Beyoncé’s new album, “Rebirth”, he’s self-consciously steeped in dance music history, astutely spanning decades of samples and sounds: Donna Summer and Chic’s ’70s disco, Jamaican dancehall, internet-speed hyperpop. He chose collaborators, references and even specific keyboard sounds that pay homage to memories of the land of clubbing as he makes his own 21st century statement. Here are some of the sources he celebrates and an exploration of the significance of him.
The second and third tracks of the album, “Cozy” Y “Alien Superstar” Writing and producing feature films by Chicago-born house music producer and DJ Honey Dijon. “Cozy” also includes a writing credit for Curtis Alan Jones, known as Cajmere or Green Velvet, one of Chicago’s biggest house music producers.
That place is key here. Chicago is the birthplace of house music, and Chicago house, in particular, often moves with a very pronounced swing, accentuated by staccato, octave-jumping bass patterns. The canonical example is “There’s No Going Back” by Adonis from 1986, and the bass line from “Cozy” play as an investment of it. The song is almost mnemonically recognizable as early Chicago house without simply sounding like an homage.
In “Alien Superstar” the hook’s cadence (“I’m too fancy for this world/I’m forever that girl”) is attributed to an interpolation of Right Said Fred’s dancefloor novelty “I’m too sexy.” Taylor Swift borrowed the same part (also with credit) in her 2017 song “Look What You Made Me Do,” and Drake sampled the 1992 song in 2021’s “Way Too Sexy.”
There is another direct callback at “Spoof it”: The bass line is instantly recognizable as the progeny of Bernard Edwards’ monster riff from Chic’s “Good Times” a No. 1 hit in 1979, and Edwards’ partner in Chic, Nile Rodgers, is credited for writing and playing guitars here. (On bass and drums: rafael saadiq.) As Ken Barnes pointed out in his liner notes to “The Disco Years Vol. 4: Lost in Music,” a Rhino Records compilation, rewriting Chic became something of a national pastime in the early 1980s, especially in the early 1980s. through early hip-hop and post-disco R&B. This version of one, two, three (break) is just as indebted to the many rewrites of “Good Times” as the original: the Sugarhill gang “Rapper’s Delight” and Vaughn Mason “Bounce, Rock, Skate, Roll” for instance.
“Energy” features the writing and production of Skrillex, an EDM festival superstar in the early 2010s known for his drops, dramatic build-ups that resolve to a fresh beat, but since his heyday, he’s largely worked behind the scenes. scene. (See the success of Justin Bieber in 2015 “Where are u now,” which he did with Diplo.) “Energy” seems to operate on wires; it’s taut minimalism, with the subtlest layers of sub-bass tones.
The song also has writing credits for Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo, the Neptunes songwriting-producing duo known for their work with a wide swath of singers and rappers beginning in the 1990s. Thursday, before the release of “Rebirth,” singer-songwriter Kelis spoke on social media, saying those credits were for a sample of one of her songs (it turned out to be an interpolation of 2003’s “Milkshake”). , and that she had not given permission for the use of it. Kelis was not a credited writer or producer on most of the early albums she made with the Neptunes, and she had no credits on “Milkshake.” in a 2020 interview with The Guardian she said that she had signed a deal with the duo when “I was too young and too stupid to double check.”
A similar situation arose with the album’s lead single, “Break my soul” which is indebted to Korg’s central motif of Robin S.’s pop-house hit “Show Me Love”. But it was initially unclear if his 1992 remix was sampled, and within the first week of the song’s release, the credits changed. (The latest version says that Beyoncé’s song “contains elements” of “Show Me Love”.) The life after death of the Robin S. song has been solid: its riff was featured in the 2019 song by the producer of Brooklyn AceMo. “Where are they?” with John FM, which became a key underground dance anthem before and during the pandemic, as well as recent releases from Charlie XCX Y daddy yankee.
Another key to “Break My Soul” is the shouts of exhortation (“Release your wiggle!”) from New Orleans jump artist Big Freedia, whom Beyoncé had previously sampled on “Formation” (2016). Bounce is a style of dance music created in New Orleans that is blisteringly fast, bass-heavy, and heavy on call and response; twerking arose in response to it.
Beyoncé looks back to the late ’90s in “Plastic off the couch.” While most of the song is a lush digital ballad, there is a moment in its coda that could have come from “glitch” experimental electronica, where the end of a heavily overdubbed vocal run is subjected to a deliberately audible edit. It’s jarring but above all humorous hair: an audible wink to the listener, a facet of modern pop’s high-tech production laid bare. (For an example from the ’90s, see Oval’s album “94disc,” or the compilation “Clicks + Cuts” published in 2000).
The classic drive asserts itself at the midpoint of the album. “The Rhythm of Virgo” features layers of rippling percussion, synth, and bass that update the production work Quincy Jones did with Michael Jackson, a kind of Daft Punk companion piece. “Get luck.” “Move on,” the next track, includes a function of grace jones – disco royalty, in case anyone was wondering where Beyoncé came from.
Just as notable on “Move,” and even more notable on “America Has a Problem,” is the swarming low end known in the dance world as the “Reese bass.” The term is a reference to a 1988 record, “I Just Want Another Chance” by Reeseone of many aliases used by Kevin Saunderson, one of the first producers identified with Detroit techno in the mid-1980s.
In the same way that “Chicago house” refers not only to a style and its birthplace, but also to that octave-jumping sound, “Detroit techno” tends to denote attention to detail and an aura of restless invention. The fog-heavy bass of “Just Want Another Chance” was often reused by styles of London bass music such as jungle, drum & bass, UK garage and dubstep, what writer Simon Reynolds has called the “hardcore continuum” of British musical black. inner-city styles that took root on London pirate radio.
Beyoncé’s use of Reese’s heavy, undulating bass on “Move” and “America Has a Problem” further places the album on the black dance music continuum. “Problem” also opens with orchestral stabs, a la Afrika Bambaataa & the Soulsonic Force, the landmark electronic rap track. “Planet Rock” – or, even more aptly given the title and lyrical theme, Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation”.
“Heated” features Beyoncé in a commanding neo-dancehall form over a slinky, woodblock-heavy beat. At the end of the song, she mentions playing tracks with her fingers on the MPC, an instrument designed by Roger Linn that came out in 1988. The MPC, made by Akai, is not played with a keyboard, but instead has a square keyboard. grid of pads that trigger different sounds, and has become a popular performance and composition tool.
“Thick” sounds like something that would have been on every dubstep dancefloor in the days before Skrillex, when the subgenre’s slack bass and variable tempos were mostly the province of British producers. Sure enough, the song’s writing and production credits list an artist influenced by those musicians: Chauncey Hollis Jr., aka Hit-Boy, who produced a dubstep-inflected hit in Jay-Z and Kanye West’s “Watch the Throne” (2011).
The sounds of plasticine “Thick” segue into the even more heavily synthetic “All On Your Mind” co-produced by general cook, the main mind behind the London-based label and art collective PC Music, which arrived in the mid-2010s with a sound based on stylish hype – tones that were not just loud in a machine music form, but deliberately screeching (sophiethe producer known for exhilarating hyperpop who died in 2021, came from this camp.) “All Up” is futuristic robo-pop, with a subwoofer line that seems to be diving under the speakers rather than emanating from them.
“pure honey,” Penultimate, it’s another sub-bass monster: the first part, driven by a nasty kick drum, is a surprising approach to techno in its steeliest, or perhaps “purest” form. The “honey” arrives at the 2:11 mark, a bulbous neo-disco beat with feathery horns reminiscent of early Wild. The track is run in part from a sample of a subtitled Kevin Aviance song “The feeling” — one of the key recordings in a queer house sub-style known as “bitch tracks”.
The final track of the album, “Summer Revival” features Beyoncé singing, “It’s so good, it’s so good, it’s so good, it’s so good” over a very familiar pinball riff — yes, the ending interpolates Donna Summer’s. “I feel love,” the 1977 disco hit with a synth backdrop and a throbbing beat that foreshadowed the future sound of dance music. But the main melodic phrase of “I Feel Love” sounds like it’s being played on the Korg keyboard that anchors “Break My Soul,” subtly bridging two eras into a third.