Beyoncé welcomed us into what she’s calling her Renaissance with a sample of a seminal house music classic. The bassline of Robin. S’s Show Me Love would become the bassline for our expectations of the singer’s eighth studio album, which promised to be her most definitive pivot toward the dancefloor to date. Her interpolation of dance and club music history continued with the album’s artwork, which casts Beyoncé as a sort of present day Lady Godiva by way of Bianca Jagger at Studio 54. The signs were all there; Beyoncé was moving into house. Perhaps unsurprisingly so. After all, house has been having a moment in pop music. Now with Renaissance, that moment is being affirmed by the Queen B herself. An exercise in joy and liberation, the album spans a number of styles from house in all its forms, dancehall, reggaeton, and most satisfyingly, vintage disco; all styles and forms connected to the queer underground. It is in these spaces specifically; in ballrooms, drag clubs, and secret raves, that Renaissance seems to position itself. Beyoncé manages to pull in an impressive bevy of producers from this world. Names like Mike Q, Honey Dijon, Leven Kali, and even A.G. Cook read like the lineup for a Pxssy Palace festival with Beyoncé as headliner. Whether she actually manages to assimilate into the subculture itself is up for debate, but she does her best to make an argument for herself.
Renaissance mostly struts the runaway with an inflated sense of grandeur that doesn’t quite match up with its true merits. The album flows without breaks, a similar tried and true strategy employed by Madonna on Confessions On A Dancefloor (though objectively, Renaissance’s sequencing is far more inventive). There are some truly stellar moments. The Honey Dijon produced Alien Superstar is easily Beyoncé’s best pop release since Sweet Dreams, with the same sort of melodramatically triumphant chorus that you can’t help but swoon at. The old-school cosmic disco of Cuff It is genuinely euphoric and full of the sort of hedonistic romanticism that Beyoncé envisioned at the core of Renaissance. Then there are some rather questionable choices. On Move, she does the impossible: she manages to pull out a legit Grace Jones feature. But there’s something inherently uncomfortable about Beyoncé’s put on patois cadence and inflections, claiming “we coming straight out the jungle.” Jones is a Trinidadian local. Beyoncé, on the other hand, is from Texas. Just one track later on the middle ground Heated, she begs to be cooled down. Similarly, when she deathdrops into playing ballroom MC on Pure/Honey, it feels slightly out of touch.
For all the album’s outward promises of a non-stop queer disco house extravaganza, Renaisannce contains its fair share of classic Beyoncé hip-hop adjacent R&B and soulful pop. There’s something satisfying about Beyoncé returning to her roots in this regard, on tracks like the scuzzy jazz of Plastic On The Sofa which recalls the sultry harmonies of Destiny’s Child’s Cater For You. These tracks, pushed toward the album’s latter half, are possibly some of its most believable. Beyoncé makes sense in the throwback big diva disco of Virgo’s Groove (one of the album’s strongest) and Cuff It way more than on the mutant kuduro of Energy. She channels Donna Summer and Diana Ross on these tracks, and it works because she’s not having to put on anything other than herself. In their time, Summer and Ross never set out to make gay music by doing whatever was popular in gay clubs. They became popular in gay clubs by virtue of the music’s inherent honestly, and their trust in their own instincts. And when Beyoncé leans into these instincts of her own, Renaissance is electric. Perhaps unsurprisingly, she closes Renaissance by sampling Summers’s I Feel Love, a bid to channel the energy of liberation and jouissance this essential entry into dance music history instigated for its era.
With its influences from dancehall, gqom, deep house, and Chicago classic house, the comparisons to Drake’s recent Okay, Nevermind are likely inevitable and undoubtedly the arguments will lean in Beyoncé’s favour. But both albums ultimately suffer from the same fatal flaw: they’re mere appropriations of the subcultures they are claiming to celebrate and draw inspiration from. Of particular concern is Beyoncé’s relationship with her queer fans and status as a gay icon. She’s had her moments. She recieved a GLAAD award and shared how her gay uncle was a massive influence on her life. She’s been inclusive in her visuals and campaigns, as well as in who she hires on her team. But when it comes to the groundwork of this discourse, she feels enigmatic. Unlike her peers in the vein of Gaga or Rihanna, Beyoncé has remained fairly chaste when it comes to speaking out about matters regarding queer and gay politics in the same way she been vocal about matters of race and gender. Yet on Renaissance, she’s calling categories and using lingo like ‘sis’ and ‘cunty hunty,’ claiming the ballroom as her space. It’s borderline offensive in the greater scheme of things; especially when she fails to lyrically transpose queer euphoria and jouisannce into anything beyond getting high and feeling sparkly like diamonds.
It’s a problem that has become more apparent with her in recent years. While the conscious politicisation of her image and persona made sense for the music of Beyoncé and Lemonade, and arguably made the music even stronger, her recent work and boundless wokeness has felt increasingly more like appropriation. Take The Gift, for example, with its reliance on West and South African underground dance sounds. And yes, while she’s working with artists and producers essential to the scenes she finds herself ‘inspired’ by, the fact remains that it is Beyoncé who profits most from this work. As she’s attempted to extend who and what Beyoncé could mean, she’s reached further away from herself. But, perhaps not all is lost. As she says so herself on Summer/Renaissance: if you’re looking for Beyoncé here, she’s inside her bag. Swag.
Listen to Virgo’s Groove from Renaissance below.
