Renaissance girl – Newspaper Kommersant No. 138 (7339) dated 08/02/2022

Beyoncé’s first studio album in six years, Renaissance, was released on July 29. The day before, it was leaked to the network, but the commercial results of the album are still amazing. Within hours of its official release, “Renaissance” topped the Spotify and Apple Music charts. Tells Boris Barabanov.

Beyoncé Knowles is a pop singer with an estimated net worth of $450 million, having sold 100 million of her albums worldwide by the time she released her seventh studio album, Renaissance. Therefore, the attention to “Renaissance” is unprecedented. Beyoncé belongs to the category of artists, each stroke of whose eyelashes immediately requires decoding, each gesture causes a storm of comments. What then to say about a lady who has not released an album for six years – since the album “Lemonade”.

In fairness, it’s worth saying that in these six years, Beyoncé has not disappeared from the radar, and this is putting it mildly.

In 2018, together with her husband Jay-Z, she released the album Everything Is Love, from which fans concluded that the singer had overcome a difficult period in her family life and was ready to sing about love again. Then, in 2018, Beyoncé became the headliner of the Coachella festival. Beyoncé performed in front of an audience of 125,000 with 100 dancers and Destiny’s Child reunited for the occasion. This performance, according to critics, set new standards for headlining festival sets. It attracted the most viewers in the history of an online broadcast from Coachella and set the record for any broadcast on YouTube. The Coachella performance formed the basis for the live album and movie Homecoming.

Beyoncé then voiced Nala in Jon Favreau’s The Lion King, released a soundtrack album for the film, and on the basis of this album she created her own film – Black Is King, designed in the style of “Afrofuturism”. Finally, in 2021, Beyoncé’s song “Be Alive” written for her was released along with the sports drama “King Richard”. All these releases, as usual, were accompanied by nominations for prestigious awards and impressive results in the charts. Even if you had other things to do in those six years, Beyoncé was still constantly in front of your eyes.

And you don’t have to listen to it at all. This whole impressive corpus of works was in one way or another addressed to a black audience or tied to current American issues of recent years. Beyoncé was a big part of the culture born out of the rise of American black feminism and the BLM movement. The new album “Renaissance” turned out to be a little closer to the public with other musical tastes.

Critics almost unanimously praise “Renaissance”, which means that, from their point of view, Beyoncé’s appeal to carefree disco music, and first of all to British house, is the right and timely thing. Perhaps the public really missed not only the “normal” Beyoncé album, but also the songs arranged differently from those that made her the most authoritative black singer.

One of the main storylines of Beyonce’s new album is the songs “Cuff It”, “Virgo`s Groove”, “Move” and “Summer Renaissance”. Beyoncé’s writers and collaborators include disco luminaries Nile Rodgers (Chic), Grace Jones, Giorgio Moroder and the late Donna Summer. The last two appeared on the album thanks to the song “I Feel Love” – ​​Beyoncé, following many of her colleagues, could not resist using the imperishable disco anthem in the new song. “Summer Renaissance” is the quintessence of today’s Beyoncé production method. She does not take fragments of other people’s songs as they are, but uses melodies in whole or in part, singles out one or more notes from the canonical keyboard part, stops one step away from a full quote, but does not forget to indicate the source in the song’s imprint.

The same method is used in the tracks of the album “Renaissance”, created under the influence of house of the 1990s. In the block of songs “Energy” and “Break My Soul” he is reminded of an echo of Robin’s hit “Show Me Love”, the mood is created through the use of keyboard timbres and familiar note sequences. So, in the “Summer Renaissance”, a bow towards disco classics is followed by a long period of pure recitative, and then, once again paying tribute to Donna Summer, Beyoncé moves on to a leisurely list of fashion brands reminiscent of Madonna’s song “Vogue”.

Critics rave about the album’s skillful production, discussing the bold cover, in which the singer rides a crystal horse, but in reviews, as in fan posts, you can rarely find an enthusiastic reaction to a particular song or melody. Despite the drift towards more “British” and “European” music, it is unlikely that Beyoncé will replenish her fan base with some new cohort of fans who have not yet listened to her or treated her evenly, and now have come to the bosom of her church. At its core, Beyoncé hasn’t changed. Perhaps her new songs are less politicized and loaded with important topics for compatriots. But the subtitle of the album “act I” may hint that there will be more of this “important” in the second act.