusion to 4’s “Schoolin’ Life” (“I'm a doc, I'm a nurse, I'm a teacher / Dominate is the best way to beat ya”), one final reminder that, after 25 years in the game, Beyoncé has more than earned the right to be self-referential.
As usual, Beyoncé walks in the spirit of Black music icons like Prince (“Honey”), Marvin Gaye (“Plastic Off The Sofa"), and Michael Jackson (“Cuff It”), but she also secured a legendary collaboration on Renaissance. Grace Jones, a music icon whose impact is permanently cemented in the landscape of popular music, appears on “Move,” one of the album’s standout tracks. A haughty runway anthem, “Move” finds Beyoncé exalting Grace (check out her cooing Grace’s name in the background) and Tems acting as one of the night’s emcees (“Who this gyal in di back of di room?!”). “Move” is also an example of Renaissance’s cohesiveness beyond the seamless transitions. The song’s lyrical references to Jamaican dancehall morph into a moody neo-dancehall that grounds the subsequent “Heated.” In the same way, the heart-bursting choir at the very end of “Break My Soul” sets up the perfect thematic transition to “Church Girl.” There’s also the taste of “America Has A Problem” that she teases in album opener “I’m That Girl” as she sings about her “un-American life,” as well as the hints of “All Up In Your Mind” at the tail end of “Thique.” Beyoncé mastered the art of album sequencing years ago, but she proves herself peerless on Renaissance.
There’s a lot of hyperbole that surrounds Beyoncé, but when an artist puts out an album as intricately curated as Renaissance after already shifting pop culture and the music industry with their previous studio albums and side projects alike, is that hyperbole not deserved? This is a 40-year-old Black female pop star at the very top of her game — unapologetically sexual, vocally pristine, and more willing to reinvent the wheel than ever before. The album certainly isn’t perfect — the hourlong runtime is ever so slightly pushing it — but it’s leaps and bounds beyond what anyone else in the mainstream has offered this year. It’s a triumph, plain and simple. They don’t call her Queen Bey for nothing.
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Key Tracks: “Alien Superstar” | “Church Girl” | “Cuff It” | “Plastic Off The Sofa | “America Has A Problem”
Score: 94
