Revolutionary Fun: Why we can’t stop talking about Beyoncé’s ‘Renaissance’

After nearly a decade of shifting the music industry with surprise drops and arresting visual albums, Beyoncé’s seventh full-length album, Renaissance, emerged into the world on Friday in a way that almost felt traditional. There was a lead single, a properly announced release date and even a highly publicized leak, but the retro-leaning familiarity of Beyoncé’s approach hasn’t lessened the impact of an album that demands a deep decoding. Thick with references to dance music past and present and the Black artists who’ve built the genre, there’s much to dig into on the overwhelming, energetic and well-studied Renaissance.

Can Queen Bey command the legions of listeners who follow her back to those sweaty, communal, utopian spaces that span decades of history and memory? NPR Music convened three critics — Ann Powers, Jason King and LaTesha Harris — to linger over the build and release of Renaissance and see how deep the dance floor ecstasy goes.

Jason King: The first thing that strikes me about Renaissance, Beyoncé’s ultra-anticipated seventh solo album, is that it’s her first full-length release I’ve listened to rather than watched since 2011’s 4. Every other Bey event of the past nine years — 2013’s surprise visual album Beyoncé, 2016’s HBO-delivered musical film Lemonade, 2019’s Netflix-assisted Homecoming, 2020’s Disney+ tie-in Black is King — has been an immersive feast for the eyes as much as, or even more than, the ears. This time around, Renaissance’s retro-’90s lead single “Break My Soul” climbed the pop charts without an official narrative feature music video. Beyoncé’s no fool: she promoted Renaissance by way of a high-end fashion spread in British Vogue, and the tantalizing, slickly-rendered album art and photography. But I’m struck that she seems to want us to mostly hear her first—and all that implies.

Renaissance is a maximalist opus of 16 tracks that summon six decades of innovation across the sprawling multiverse of post-1970s Black dance music. It’s Beyoncé, so naturally it’s shrewdly calculated: There’s Nile Rodgers’ iconic chucking ’70s disco guitar on “Cuff It;” the pioneering Chicago house of Green Velvet on “Cozy” (along with house music DJ Honey Dijon, who also contributes to “Alien Superstar”); the buckwild hip-hop banger “Church Girl” featuring a Twinkie Clark gospel sample served up by co-producers No I.D. and The-Dream; not to mention West African Afrobeats and South African gqom, trap and a whole lot more.

Songs start one way and then somehow morph into something else: “Pure/Honey” serves up 1990s underground New York voguing music (thanks to its sample of Kevin Aviance’s “Cunty”) before transforming into breezy Prince-esque ’80s boogie. Samples and interpolations of the funk music past, paying homage to legends from James Brown to Teena Marie, abound in Beyoncé’s expansive, quasi-chaotic musical Cuisinart. Even in the absence of Beyoncé’s customary immersive visuals, Renaissance is such a barreling head rush of creative musical, sonic and lyrical ideas that the work of deconstructing and making sense of it is inherent to the album’s coded power. Whether the results successfully cohere and do what Beyoncé seems to hope they will do — inspire escapist fun and transcendence in these grim times — is something to ponder.

LaTesha Harris: With a multitude of mirrors for light to reflect off, a disco ball is a space of infinite possibilities. Every glance offers a new perspective, a new world to disappear into. In late 2020, I predicted that Beyoncé planned to pivot to disco for her long-awaited solo seventh studio album based solely on the fact that her IG updates featured more power clashing fits. True to the clues, Beyoncé’s sonorous new release is a power clash. Ambitious and experimental, disparate elements merge together with tracks starting in one era and ending in a different one.

As Jason described, Renaissance, the first of what she has called a three-part project, turns disco’s infinite potential into a showcase of the sonic Black diaspora. In every refraction of light, a different genre is transformed and beamed down to the dance floor with the sole purpose of getting listeners out of their heads and into their bodies. What you said about this being the first Beyoncé project in nearly a decade we could only listen to start is so poignant. If Renaissance is the theme of the ball, Beyoncé is the house mother fussin’ on the balcony, the queen on the floor serving face, the spectator snapping in time and omnipotent judge all at once. We’re not meant to watch the renaissance, we’re meant to go out and create it.

Ann Powers: Thank you both for setting up the question that’s been haunting me ever since Beyoncé began the Renaissance rollout with the imperiously ecstatic “Break My Soul” and an image of her astride a glass horse, embodying disco decadence: Can Beyoncé actually have fun? Is that what this project is all about? She highlights that word in “Cuff It,” the joyful Chic tribute that’s one of the album’s most instantly memorable tracks. “Have you ever had fun like this?” she sings with a softness that glows up the next line, the song’s lyrical hook — “We gon’ f*** up the night.” Fun is what f**** up the night, what sets the established order on its head.

I’m distinguishing “fun” from “pleasure” here, and also from the work (it, girl) of providing fun to others. Fun is unpredictable and does not have a goal, even the bodily fulfillment pleasure offers: In queer spaces, the scholar Ben Walters writes, it is the sparkle dust that unites individuals: “Queer fun builds queer worlds.” Beyoncé has long been a master and outspoken advocate of sexual pleasure, but even at her most sensual — think of “Rocket,” which includes the line “I do it like it’s my profession” — she’s about business more than fun. Her command of the erotic is yet another product of her perfectionism, and if she gets mind-blowing orgasms out of it, that’s her due.

Fun refutes the kind of perfectionism by which she lives, which is why I doubted her when she implied in her initial announcement that this project would be her entryway into it. Within her career, this child performer turned mother-mogul has embodied many virtues. Her impeccable work ethic complemented by her skill at maintaining an enviable work-life balance; her claims to power coupled with a steadfast commitment to mentorship and building Black-centered community; her visionary capabilities grounded in a dedication to craft — all of these qualities have made Beyoncé the formidable leader of an ever-more aspirational pop world. Yet for all the pleasure and catharsis she’s offered her fans, Beyoncé has rarely presented herself as buoyantly free within her music. She works so we can enjoy her. So, accepting that she did feel as free as she claims while making this music, I am compelled to ask — what is the functionality of her fun?

Mason Poole/Via Parkwood Entertainment

Jason King: On first listen, Renaissance seems to sidestep emotional confessionalism. There’s no deep dive into protest politics, despite the loaded title of album cut “America Has a Problem.” By any definition, that’s a hard left turn for an artist whose 2016 Lemonade became one of the most politically trenchant and emotionally compelling works of art to emerge during a decade defined by #BlackLivesMatter and #MeToo concerns. But Renaissance may be activist in another way: The album’s driving focus on rhythm drove me — desperately — to hear these songs on a crowded dance floor in the IRL company of other dancers. I ventured Saturday night to a handful of New York queer bars and clubs to hear DJs spin selected album tracks (and in one club, the DJ just played the entire album in sequence). The electrifying beats and grooves did what they were intended to do: They summoned me to the nearest clubs, compelling me to shake off the isolation and silos I’ve become accustomed to over the past couple of years of pandemic Hell. Is Renaissance’s mission of dance floor togetherness and social aggregation right on time? Or is it too early in its attempt to engineer the Roaring 2020s, given that we’re still slogging our way through an exhaustive third summer of a global pandemic (and emerging viral outbreaks like monkeypox) and we’re not out of it yet, no matter how hard some of us wish we were?

However you look at it, Renaissance is Beyoncé’s Funkadelic moment, her Clintonian offer of a chance to dance your way out of your constrictions, to free your ass so your mind can follow — musical motivation to release your wiggle. It’s telling that Renaissance wraps up with “Summer Renaissance,” a key-shifting, deconstructed interpolation of Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” — the pivotal 1977 track that helped inaugurate modern electronica and the current neo-disco craze. It’s a brazen mic drop moment, a potent reminder that Black women — like Summer and Beyoncé herself — have always already been at the center, not on the periphery, of the past 50 years of electronic and dance music innovation.

LaTesha Harris: Beyoncé is generous to the girls who tore up the dance floor before her. Lead single “Break My Soul” shows love to Robin S. and Big Freedia, a New Orleans rapper whose work reflects a direct evolution of disco to hip-hop to bounce, and she snagged a feature from Studio-54 staple Grace Jones on the Tems-assisted “Move.” She also doesn’t shy away from the soulful aspects of house, rooting the genre in its Black origins as she replatforms it for the masses. The most notable stop in this extensive tour de flowers is Beyoncé’s sampling of Moi Renee, a centerpiece of New York’s underground ball culture in the ’90s. The multi-layered “Pure/Honey” is a masterclass, a nod to Mr. Fingers, and it even features a shoutout to Janet Jackson’s 1986 funk hit, “Nasty” before returning back to the ball with Renee’s “Miss Honey” — often considered the first bitch track. The drag legend’s inclusion and replatforming on Renaissance makes the album Beyoncé’s most explicit embrace of the support she’s recieved from her longstanding queer audience. Shortly before the album’s release, Beyoncé posted a statement on her website, thanking her Uncle Jonny who died of HIV-related complications in the early ’90s: “He was my Godmother and the first person to expose me to a lot of the music and culture that serve as inspiration for this album. Thank you to all the pioneers who originate culture, to all of the fallen angels whose contributions have gone unrecognized for far too long. This is a celebration for you.”

As much as Renaissance is Beyoncé’s first electronic dance record, it’s also her first solo rap record. Album opener, “I’m That Girl,” arguably one of its more confessional tracks, delivers an homage to Princess Loko, an underground pioneer of Southern gangsta rap in the ’90s. In returning to her roots as a teenaged music lover who grew up on Southern hip-hop, she has reinvented her approach to sound. Bey weaves trap elements, notably her signature rap-sing cadence as she delivers jaw-dropping bars, with synth beats akin to the bitch tracks ’90s drag queens vogued to in gay underground ballroom scenes. True to her intention to honor hip-hop’s legacy within the space of disco, on “Heated,” a pop-trap masterclass that features the Queen at her most braggadocious, she brags, “Fan me off, I’m hot, hot, hot. Like stolen Chanel, lock me up in jail. Fingertips go tap, tap, tap on my MPC, makin’ disco trap.”

Ann Powers: Rap-mode Beyonce has long been her most playful manifestation, even as she matches any rival for wit and dexterity. That’s extra true on Renaissance – I particularly love “Pure/Honey,” LaTesha, not just for its nod to queens past but because her bratty, snappy delivery invokes Moi Renee’s sharp, chaotic energy. By foregrounding voices like Renee’s and Big Freedia’s, who’ve been marginalized within a hip-hop pantheon grounded in traditionally masculine notions of virtuosity and strength, Beyonce also claims a safe space for herself. Like Madonna, who’s returned to her dance floor roots many times to relax and rejuvenate, Beyonce is now over 40 in a pop field that barely tolerates women, and in this space she finds sustenance and affirmation.

When I first heard “Break My Soul,” I honestly felt her voice was a bit lost in its swirling blare; but now I think that’s the point. The internet chatter about Big Freedia’s command to “release your wiggle” (and Beyonce’s girlish echo, “I just quit my job and fell in love”) being part of the mythical Great Resignation is off-base, in my opinion. This is about finding freedom wholly in the moment, in the provisional utopia a club can provide, and being rejuvenated so you can work — and fight — another day. It’s instructive to recall the previous time Beyonce sampled Freedia, on “Formation,” which along with its Katrina-themed video formed one of her most overtly political statements. A call to arms and to raised consciousness, “Formation” highlighted a Freedia line that reinforced that message: “I came to slay, bitch.” Now, we’re going on a decade of queer and BIPOC activism in the face of brutal challenge after brutal challenge. As the ACT-UP and Queer Nation activists who danced by night and raged by day knew, resilience requires not only fierceness but flexibility. Today’s influencers call it self-care. “Break My Soul” resonated differently days after its release, after Roe v. Wade was overturned and new threats to LGBTQIA+ rights loomed. The wiggle it released in people was a soul adjustment needed to survive the battering.