Renaissance: Category is… Bey!

Whenever Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter graces us with an album drop, what excites me just as much as the new music is the feeling of living through a shared cultural moment. Particularly online! Ever since Bey “changed the game with that digital drop” — the surprise release of her *truly* game-changing self-titled album on a fateful Friday night in December 2013 — her releases have felt akin to a comet’s apparition: sudden, vibrant, inspirational, conversation-starting, a shake-up for the culture. Since Beyoncé is an artist consistently at the absolute top of her craft, each release begs the question: How will she possibly manage to one-up herself again?

Act I: Renaissance, Beyoncé’s latest disco-ball in the night sky (and first true solo project since 2016’s Lemonade) feels like another one of these cultural moments. After two weeks of listening and dancing to the album on repeat, there’s no question that the Queen has done it again; Beyoncé has delivered perhaps the most daring, audacious, and UNIQUE albums of her 25 year-long career.

In this album, the first of an upcoming trilogy recorded throughout the pandemic (her “Lord of the Rings” slay…), category is: DISCO. Category is: HOUSE. Category is: Breathing new life into oft-maligned genres of music that have been distorted, displaced, and appropriated from their original creators.

For years, disco & dance music have been the butt of a bad joke, that pivoting to these genres was an attempt to salvage one’s career by “pandering to the gays.” It should be noted that this negative connotation towards these influential genres of music was not coincidence, but rather (you guessed it) targeted racism, homophobia, and bigotry!! (*insert air-horn sounds*) The “Disco Sucks” movement of the late 1970s targeted & belittled the genre specifically because it was a music for Black and queer folks by Black and queer folks.

And while in modern times, the tides have turned back in disco’s favor with some fantastic disco-inspired records (Dua Lipa’s Future Nostalgia, Jessie Ware’s What’s Your Pleasure, & Kylie Minogue’s Disco to name a few,) hardly any have taken the time and care that Beyoncé has put into honoring the genre’s roots and legacy. Through the album’s 16 tracks, Beyoncé samples, interpolates, and remixes a bevy of classic disco, house, and ballroom classics in an effort to both honor the musical legacy of the sounds she pulls from while still creating something uniquely hers.

Beyoncé dedicates this album in part to her late Uncle Johnny, a gay man who helped raise her & Solange, introduced the sisters to Black Queer culture, and tragically died young during the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Uncle Johnny is memorialized on “HEATED” (A track penned in part by Drake, who despite releasing a middling House album of his own this June, delivers one of Renaissance’s standout tracks). In an album dedication posted on her website, she describes Uncle Johnny as her “Godmother and the first person to expose [her] to a lot of the culture and music that serve as inspiration for this album.”

There’s something so comforting in knowing just how reverent Beyoncé is of Queer & Black Culture. It is not just a set of musical aesthetics and sounds that she’s appropriating for some bops. Her love and reverence for this music and culture shines throughout the project, not just in its sampled sounds, but in its prominent inclusion of Black Queer voices such as TS Madison’s “B**ch I’m Black” monologue in “COZY” and Big Freedia’s “Explode” which practically provides the entire musical groundwork for “BREAK MY SOUL”. Many think of sampling as simply a process of taking sounds from other artists and remixing them into your own, but in these instances it feels like Beyoncé is letting these voices stand on their own and take center stage.

“PURE/HONEY'' is a feast in this regard: highlighting ballroom culture with samples of MikeQ & Kevin JZ Prodigy’s ballroom staple “Feels Like”, Kevin Aviance’s “Cunty”, and (perhaps my favorite deep-cut on the record) 90s drag legend Moi Renee’s “Miss Honey”.

As mentioned earlier, this album was Beyoncé’s pandemic project, and it is very much a reflection of our collective grief and the way we use music and dance as an escape. Some might see this escapism as vapid or even irresponsible, but for the queer community, it has always been an essential tool of survival. The dance floor reminds us that there is still love and joy and meaning to be found even in the most dire of times. It was true of the HIV/AIDS epidemic of the 80s and 90s and has held true today, as we face not only the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic, but a slew of renewed anti-LGBTQ bigotry exacerbated by the monkeypox outbreak, for which the queer community is already quickly becoming a scapegoat.

Shit is bleak! But it’s times like these that music like this hits the hardest. After the release of the album’s lead single “BREAK MY SOUL”, many were quick to point out how dance music always tends to make its biggest comebacks when the culture is getting real spooky-ooky and the economy is getting real stanky. Renaissance offers us a new chance to find freedom and joy amidst the chaos.

This sense of freedom and joy permeates through the structure of the album itself. Beyoncé eschews traditional song structure almost entirely throughout Renaissance. Songs meander and flow from idea to idea, vibe to vibe, song to song, often seamlessly with some of the best & most satisfying transition work I’ve ever heard. In a culture where pop songs have grown shorter and shorter, Beyoncé has bravely declared that 4 to 6 minute songs are back. “PLASTIC OFF THE SOFA” is a sultry, groovy love song that lounges and takes its sweet time as Beyoncé luxuriates into some absolutely stunning vocal runs before transitioning into the even longer and hornier “VIRGO”S GROOVE”, where each declaration of Beyoncé’s desire seems to naturally spring up with increasing intensity throughout the 6 minute long track. All told it’s a perfect 10 minutes of music within an already skipless hour-long album.

Beyoncé’s albums are, above all else, love letters. Lemonade was a love letter to the spurned, the heartbroken, & the forgiven. Everything is Love was a love letter to…Jay-Z I guess? And The Gift/Black is King was a love letter to Blackness, ancestry, and the diaspora.

Renaissance is a love letter too; this time to the Black Queer community, the culture we create, shape, & are hardly ever credited for. “COZY” features a verse where Bey lovingly sings through the colors of the Progress Pride flag (ala Joseph & The Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat), and in the recently released “BREAK MY SOUL - THE QUEENS REMIX” where the song is remixed with Madonna’s “Vogue”, Beyoncé shouts out not only some of the most influential Black women in the music industry, but also the names of legendary historic ballroom houses from the scene. It’s a sort of poetic justice for “Vogue”, a song which, while widely influential for bringing the art form of voguing to the national consciousness, never gave credit to the ballroom community that created it. It’s a perfect distillation of Renaissance’s ethos. Beyoncé is giving the foremothers and forefathers of the culture their long-overdue flowers.

Laurence Turner-Cordova is a California-based writer, podcaster, and card-carrying Beyhive member (don’t forget to pay your dues!) He produces and co-hosts Gay for Play: A Video Game Podcast on LGBTQ+ representation in gaming and pop culture.