Let’s go back to last summer. In an interview with Harper’s Bazaar, Beyoncé responded to questions about new music: “With all the isolation and injustice over the past year, I think we are all ready to escape, travel, love, and laugh again. I feel a renaissance emerging, and I want to be part of nurturing that escape in any way possible. I’ve been in the studio for a year and a half. Sometimes it takes a year for me to personally search through thousands of sounds to find just the right kick or snare. One chorus can have up to 200 stacked harmonies. Still, there’s nothing like the amount of love, passion, and healing that I feel in the recording studio. After 31 years, it feels just as exciting as it did when I was nine years old. Yes, the music is coming!” True to her word, one year later Beyoncé has returned with new music. At this point, if Bey says she’s going to Mars next year, we better believe Bey is going to Mars.
 

Released last June, the lead single “BREAK MY SOUL” could feel somewhat bewildering. The adoption of this song as an anthem of the Great Resignation could very well be traced to its powerful dance sound and a literal reading of some of the lyrics. Beyoncé could have actually intended this. She disclosed the album title – RENAISSANCE – the release date, cover art, and other information a month before it dropped. Why is this worth mentioning? The last time Beyoncé’s new music followed this established strategy for album release was 2011’s 4. Beyoncé in 2013 and Lemonade in 2016 both dropped without PR buildup. The albums were “visual albums” with significant investment in visual storytelling, and Lemonade was available online only for streaming on TIDAL: all part of a series of commercially unmotivated decisions. But things are a bit different this time. Indeed, she now has her official TikTok account where she posted a special video montage for “BREAK MY SOUL.”
 

Beyoncé reconfirmed the artistic motive behind her newest studio album in a post on her official website before the release of RENAISSANCE: “My intention was to create a safe place, a place without judgment. A place to be free of perfectionism and overthinking. A place to scream, release, feel freedom.” How this personal manifesto found its musical form became obvious after the album was released, and hindsight makes it very clear that Beyoncé had bared her soul to us about where she was during the creation of the album. But such a powerful artistic impulse requires a distilling process, and we see that in the thoughtful, measured unfolding of Beyoncé’s musical vision through the promotional communications. Now, let’s revisit “BREAK MY SOUL.” From the opening we quickly recognize the classic 90s dance number, Robin S’s “Show Me Love” with its legendary synth lead. This is paired with a vocal sample from “Explode” by Big Freedia, the queen of bounce music, a sub-genre of hip-hop from New Orleans. With “Show Me Love” continuously popping up in songs as a reference or a sample even before “BREAK MY SOUL,” and Big Freedia already having featured in Beyoncé’s 2016 megahit “Formation,” the album’s homages seem to be a continuation of an established and familiar musical narrative. However, from the perspective of the entire RENAISSANCE album, we can appreciate these choices as part of a larger evolution of dance club culture music and the dance genre as a whole.

In “COZY” the Chicago native DJ Honey Dijon collaborates as the producer. The song vibes along the trademark bass line of Chicago house music, but with a little twist. Immediately following this track is “ALIEN SUPERSTAR” which Honey Dijon also produced. The intro is the warning message from “Moonraker,” a song by Foremost Poets, an important early figure in the Chicago house music scene. The song then closes with a clip from a 1973 speech by author and activist Barbara Ann Teer. The song lyrics are a reference to Right Said Fred’s classic dance number released in 1991, “I’m Too Sexy.” Track number four, “CUFF IT” directly samples Chic’s 1979 hit single “Good Times.” Unsurprisingly, Niles Rodgers name appears as songwriter and guitarist. Disco and new wave icon Grace Jones collaborates with Beyoncé for the tenth track, “MOVE.” This is a salient point, and a connection with the dance club and ballroom culture becomes visible across the entire tracklist. 

In the post she wrote on her official website, Beyoncé thanked her children, husband, and especially Uncle Jonny. Uncle Jonny was Beyoncé’s godmother and the person who taught her about the musical history behind the rich culture that serves as the backdrop to RENAISSANCE. (On a previous occasion, Tina Knowles – Beyoncé’s mother – mentioned that Uncle Jonny passed away from HIV-related complications when the singer was 17.) In the same post, Beyoncé pays homage to musical visionaries in the dance genre: those who have been forgotten by the industry for far too long. The whole album is a glorious celebration of these artistic minds as we can see from the tens of thousands of lines in the album’s list of credits for the samples, references, direct and indirect collaborations. RENAISSANCE is a grand tour of musical genres ranging from disco, Chicago house, Detroit techno, early rap music, dubstep, and EDM which all come together in the most Beyoncé way to liberate and feed one’s soul. As the pandemic very slowly arcs towards resolution, it is actually the “most vulnerable among us” who step up to meet this longing for freedom and peace through musical expression on the club dancefloors. It thus goes without saying that RENAISSANCE is a love song to the African American queer community. 
 

There has been of late an increasingly visible trend in the music scene towards a retro-90s style. For instance, Drake and Charli XCX have already sampled from this era along a similar vein as RENAISSANCE. However, Beyoncé didn’t stop at distilling musical inspiration from one or two tracks of the era. She mined the 90s and the echoes of this period heard today for guidance on what it means to be truly, inimitably, unquestionably Beyoncé. Investing significant time and resources, this intense labor of love has resulted in a monumental musical thesis and love letter. Reflective of the incredible depth of self-reflection is the announcement of RENAISSANCE as part one of three. Nobody knows yet when or in what form the second and third act will arrive. What is for certain is that it will be worth the wait.