Time. It’s…magical, isn’t it?
It’s the reason we can look back at historical detonations fondly – ‘study’ the intricacies of revolutions from the safety of a textbook, turn the tears of personal trauma into warpaint for the road ahead. Be defined by its mark for all our days or elect to fight off its patina until we tap out or have to. Time is the greatest re(writer) that always lived. Nothing and no one else is message, medium and messenger the way time is. Time is the greatest storyteller because you can’t escape it.
Those who know this and serve that knowledge well always come out on top. And, in the vast, teeming expanse of pop culture she’s domesticated and dominates, Beyoncé is a glowing nexus of time’s most potent truths. She has grown with it – sensation-turned-doyenne-turned-gawdess; it’s not a resume but a trajectory. Everyone who calls her a ‘queen’ is shambolically misinformed. She left mere queenhood – to people who make a living on Instagram, or um, aspire to – behind a long time ago. Read the signs, look up at the sky: She’s a goddess now, and has been for a while.
Now, she’s telling us there’s a RENAISSANCE unspooling, or, more accurately, Act I: Renaissance, the first installment of an impending triptych. But we know by now that when Beyoncé says there’s a renaissance abloom, what she’s actually doing is ushering us towards what it looks, feels and sounds like. It’s not a renaissance on her terms but a renaissance bursting forth from the ingredients time, her muse and master, has driven her to choose to define it by. Like everything significant, it’s all so richly, deeply personal and totalisingly political. And it all works in ways that are mutually affirming, powerfully believable and substantively perfect.
Perfection is nothing new in the Beyoncé lexicon. Her ongoing career is a real-time demonstration of how to be your own gold standard, the carats of which increase with every subsequent undertaking. Perfection is her art form. So much so that it’s led to her being on the receiving end of the critique that she’s so perfect she’s soulless. Ingrates, all of them. The mob has missed the mark completely: Beyoncé made perfection her professional calling card. She can do it all – and better than the competition.
This is especially important to appreciating RENAISSANCE, album number seven in the Bey trove. In the past two years, some of the greatest movers of the needle, all of whom operate in the vortex of hip-hop, have released arc-defining, time-stopping albums. Kanye West’s DONDA is one of them. Kendrick Lamar’s Mr. Morale & The Big Steppers is another. But for all their searing monumentality, they’re also incredibly alienating, designed as they are to lose people along the way. On the seething, bloodthirsty, Lemonade, album number six, Beyoncé was likeminded. Not so on Renaissance.
When she meets the moment here, she brings everyone with her.
This thing we call a beat, this thing we call texture, she weaponises and alchemises into higher, elemental forces. It’s both general and specific, implied and actual, metaphor and thing.
It was at the tail end of June that she first sounded her call. The lead single “BREAK MY SOUL” was a tantalising, hypnotic spell. She cast it three days after Drake’s own seventh album Honestly, Nevermind entered the ether, almost as if as a challenge, almost intimating that she knew he was going to misfire. These optics are crucial: Drake is the king of pop, and latter-day Beyoncé has been brutal in beating kings at their own games.
“Break My Soul” has a colossal blast radius. It’s the kind of late-period song that will be as loudly screamed for live as the older hits. It’s the kind of song personal mantras are made of. It’s the kind of song the album it arrived with will be remembered by. It’s also the kind of song whose merits are so unsubtly self-explanatory.
It achieves blastoff from 0:00 onwards. The first words aren’t sung by Beyoncé but by Big Freedia, which, already intuits the parameters its/the album’s heart will beat over and with, which is radical self-love, radical love for everybody (not in scare quotes), which is salvation, which is allyship for ways of life/love that have been unfairly, militantly forced into the shadows.
“You won’t break my soul”, she coos. It’s the kind of line that’s both abstract and specific, the kind that makes pop music a force that people are pious to. But it’s also superlatively effective in a wholly different way. In her hands, its meaning is amplified millionfold. For when she says “my”, she means “our”. “Your won’t break our soul” – after staring down the barrel of a global pandemic for two years, one that also welcomed into its dark thrall the phenomenon of a much bigger nation taking up arms against a much smaller one, tell me, who doesn’t need to hear that?
House – there’s so much of it here. House as an igniter of pure, sublime, dance floor-blessing fun. House as a raised fist against systemic erasure. House for the headphones and house for the daily fights, the perennial ones. Beyoncé invokes all without insisting on either. It’s so pure it’s fundamental, like air. Like the wind we are never not grateful for.
House is a big part of what makes RENAISSANCE the post-COVID-19 lighthouse that it is. The album, especially in its most outstanding songs, taps into the universality of pulse and pound for the kind of embracing, course-correcting, regenerative splendour that a voice-received-as-a-blessing like hers can convey. This thing we call a beat, this thing we call texture, she weaponises and alchemises into higher, elemental forces. It’s both general and specific, implied and actual, metaphor and thing. House as spirit; house as essence; house as limb-freeing, action-inspiring energy/urgency.
All the album’s many songs and sounds operate that way: “ALIEN SUPERSTAR” uses rhythm as a ceiling-smashing battering ram, as does the emphatic “MOVE”; “ENERGY” initiates an orgiatistic meld of house, funk, R&B and Afrobeats; “THIQUE” feminises the typically masculine signifiers of trap with a club-focused single-mindedness that’d make street-serving tough guys nod in approval and maybe even move; “SUMMER RENAISSANCE” kneels at the shrine of disco for the strength to live such that, “I'm a doc, I'm a nurse, I'm a teacher / Dominate is the best way to beat ya”, is a liveable reality.
Ironically, on the most consciously sound-celebrating album of her career, Beyoncé issues a humbling reminder that no other musician in pop music has less need for sound than her.
You believe it because Beyoncé says it, because she does it, because she actualises it by speaking it into existence. That’s RENAISSANCE’s second-greatest coup. Whether celebratory or pained, its reality is indelible and tremulous. And for all its sonic craftsmanship – really, the way sheer canons of sound are gathered and organised here is worthy of its own syllabus – the foremost method of credibility that Beyoncé employs here is the one she’s always had, her most irresistible veneer: Her voice.
The sum total of the music speaks what she tells it to speak. It’s spellbinding how listening to any particular song here, especially where the references are already ingrained, like the hushed, gorgeous ode to back-to-basics R&B “PLASTIC OFF THE SOFA”, makes it plain as day how much sway her voice has over the instrumentals at any given moment in time.
Ironically, on the most consciously sound-celebrating album of her career, Beyoncé issues a humbling reminder that no other musician in pop music has less need for sound than her.
This makes the album’s greatest coup resound all the more immaculately and powerfully. In the hour over which its 19 songs unravel, in its album cover, Beyoncé is urging home the truth that we live within time. We cannot elude its grasp but we can use it as a canvas on which we can and should (re)inscribe the meaning of our experience. Whether you’re Lady Godiva astride a towering steed, or a world-running superstar-wife-mother-goddess elevating the discourse around pop music and its place in the past, present and future of history, or the person listening to her whose pulse is quickened by what she’s saying and how she’s saying it, and whose dreams are as alive in them in as their heartbeat is, you have a presence worthy of emanation.
This album beckons you to tell your own story. Because those stories are worth the telling. Because, if you don’t, the pandemic wins, the war wins, the darkness wins.
Don’t let them win.
