It’s too much, this being alive. Too heavy, too uncertain, too chronically cataclysmic, too warlike, too sick, too burdened with the possibility of death. perception of error The word of the last few years—at least in American academic and activist circles—has been “precarious”. That reaches the ideas of danger, abandonment, contingency, risk. Basically: They were worried. Y: We are worried that you are not worried enough. Like I said: it’s too much.
If I were a world-famous musician whose meaning is inspected in every blink, now might be the time to find out what it feels like to mean something else, to seem lighter, to float, to sway, to splash, to writhe and squeak, sashay-shante. . To find “new salvation” in the construction of their “own foundation”.
If I were that musician, now might be the time to call my freestyle jam “America has a problem” and I don’t say what the problem is because A) Psyche! B) What am I going to say that you don’t already know? YC) The person who actually performs this song knows that “that booty will do what he wants.” Now is the time to work your body instead of losing more of your mind. “America” is one of the closing tracks on “Rebirth,” Beyoncé’s seventh solo studio album, in which she analyzes the stakes and concludes that the stakes are too high. Now is the time to remind yourself: “tell everyone”, as she sings on the first single, “Break My Soul” — that there is no speech without a record.
What a good time this is. All 16 songs come from somewhere with a dance floor: nightclubs, strip clubs, dance halls, basements, tatooine. Most of them are steeped in or carried out entirely with black queer bravado. And in almost all of them, Beyoncé sounds like she’s experiencing something personally new and privately glorious: utter ecstasy. She takes different forms: said, obviously; but also a sexy severity. The exercise of control is as fun on this album as the exorcism of stress.
As expensive, production-wise, as “Renaissance” sounds (one song credits two dozen writers, including samples and interpolations), Beyoncé’s singing here transcends any price tag. The range of her voice is close to galactic; the imagination that drives it qualifies as cinema. She coos, growls, growls, doubles and triples. Butter, mustard, foie gras, the perfect ratio between icing and cupcake.
About halfway through, something called “Plastic Off the Sofa” arrives. Now a part of me cried because those are words she doesn’t even bother to sing. Plastic from the sofa? I got you back! The rest of me wept because the singing she does, in waves of rhapsodically long, Olympic-level emissions, seems to emanate from somewhere far beyond the human throat: the ocean? The oven? But this is one of the few songs that sound recorded with live instruments: guitar riffs and some pitter-pat percussion. (The musical plastic comes out of the album couch.) The bass line keeps growing, curving and blooming until it outgrows her flower bed, and so does Beyoncé’s voice. She surfs the waves. She smells like roses. “Renaissance” turns gospel here and there, in “Church Girl”, more unabashedly. This is the only one that sounds like it was recorded in Eden.
It takes a minute for all the ecstasy of “Rebirth” to kick in. First comes a mission statement (“I’m That Girl”) in which Beyoncé warns that love is her drug. She then cuts to “Cozy,” a budding anthem about black women reveling in her skin. This one has a bottom as heavy as a cast-iron skillet and a bounce that the Richter scale couldn’t ignore. “Cozy” is all about comfort, but it sounds like an oncoming army. The first true exhale is “Cuff It,” a roller-skate jam held aloft by Nile Rodgers’ trademark fluttering guitar as a fleet of trumpets provide afterburn. Here, Beyoncé wants to go out and have an impossible-to-post good time. And it’s contagious enough to overthink a throwaway line like “I want to disappear” later, when am sober.
Comedy abounds. Thanks for sample contributions from Big Freedia and Ts Madison for that. “Dark skin, light skin, beige” — Madison slurs “Cozy” — “fluorescent beige.” Thanks to the tabloid television keyboard explosions on “America Has a Problem.” But Beyoncé herself has never been funnier than here. The severity she applies to the word “No” in “America” would be enough. But there is his personification of grace jonesthe imperiousness of “Move,” a ballroom refraction in which the two order the mob to “part like the Red Sea” when the queen arrives. (Here I am without touching who is the queen on that stage). Pop music has been tattooed with Jones’s influence for 45 years. This is one of the few main acknowledgments of his abundant musical power. There’s also Beyoncé’s vampire at the end of “Heated,” which he recites with the sound of an open fan. he is one of those round table freestyles they go down on some balls. A fraction of it includes: “UnnnCle Jonny made my dress/That cheap spandex/It looks like a mess.”
This is an album whose great idea is house. And his sense of home is enormous. It’s mansion music. “Renaissance” is adjacent to where pop has been: pulsing and throbbing. His muscles are bigger, his limbs more flexible, his ego secure. I don’t hear concerns from the market. His sense of adventure is outside the genre map, but very aware of each coordinate. It is an achievement of synthesis that never sounds servile or synthetic. These songs are testing this music, celebrating how spacious it is, how malleable. That might be why I like “Break My Soul” so much. It’s Track 6, but it feels like the thematic backbone of the album. It has tenderness, resolution and ideas: Beyoncé negotiates two different approaches to the church.
In “Pure/Honey”, Beyoncé walks through wall after wall until she reaches the room that houses all of her cousins. 2013 hot “Hit”. It ends with her singing along with a sample of the drag artist Moi Renee bellowing, “Miss Honey? Miss darling! And it’s the closest the B-52s like a Beyoncé song could never come. (But Kate, Cindy, Fred, Keith: Call her anyway!)
The album’s embrace of house and not, shall we say, trap, unequivocally aligns Beyoncé with black queer people. On the one hand, that means she’s simply an elite pop star with particularly avid support. But “Rebirth” is more than just fan service. It is oriented towards certain stories. The knotty symbiosis between cis women and gay men is one. The doors of impersonation and homage rotate with centrifugal force.
With Beyoncé, her drag seems more liberating than obfuscating. It’s not just these lesser-known gay and trans artists and personalities that her music has absorbed. They are other artists. In “Blow,” Beyoncé wondered how her partner would feel when she made love to him. Now the question is: How does it feel for her to make love, and art, sometimes as someone else? The last song on the album is “Summer Revival” and begins with the drumbeat of “I Feel Love” by Donna Summer. It is not the first time that she quotes La Donna. But the wink is not only there, where the reference is explicit. It’s in the rich middle of the album, which includes that couch song and “Virgo’s Groove,” perhaps the most delicious track Beyoncé has ever recorded. That is to say that “Renaissance” is an album about the interpretation, of the past of another pop, but ultimately of Beyoncé, a star who is now 40 years old, an age in which the real risk is to act as if you have nothing to do with it. lose.
Another story is right there in the album title: 100 years ago, when things were too much for African-Americans too (lynchings, “race riots” across the country) and fleeing from the South to the North seemed like a good alternative to murder. Even in Harlem, Alain Locke and Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes and Aaron Douglas and Jessie Fauset, to choose five figures, were at the center of an explosion of art that could be as frivolous, party-loving and vulgar as some of what is out there. on this album. His performers were gay and straight and everything in between. The point is that they also called it a revival. He sustained and delivered delight and provocation despite the surrounding crisis, giving people looking for a house something approaching home. New salvation, old foundation.
Beyonce
“Renaissance”
(Parkwood Entertainment/Columbia)