Revolutionary Fun: Why we can't stop talking about Beyoncé's 'Renaissance'
After nearly a decade of shifting the music industry with surprise drops and arresting visual albums, Beyoncé's seventh full-length album, Renaissance, emerged into the world on Friday in a way that almost felt traditional. There was a lead single, a properly announced release date and even a highly publicized leak, but the retro-leaning familiarity of Beyoncé's approach hasn't lessened the impact of an album that demands a deep decoding. Thick with references to dance music past and present and the Black artists who've built the genre, there's much to dig into on the overwhelming, energetic and well-studied Renaissance.
Can Queen Bey command the legions of listeners who follow her back to those sweaty, communal, utopian spaces that span decades of history and memory? NPR Music convened three critics — Ann Powers, Jason King and LaTesha Harris — to linger over the build and release of Renaissance and see how deep the dance floor ecstasy goes.
Jason King: The first thing that strikes me about Renaissance, Beyoncé's ultra-anticipated seventh solo album, is that it's her first full-length release I've listened to rather than watched since 2011's 4. Every other Bey event of the past nine years — 2013's surprise visual album Beyoncé, 2016's HBO-delivered musical film Lemonade, 2019's Netflix-assisted Homecoming, 2020's Disney+ tie-in Black is King — has been an immersive feast for the eyes as much as, or even more than, the ears. This time around, Renaissance's retro-'90s lead single "Break My Soul" climbed the pop charts without an official narrative feature music video. Beyoncé's no fool: she promoted Renaissance by way of a high-end fashion spread in British Vogue, and the tantalizing, slickly-rendered album art and photography. But I'm struck that she seems to want us to mostly hear her first—and all that implies.
Renaissance is a maximalist opus of 16 tracks that summon six decades of innovation across the sprawling multiverse of post-1970s Black dance music. It's Beyoncé, so naturally it's shrewdly calculated: There's Nile Rodgers' iconic chucking '70s disco guitar on "Cuff It;" the pioneering Chicago house of Green Velvet on "Cozy" (along with house music DJ Honey Dijon, who also contributes to "Alien Superstar"); the buckwild hip-hop banger "Church Girl" featuring a Twinkie Clark gospel sample served up by co-producers No I.D. and The-Dream; not to mention West African Afrobeats and South African gqom, trap and a whole lot more.
Songs start one way and then somehow morph into something else: "Pure/Honey" serves up 1990s underground New York voguing music (thanks to its sample of Kevin Aviance's "Cunty") before transforming into breezy Prince-esque '80s boogie. Samples and interpolations of the funk music past, paying homage to legends from James Brown to Teena Marie, abound in Beyoncé's expansive, quasi-chaotic musical Cuisinart. Even in the absence of Beyoncé's customary immersive visuals, Renaissance is such a barreling head rush of creative musical, sonic and lyrical ideas that the work of deconstructing and making sense of it is inherent to the album's coded power. Whether the results successfully cohere and do what Beyoncé seems to hope they will do — inspire escapist fun and transcendence in these grim times — is something to ponder.
LaTesha Harris: With a multitude of mirrors for light to reflect off, a disco ball is a space of infinite possibilities. Every glance offers a new perspective, a new world to disappear into. In late 2020, I predicted that Beyoncé planned to pivot to disco for her long-awaited solo seventh studio album based solely on the fact that her IG updates featured more power clashing fits. True to the clues, Beyoncé's sonorous new release is a power clash. Ambitious and experimental, disparate elements merge together with tracks starting in one era and ending in a different one.
As Jason described, the first of what she has called a three-part project turns disco's infinite potential into a showcase of the sonic Black diaspora. In every refraction of light, a different genre is transformed and beamed down to the dance floor with the sole purpose of listeners out of their heads and intois the theme of the ball, Beyoncé is the house mother fussin' on the balcony, the queen on the floor serving face, the spectator snapping in time and omnipotent judge all at once. We're not meant to watch the renaissance, we're meant to go out and create it.
