Beyoncé’s “Renaissance” and the Case for Misery Resistance
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Trusted dance floors make attendees part of a shared secret—the magic created by DJ selection, song resonance, and body rocking approval. The collective sway ignited when speakers merge with movement and spirit. Given the energy sparked by the release of Beyoncé’s seventh solo studio album, Renaissance, which arrived on July 29, it’s about time we put the living legend in the centuries-long tradition of Black dance music, where she belongs. Indeed, if we are talking about dance and music, then we’re talking about technique. For Beyoncé, it’s not just calling out Houston and New Orleans. It’s holding up the glory for the home of rhythm and blues and the birthplace of jazz. It’s connecting the Negro nostril to exceptional musicianship. It’s putting Big Freedia in the same world as Mahalia Jackson and Marie Laveau. In this world, booties move without thought—in the club, under the choir robe, or in the cemetery. Renaissance carries the weight of Black musical genealogies and geographies.
Of course, any flirting Beyoncé does around new music unleashes palpable anticipation worldwide, but to release “Break My Soul” as Renaissance’s lead single during a string of “social upheavals” made the nearly five-minute track an instant anthem. At the lyrical demand of Big Freedia (e.g., “Release the anger, release our minds, release our jobs, release the times”)—whose 2014 song “Explode” is sampled throughout—“Break My Soul” helped many of us find an outlet for collective unresolved and unaddressed grief. A rhythm-filled moment of silence for the folks we lost (and are losing) over the past couple years. Some might call “Break My Soul” a remix or mashup of “Explode” and Robin S.’s “Show Me Love.” This slight adjustment of how the song is read would make Beyoncé less of the leading artist on the track and instead a featured guest in the world of Black queerness and New Orleans bounce music. And yet she holds her own. “Break My Soul” works because it's a collaboration we needed to feel.
Beyoncé, a daughter and lover of the deep South, plays a unique role in the dance floor experiment. Her sound is connected to what scholar and writer Kevin Quashie calls “Black aliveness.” The cacophony of joy and clamoring around this woman is about the truth of what the Black South means to America and all its musical and linguistic forms. But what does it mean to make the Black South, Black queer musical legacies, and Black diaspora speak to one another in one setting? Renaissance has an answer. Beyoncé injects a sense of joy into an otherwise depressing time and helped initiate a long overdue discussion about house, a Black musical form that’s never received the commercial attention that comes with the force of Beyoncé.
Each song on Renaissance is exquisitely produced. The transitions highlight the difference between a mixtape and a playlist, calling up the transition work on Prince’s Parade album, which is also the soundtrack for 1986’s Under the Cherry Moon. The song sequencing on the album is determined by tempo. On Renaissance, you can hear the producers (many of whom were DJs at earlier stages of their careers) adjusting the pitch control to mix the next song. The next story. The next chapter. The next iteration of freedom. This is an album about the details of craft and the liberatory nature of gender and sexual fluidity. Equally impressive is the drum programming, the phrasing, and the appropriately placed bumps and thumps, moving the album with confidence underneath, behind, and in front of the songs—world-building regional rhythms.
Renaissance is one of Beyoncé’s most extraordinarily curated projects, and that’s because she and her crew get better with time. The 16-track project opens with “I’m That Girl,” a surprise for people who, upon hearing “Break My Soul,” prepared to step into the world of deep house and hadn’t considered Jamaica as part of the conversation of gay club music. Starting with Caribbean sounds encourages listeners to participate in an ongoing “contemplative dialogue,” as bell hooks called it, between the Caribbean, the UK, and the U.S. And how all of us in these “territories” have created innovative bass cultures that speak to the social conditions of the places we call home throughout the Black Atlantic. From hand-built sound systems to rent parties, “I’m That Girl” reminds me that we’ve done far more than make do. We shaped new genres of music at the intersection of possibility and pleasure. “I’m That Girl” is a beautiful clash between the looped vocals of Memphis-born Prince Loco and its two other writers: Terius “The-Dream” Nash, from North Carolina, and Kelman Duran, from the Dominican Republic. Diaspora.
“Church Girl” holds a special place in discussing the false binary between Black gospel and secular music. It’s a win for preacher kids like the Marvin Gayes, Sam Cookes, and Nina Simones of the world, who had to manage their affinities for pop, soul, and jazz while their parents led judgmental churchgoers. Those same churchgoers chose silence and shaming in the eighties, when Black queer folk started disappearing from the choir stand and the congregation due to the AIDS epidemic. For that crowd, “Church Girl” is a perfectly blasphemous version of what James H. Cones told us are the spiritual blues.
If we’re being honest, Aretha Franklin was exactly whom Beyoncé is describing as she sings, “Church girl acting loose, bad girls acting snotty.” Though the judgment that shaped Franklin’s teen mom years did nothing to disturb her ministry as one of the funkiest gospel singers in the world. And there’s a vital history found between funk and gospel in Detroit. “Church Girl” uses the sample of “Center Thy Will,” a song written by Elbernita Clark-Terry of the Clark Sisters. In the late 1970s and early 1980s, they blurred the lines between disco and gospel music, thanks to “You Brought the Sunshine” and their countless other tunes receiving heavy rotation at various famed queer clubs, aka sanctuaries.
“Pure/Honey” is most intentional about positioning the DJ as a key figure in the ballroom scene. The combination of samples used is a lesson in recognizing what DJ MikeQ (who was sampled on the track) describes as the “vogue trinity: DJs, dancers, and commentators.” The trinity shapes the highly specialized music specific to competitive categories—realness tracks, runway tracks, voguing tracks, hand performance tracks, just to name a few. The fact that we hear Kevin Aviance’s voice before we hear Beyoncé's is another way the album pays homage to the scene. Aviance admitted to being touched by the gesture of having him begin, and his good friend Moi Renee end, the song. The repeated “Ms. Honey” is the obituary that Moi Renee deserves.
As a project, Renaissance is for Angie Xtravaganza, Venus Xtravaganza, Hector Xtravaganza, Kim Pendavis, Octavia St. Laurent, and Dorian Corey—cast members of the Paris Is Burning film, who, like Moi Renee, are no longer here. It’s for the late Willi Ninja, creator of voguing and fierce father of the House of Ninja. There’s rich spiritual magic in all three of Beyoncé’s previous albums, including Lemonade and Black Is King. They all sent us running to the crates digging for connections, samples, references, and meaning, like a tarot deck. With Renaissance, Beyoncé’s proven that she’s the head majorette leading all of us to find parts of ourselves in the world around her music.
Beyoncé's Renaissance is available to stream via Apple Music, Amazon Music, Spotify, and Tidal.
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