Pop and Rock Music

Subterms

    More stories

    • 138 Shares139 Views

      in Music

      Carly Rae Jepsen’s Brand-New Boy Problems, and 7 More New Songs

      by

      Hear tracks by DJ Khaled featuring Drake and Lil Baby, Panda Bear & Sonic Boom, the 1975 and others.Every Friday, pop critics for The New York Times weigh in on the week’s most notable new songs and videos. Just want the music? Listen to the Playlist on Spotify here (or find our profile: nytimes). Like what you hear? Let us know at theplaylist@nytimes.com and sign up for our Louder newsletter, a once-a-week blast of our pop music coverage.Carly Rae Jepsen, ‘Beach House’Boy problems? Carly Rae Jepsen’s got them in spades on “Beach House,” a cheeky earworm from her forthcoming album “The Loneliest Time.” Jepsen employs her deadpan sense of humor as she lists off the red flags and deal-breakers that marred relationships with “Boy No. 1” to “Boy No. I Can’t Keep Count Anymore.” Amid all the silliness, though (“I got a beach house in Malibu,” one prospect tells her, “and I’m probably gonna hurt your feelings”), the song effectively taps into the romantic frustration of endless, “Groundhog Day”-esque first dates and long-term singledom: “I’ve been on this ride, this roller coaster’s a carousel,” Jepsen sings on the anguished pre-chorus, “And I’m getting nowhere.” LINDSAY ZOLADZDJ Khaled featuring Drake and Lil Baby, ‘Staying Alive’A quizzically melancholic opening salvo from the upcoming DJ Khaled album “God Did,” “Staying Alive” nods casually to the Bee Gees on the way to somewhere far less ecstatic. In this construction, staying alive is an act of defiance, not exuberance. Drake bemoans “This life that allow me to take what I want/it’s not like I know what I want,” while in the video, he plays a doctor smoking hookah in the hospital and absently signing off on charts of patients who might need some help achieving the song’s title. JON CARAMANICABenny Blanco, BTS and Snoop Dogg, ‘Bad Decisions’Equally unimaginative as the BTS English-language breakthrough hit “Dynamite” but somehow less cloying, this collaboration benefits from the grandfatherly presence of Snoop Dogg, who at this stage of his career always raps as if his eyebrow is arched, and he can’t quite believe what he’s called upon to do either. CARAMANICAThe 1975, ‘Happiness’“Happiness,” the latest single from the eclectic British pop group the 1975, manages to sound both sleek and a little spontaneous; the dense, ’80s-inspired production gleams but there’s always enough air circulating to keep the atmosphere well ventilated. The frontman Matty Healy sounds uncharacteristically laid back here, trading in his usual arch, hyper-referential lyrics for simpler sentiments: “Show me your love, why don’t you?” he croons on an ecstatic chorus that’s catchy without feeling overdetermined. The video, directed by Samuel Bradley, is a hoot, finding the group mugging in all variety of louche, gorgeously lit environments — basically the visual equivalent of the lush saxophone solo that drops in the middle of the song. ZOLADZBandmanrill, ‘Real Hips’A surprisingly luscious and nimble offering from the Newark rapper Bandmanrill that makes plain the through lines that connect drill music, Jersey club and bass music. CARAMANICAPanda Bear & Sonic Boom, ‘Edge of the Edge’Fans of Panda Bear’s beloved 2007 album “Person Pitch” will likely enjoy the sunny, collagelike “Edge of the Edge,” which will appear on “Reset,” the Animal Collective member’s collaborative album with Spacemen 3’s Sonic Boom, out next week. “Edge of the Edge” pairs a playful sample of the doo-wop group Randy & the Rainbows’ 1963 hit “Denise” with Panda’s serenely melodic vocals, which cut through the carefree, pop-psychedelic vibe with some light social critique: “Can’t say it’s what you bargained for,” he sings, wagging a finger at the frenzied escalation of technology, “It’s forever at the push of a button.” The song, in opposition, sounds contentedly off the grid. ZOLADZBonny Light Horseman, ‘Exile’The voices of Eric D. Johnson and Anaïs Mitchell entwine beautifully on “Exile,” the opening track from the folk trio Bonny Light Horseman’s upcoming second album “Rolling Golden Holy.” The song is a duet in the truest emotional sense, as Mitchell swoops in to finish some of Johnson’s lines and, on the chorus, provides a warm, glowing harmony that meets his lonely plea, “I don’t wanna live in exile.” ZOLADZYoungBoy Never Broke Again featuring Rod Wave, ‘Home Ain’t Home’The two loneliest howlers in hip-hop unite for a meditation on the joylessness of fame. CARAMANICA More

    • 63 Shares109 Views

      in Music

      The Robust Return of Beyoncé

      by

      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | StitcherBeyoncé’s seventh solo album, “Renaissance,” is a rich tribute to the long history of Black dance music, from disco up through ballroom house. It functions both as collage and history lesson, and also captures an evolution in her songwriting and personal presentation toward more modern directions.For Beyoncé, who is 40, it is a strong midcareer pivot that asserts her singular place in pop music, capable of essentially disappearing for several years then re-emerging on her own terms, and still finding her audience.On this week’s Popcast, a deep dive on Beyoncé’s new album, her push-and-pull between tradition and futurism, her relationship to queer music communities and the ways in which she reframes understanding of authorship and ownership.Guests:Joe Coscarelli, The New York Times’s pop music reporterWesley Morris, a critic at large at The New York TimesJon Pareles, The New York Times’s chief pop music criticSalamishah Tillet, a contributing critic at large at The New York TimesConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

    • 138 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      Mo Ostin, Music Powerhouse Who Put Artists First, Dies at 95

      by

      At the helm of Warner Bros. Records from the 1960s into the ’90s, he worked closely with some of the most successful and influential performers of his era.Mo Ostin, who in his many years as the powerful chief executive of Warner Bros. Records made a point of putting the artist first, in the process encouraging the most important works of musicians like Jimi Hendrix, Neil Young and Prince, died on Sunday at his home in Los Angeles. He was 95. The death was confirmed by his granddaughter Annabelle Ostin.“Between the early ’60s and the mid-’90s, under legendary record man Mo Ostin, no company was more successful at artist development — or operated with more sophistication,” the music industry trade publication Hits wrote in 2016.The list of artists signed to the constellation of affiliated Warner Bros. labels when they were guided by Mr. Ostin reads like a dream-world music hall of fame. It includes pivotal singers of the 1950s like Frank Sinatra, Bing Crosby and Sammy Davis Jr.; innovators of the 1960 and ’70s like Van Morrison, Joni Mitchell and the Grateful Dead; and game-changers of the ’80s and ’90s like Madonna, R.E.M. and Green Day.“One of the great things about Warners, I always felt, was our emphasis and priority was always about the music,” Mr. Ostin told The Los Angeles Times for a profile of him in 1994.After a corporate power struggle led to his departure from Warner Bros. in 1995, he helped form DreamWorks Records, the music arm of the entertainment conglomerate created by David Geffen, Steven Spielberg and the former Disney executive Jeffrey Katzenberg. There he signed fresh mavericks like Rufus Wainwright, Elliott Smith and Nelly Furtado, along with veterans like the Isley Brothers and Burt Bacharach.One crucial factor in Mr. Ostin’s scouting and shaping of the brightest talents during Warner’s most vaunted years was his ability to hire and hold onto a tight executive team, highlighted by a prolific group of producers and A & R people like Lenny Waronker, Russ Titelman, Ted Templeman and Joe Smith.Another key was his saviness in creating joint-venture deals with a variety of labels, including Sire (which brought to the stable New Wave stars like Talking Heads, the Pretenders and Depeche Mode); Bizarre/Straight (tapping the netherworld of Frank Zappa, Alice Cooper and Captain Beefheart); Tommy Boy (hip-hop); Slash (punk and alternative music); and Quincy Jones’s Qwest (R&B).Mr. Ostin, right, and the producer Joe Smith appeared on a Los Angeles billboard in about 1973. Ginny Winn/Michael Ochs Archives, via Getty ImagesFor all his success, Mr. Ostin underplayed his role in public. Unlike his music-business peers Ahmet Ertegun, David Geffen and Clive Davis, who swooned before the spotlight, he granted very few interviews and kept a low profile on the party circuit.“To me, the artist is the person who should be in the foreground,” Mr. Ostin said in 1994.Still, the industry recognized the significance of his work. He was inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2003, and the Recording Academy honored him with a President’s Merit Award in 2014 and a Trustees Award in 2017.He was born Morris Meyer Ostrofsky on March 27, 1927, in Brooklyn to immigrant parents who had come to the United States from Russia during the Communist revolution of 1917. When he was 13, he moved with his parents and his brother, Gerald, to Los Angeles, where the family ran a produce market.He was a music fan from an early age, but his introduction to the music business came by happenstance. Living next to his family was the brother of Norman Granz, who owned the jazz label Clef Records and promoted concerts in the 1940s and ’50s. During his college years at the University of California, Los Angeles, where he majored in economics, Mr. Ostin wound up helping Mr. Granz by selling programs for his concerts. He married Evelyn Bardavid in 1948.Earning a bachelor’s degree with honors, Mr. Ostin enrolled in U.C.L.A.’s law school but dropped out in 1954 to support his wife and their young son. A job opportunity also came about through Mr. Granz, who hired him to be the controller for Clef at a time when the label’s roster included such important jazz artists as Count Basie, Ella Fitzgerald and Charlie Parker.Clef eventually changed its name to Verve; about the same time, Mr. Ostin changed his name as well.Toward the end of the 1950s, Frank Sinatra tried to buy the label, inspired by its artist-friendly approach. But he lost out to MGM Records, a disappointment that led him to form his own company, Reprise, in 1960. He named Mr. Ostin executive vice president, with the mission to model the new company on Verve.“Frank’s whole idea was to create an environment which, both artistically and economically, would be more attractive for the artist than anybody else had to offer,” Mr. Ostin said in 1994. “That wasn’t how it was anywhere else.”For the first few years, Reprise’s economics did not match its artistic efforts, in part because of Sinatra’s ban on signing any of the promising new rock ’n’ roll acts. “I went to Frank and said, ‘Look, we’re not going to be able to survive unless we become competitive,’” Mr. Ostin told Hits in 2016. “He hated rock ’n’ roll, but he realized what I was saying made a lot of sense. So he lifted the ban. That was a big, big turning point.”The first rock band Mr. Ostin signed, in 1964, were the Kinks, who scored a Top 10 hit that year with “You Really Got Me,” followed by another in 1965 and four more Top 40 entries by early the next year. By that point Sinatra, in need of cash, had sold Reprise to Warner Bros., which merged the companies and gave Mr. Ostin creative control.Along with Mr. Waronker and Mr. Smith, Mr. Ostin signed successful pop acts like Petula Clark, the Association and Harpers Bizarre before moving on to more hard-edge rock bands like the Dead, Fleetwood Mac and Jethro Tull. Mr. Ostin himself signed Jimi Hendrix in 1967, drawn by the early buzz Hendrix was stirring in Britain.Mr. Ostin, standing at left, and Mr. Smith, standing second from left, with three members of Fleetwood Mac in 1973: seated from left, Christine McVie, John McVie and Mick Fleetwood. Warner Brothers ArchiveThat year, Mr. Ostin was named president of Warner-Reprise. By 1970, he was chairman and chief executive, a post he would hold for nearly a quarter-century.In the early ’70s, the company greatly magnified its power by launching the WEA distribution system, filtering in the rich catalogs of Elektra and Atlantic Records. By adding more and more affiliated labels, Mr. Ostin gained enough muscle to take on the music industry’s unchallenged market behemoth at the time, CBS Records.Rivalry between the two corporations escalated into a tit-for-tat battle starting in the late 1970s, when CBS’s chief executive, Walter Yetnikoff, lured James Taylor away from Warner Bros.; Mr. Ostin retaliated by signing Paul Simon away from CBS. In the 1980s, Mr. Ostin pulled off the same feat by poaching Miles Davis from his longtime home at CBS. (By that time WEA had overtaken CBS as the market champion.)The signing of Mr. Simon paid off particularly well in 1984, when his album “Graceland” became a major hit and, by incorporating influences from South Africa and elsewhere, stood as a game changer in Western awareness of global music.“There was no indication whatsoever when we started that the album had any chance of a commercial payoff,” Mr. Simon told The Los Angeles Times in 1994. “But Mo loved the idea and encouraged me to take the risk.”Scores of culturally important or commercially mighty acts were nurtured by Warner Bros. in Mr. Ostin’s era. The list includes the bands Black Sabbath, Deep Purple, Van Halen, Dire Straits, ZZ Top, the Red Hot Chili Peppers and the Sex Pistols, as well as George Benson, Rod Stewart, Rickie Lee Jones, Chaka Khan, Randy Newman, Emmylou Harris, Bonnie Raitt and Ice-T.During those years Fleetwood Mac went from a cult band to a historic album seller with the blockbuster “Rumors” in 1977. The next year, Mr. Ostin wooed Prince to the company. Other top labels had been vying for him, but Mr. Ostin bested them by taking the rare risk of guaranteeing Prince a three-album deal and by giving him creative control.Of all the artists signed during the peak of his reign, Mr. Ostin singled out Neil Young and Prince as perhaps the most significant, in large part because their prestige became the incentive for important later artists to sign. “I can’t tell you how many new artists mention Neil Young when we’re trying to sign them — R.E.M., Dinosaur Jr. and tons of others,” he said.Mr. Ostin being inducted into the Rock & Roll Hall of Fame in 2003.Frank Micelotta/Getty ImagesMr. Ostin’s departure from Warner Bros. in 1994 came in the wake of a corporate reshuffling in which he would have had to report to Robert Morgado, the new chairman of Warner Music Group, greatly limiting his autonomy. “This business is about freedom and creative control,” Mr. Ostin told The Los Angeles Times. “An executive has to be able to make risky decisions with minimal corporate interference.”The next year, he joined with his son Michael, who had worked with him at Warner Bros., and Mr. Waronker to manage DreamWorks Records. Mr. Ostin retired from the music industry in 2004, after the DreamWorks label was sold to Universal Music Group, but he continued to do consulting work for Warner Bros.In addition to his granddaughter Ms. Ostin, he is survived by his brother, Gerald; his son Michael; three other grandchildren; and one great-granddaughter. His wife died in 2005. Two of his sons died: Randy, a record promoter, in 2013, and Kenny in 2004.Mr. Ostin’s unflagging support for artists led them to lionize him. Flea, whose band the Red Hot Chili Peppers had been signed by Mr. Ostin, said in an interview for this obituary in 2019: “Mo was an exceptionally kind and intelligent man. When I talked to him, I felt understood.”That connection inspired Flea to write and record “a little country ditty,” in honor of Mr. Ostin after his departure from Warner Bros. — to Mr. Ostin’s great delight, he said.“Mo, Mo, why did you have to go?” the unreleased song began. “You’re the first record company guy/That looked me in the eye.”Alex Traub More

    • 113 Shares169 Views

      in Music

      Beyoncé Will Change ‘Heated’ Lyrics After ‘Ableist Slur’ Criticism

      by

      The pop star’s decision to replace two words in her song “Heated” follows Lizzo’s removal of the same term, which has been used as a slur against disabled people, from her track “Grrrls.”Days after the release of her latest album, “Renaissance,” Beyoncé will modify the lyrics of one of its songs, a representative for the singer said on Monday, in response to an outcry from disability rights advocates who say the pop star should not have used a word that has historically been employed as a derogatory slur.In “Heated,” a dancehall-inspired track, the singer uses the words “spaz” and “spazzin’” in an energetically recited portion of the song that’s a callback to the freestyles at some ballroom events. Activists condemned the use of the word in social media posts, pointing out that another pop star, Lizzo, had removed the same lyric from a song following similar backlash in June.“The word, not used intentionally in a harmful way, will be replaced,” a spokeswoman for Beyoncé said in an email.The word at issue is based on spastic diplegia, a form of cerebral palsy that causes motor impairments in the legs or arms. In June, Hannah Diviney, a writer and disability advocate from Australia, tweeted about Lizzo’s use of the word, noting that to a person with cerebral palsy like her, spasticity referred to an “unending painful tightness” in her legs, and urged the singer to “do better.” In response to the criticism from fans and activists, Lizzo changed her song, “Grrrls,” and wrote in a statement that “this is the result of me listening and taking action.”Diviney wrote in an op-ed, published in The Guardian on Monday, that her “heart sank” when she learned that Beyoncé’s new album had used the same word.“I thought we’d changed the music industry and started a global conversation about why ableist language — intentional or not — has no place in music,” Diviney wrote. “But I guess I was wrong, because now Beyoncé has gone and done exactly the same thing.”Disability right advocates have noted that the word has been more commonly used as a derogatory term in the United Kingdom compared to the United States. Scope, a group in Britain that campaigns for equality for people with disabilities, tweeted, “Disabled people’s experiences are not fodder for song lyrics,” and urged Beyoncé to follow Lizzo’s example. More

    • 100 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      Bad Bunny Reigns Again Before Beyoncé’s Chart Arrival

      by

      The Puerto Rican pop star logs a seventh week at No. 1 on the Billboard album chart; numbers for “Renaissance,” Beyoncé’s latest, arrive next week.Before Beyoncé arrives with oomph on the charts, Bad Bunny is spending a seventh nonconsecutive week at No. 1.“Renaissance,” the feverishly anticipated and extensively teased seventh solo studio LP from Beyoncé, will debut on next week’s Billboard rankings; industry estimates predict an easy ride to No. 1 on the album chart, with totals between 275,000 and 315,000 total units including sales, streams and downloads. Spotify said on Saturday that the first 24 hours of “Renaissance” made it the most-streamed release by a female artist in a single day so far this year.Those predictions, though not final, would put the singer near the top of the sales heap for 2022 debuts. But Beyoncé would still fall well short of the biggest opening to this point: Harry Styles’s “Harry’s House,” which opened with 521,500 units in May, including 182,000 copies on vinyl, the most of the modern era. Beyoncé, too, is selling multiple physical versions of her new release, but Billboard’s rules dictate that they will only be counted toward chart position when they are shipped to customers — an open logistical question that will affect her final first-week totals.In the meantime, Bad Bunny remains on top of the Billboard 200 for the fifth week in a row, during a relatively slow time for fresh releases from major artists. “Un Verano Sin Ti,” the fourth album from the Puerto Rican rapper and singer, earned 98,000 in sales by Billboard’s metrics, almost all of which came via the 135.9 million streams of songs from the album, according to the tracking service Luminate.Released in May, “Un Verano Sin Ti” had topped 100,000 units in each of its previous 11 weeks on the chart, according to Billboard.Also in the Top 5 this week, with modest numbers: the country singer Morgan Wallen’s “Dangerous: The Double Album,” released in early 2021, is back up to No. 2 with 49,000 units; “Harry’s House” is No. 3 with 48,000 units; the South Korean group Seventeen is No. 4 with 34,000 units; and Future’s “I Never Liked You” is No. 5 with 33,000 units. Jack White’s latest solo album, “Entering Heaven Alive,” debuts at No. 9. Lizzo’s “Special” falls to No. 7 from No. 2 in its second week out, down 58 percent to 29,000 units. More

    • 125 Shares169 Views

      in Music

      ‘Renaissance’ Review: America Has a Problem and Beyoncé Ain’t It

      by

      On “Renaissance,” the pop star’s seventh solo album, she finds escape, rebirth, community, pleasure and control in decades of dance music steeped in Black queer bravado.It’s too much, this being alive. Too heavy, too uncertain, too chronically cataclysmic, too bellicose, too unwell, too freighted with a possibility of the perception of error. The word of the last few years — in American activist and academic circles, anyway — has been “precarity.” Which gets at ideas of endangerment, neglect, contingency, risk. Basically: We’re worried. And: We’re worried you’re not worried enough. Like I said: It’s too much.If I were a globally famous musician whose every blink gets inspected for Meaning, now might be the time to discover how it feels to mean something else, to seem lighter, to float, to bob, splash, writhe and grind, to sashay-shanté. To find “new salvation” in building her “own foundation.”Were I that musician, now might be the time to call my freestyle jam “America Has a Problem” and not say what the problem is because A) Psych! B) What I’ma say you don’t already know? And C) The person actually performing this song knows “that booty gon’ do what it want to.” Now’s the time to work your body in lieu of losing more of your mind. “America” is one of the closing tracks on “Renaissance,” Beyoncé’s seventh solo studio album, the one where she surveys the stakes and concludes they’re too damn high. Now’s the time to remind yourself — to be “telling everybody,” as she sings on the first single, “Break My Soul” — that there’s no discourse without disco.What a good time this thing is. All 16 songs hail from someplace with a dance floor — night clubs, strip clubs, ballrooms, basements, Tatooine. Most of them are steeped in or conducted entirely with Black queer bravado. And on nearly every one, Beyoncé sounds like she’s experiencing something personally new and privately glorious: unmitigated ecstasy. It takes different forms: bliss, obviously; but a sexy sternness, too. The exercise of control is as entertaining on this album as the exorcism of stress.As expensive, production-wise, as “Renaissance” sounds (one song credits two dozen writers, including samples and interpolations), Beyoncé’s singing here transcends any price tag. The range of her voice nears the galactic; the imagination powering it qualifies as cinema. She coos, she growls, she snarls, she doubles and triples herself. Butter, mustard, foie gras, the perfect ratio of icing to cupcake.At about the halfway point, something arrives called “Plastic Off the Sofa.” Now, part of me wept because those are words she doesn’t even bother to sing. Plastic off the sofa? Got you again! The rest of me wept because the singing she does do — in waves of rhapsodically long, Olympic-level emissions — seems to emanate from somewhere way beyond a human throat: The ocean? The oven? But this is one of the few songs that sound recorded with live instruments — plinking guitar and some pitter-pat percussion. (The musical plastic comes off the album’s sofa.) The bass line keeps swelling and curving and blooming till it outgrows its flower bed, and Beyoncé’s voice does, too. It surfs the swells. It smells the roses. “Renaissance” turns to gospel here and there — on “Church Girl,” most brazenly. This is the only one that sounds like it was recorded in Eden.It takes a minute for all the rapture on “Renaissance” to kick in. First comes a mission statement (“I’m That Girl”) wherein Beyoncé warns that love is her drug. Then it’s on to “Cozy,” an in-the-making anthem about Black femmes luxuriating in their skin. This one has a bottom as heavy as a cast-iron skillet and a bounce the Richter scale couldn’t ignore. “Cozy” is about comfort but sounds like an oncoming army. The first true exhalation is “Cuff It,” a roller-skate jam held aloft by Nile Rodgers’s signature guitar flutter while a fleet of horns offer afterburn. Here, Beyoncé wants to go out and have an unprintably good time. And it’s contagious enough to overthink a throwaway line like “I wanna go missing” later, when I’m sober.Comedy abounds. Thank the sampled contributions of Big Freedia and Ts Madison for that. “Dark skin, light skin, beige” — Madison drawls on “Cozy” — “fluorescent beige.” Thank the tabloid-TV keyboard blasts on “America Has a Problem.” But Beyoncé herself has never been funnier than she is here. The sternness she applies to the word “No” on “America” alone would be enough. But there’s her impersonation of Grace Jones’s imperiousness on “Move,” some sharp-elbowed dancehall refraction in which the two of them command the plebes to “part like the Red Sea” when the queen comes through. (Here’s me not touching who the queen is in that scenario.) Pop music has been tattooed with Jones’s influence for 45 years. This is one of the few mainstream acknowledgments of her bounteous musical might. There’s also Beyoncé’s vamp at the end of “Heated,” which she recites to the crack of a splayed hand fan. It’s one of those round-table freestyles that go down at some balls. A fraction of hers includes: “Unnncle Jonny made my dress/That cheap spandex/She looks a mess.”This is an album whose big idea is house. And its sense of house is enormous. It’s mansion music. “Renaissance” is adjacent to where pop’s been: pulsing and throbbing. Its muscles are larger, its limbs flexier, its ego secure. I don’t hear marketplace concerns. Its sense of adventure is off the genre’s map, yet very much aware of every coordinate. It’s an achievement of synthesis that never sounds slavish or synthetic. These songs are testing this music, celebrating how capacious it is, how pliable. That might be why I like “Break My Soul” so much. It’s Track 6, but it feels like the album’s thematic spine. It’s got tenderness, resolve and ideas — Beyoncé brokering two different approaches to church.On “Pure/Honey” Beyoncé breaks through wall after wall until she gets to the chamber that holds all the cousins of her 2013 sizzler “Blow.” It ends with her lilting next to a sample of the drag artist Moi Renee bellowing, “Miss Honey? Miss Honey!” And it’s as close to the B-52’s as a Beyoncé song might ever come. (But Kate, Cindy, Fred, Keith: Call her anyway!)The album’s embrace of house and not, say, trap unambiguously aligns Beyoncé with queer Black folks. On the one hand, that means she’s simply an elite pop star with particularly avid support. But “Renaissance” is more than fan service. It’s oriented toward certain histories. The knotty symbiosis between cis women and gay men is one. The doors of impersonation and tribute revolve with centrifugal force.With Beyoncé, her drag seems liberating rather than obfuscating. It’s not just these lesser-known gay and trans artists and personalities her music has absorbed. It’s other artists. On “Blow,” Beyoncé wondered how it felt for her partner when he made love to her. Now the wonder is: How does it feel for her to make love — and art — sometimes as somebody else? The album’s final song is “Summer Renaissance,” and it opens with the thrum of Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love.” It’s not the first time she’s quoted La Donna. But the nod is not only there, where the reference is explicit. It’s in the album’s rich middle, which includes that sofa song and “Virgo’s Groove,” maybe the most luscious track Beyoncé’s ever recorded. This is to say that “Renaissance” is an album about performance — of other pop’s past, but ultimately of Beyoncé, a star who’s now 40, an age when the real risk is in acting like you’ve got nothing to lose.Another history is right there in the album’s title: 100 years ago, when things were also too much for Black Americans — lynchings, “race riots” all over the country — and flight north from the South seemed like a sound alternative to murder, up in Harlem, Alain Locke and Zora Neale Hurston and Langston Hughes and Aaron Douglas and Jessie Fauset, to pick five figures, were at the center of an explosion of art that could be as frivolous, party-hearty and vulgar as some of what’s on this album. Its artists were gay and straight and whatever was in between. The point is they called that a renaissance, too. It sustained and delivered delight and provocation in spite of the surrounding crisis, it gave people looking for a house something that approximates home. New salvation, old foundation.Beyoncé“Renaissance”(Parkwood Entertainment/Columbia) More

    • 113 Shares179 Views

      in Music

      A Guide to the Dance Music on Beyoncé’s ‘Renaissance’

      by

      Chicago house, hyperpop, classic ’70s disco: The pop star’s new album is a tour through some of the genre’s most well-known touchstones as well as more underground sounds.Beyoncé’s new album, “Renaissance,” is consciously steeped in dance-music history, cannily embracing decades of samples and sounds: the 1970s disco of Donna Summer and Chic, Jamaican dancehall, internet-speed hyperpop. She chose collaborators, references and even specific keyboard sounds that pay homage to club-land memories while making her own 21st-century statement. Here are some of the sources she celebrates, and an exploration of their significance.The album’s second and third tracks, “Cozy” and “Alien Superstar,” feature writing and production by the Chicago-born house-music D.J. and producer Honey Dijon. “Cozy” also includes a writing credit for Curtis Alan Jones, known as Cajmere or Green Velvet — one of Chicago house music’s greatest producers.That locale is key here. Chicago is house music’s birthplace, and Chicago house, in particular, often moves with a heavily pronounced swing, accentuated by octave-jumping staccato bass patterns. The canonical example is Adonis’s “No Way Back,” from 1986, and the bass line of “Cozy” plays like an inversion of it. The song is almost mnemonically recognizable as early Chicago house without simply sounding like homage.On “Alien Superstar,” the cadence of the hook (“I’m too classy for this world/Forever I’m that girl”) is credited to an interpolation of Right Said Fred’s dance-floor novelty smash “I’m Too Sexy.” Taylor Swift borrowed the same part (also with credit) on her 2017 track “Look What You Made Me Do,” and Drake sampled the 1992 song on “Way Too Sexy” from 2021.There’s another direct callback on “Cuff It”: The bass line is instantly recognizable as the progeny of Bernard Edwards’s monster riff from Chic’s “Good Times,” a No. 1 hit in 1979, and Edwards’s partner in Chic, Nile Rodgers, gets credit for writing and playing guitars here. (On bass and drums: Raphael Saadiq.) As Ken Barnes pointed out in his liner notes to “The Disco Years Vol. 4: Lost in Music,” a compilation on Rhino Records, rewriting Chic became a kind of national pastime during the early 1980s, not least via early hip-hop and post-disco R&B. This version of the one, two, three (rest) is as indebted to the many “Good Times” rewrites as the original: the Sugarhill Gang’s “Rapper’s Delight” and Vaughn Mason’s “Bounce, Rock, Skate, Roll,” for example.“Energy” features writing and production from Skrillex, an EDM-festival superstar through the early 2010s known for his drops — dramatic buildups that resolve into a fresh beat — but since his heyday, he’s largely worked behind the scenes. (See Justin Bieber’s 2015 smash “Where Are Ü Now,” which he made alongside Diplo.) “Energy” seems to operate on wires; it’s taut minimalism, with the supplest layering of sub-bass tones.The song also has writing credits for Pharrell Williams and Chad Hugo, the songwriting and production duo the Neptunes, known for their work with a wide swath of singers and rappers starting in the 1990s. On Thursday, before the release of “Renaissance,” the singer and songwriter Kelis spoke out on social media, saying those credits were for a sample of one of her songs (it turned out to be an interpolation of “Milkshake,” from 2003), and that she hadn’t given permission for its use. Kelis wasn’t a credited writer or producer on most of the early albums she made with the Neptunes, and didn’t have credits on “Milkshake.” In a 2020 interview with The Guardian she said she had signed an agreement with the duo when she “was too young and too stupid to double-check it.”A similar situation arose with the album’s lead single, “Break My Soul,” which is indebted to the central Korg motif from Robin S.’s pop-house hit “Show Me Love.” But whether her 1992 remix was sampled was initially unclear, and for the first week of the song’s release, the credits shifted. (The latest version says the Beyoncé song “contains elements” of “Show Me Love.”) The Robin S. song’s afterlife has been robust: Its riff showed up in the Brooklyn producer AceMo’s 2019 “Where They At???” featuring John FM, which became a key underground dance anthem before and during the pandemic, as well as in recent releases from Charli XCX and Daddy Yankee.Another key to “Break My Soul” is the shouting of exhortations (“Release your wiggle!”) by the New Orleans bounce artist Big Freedia, whom Beyoncé had earlier sampled on “Formation” (2016). Bounce is a New Orleans-bred dance-music style that’s dizzyingly fast, bass intensive and heavy on call and response; twerking emerged in response to it.Beyoncé glances back to the late ’90s again on “Plastic Off the Sofa.” While the bulk of the song is lush digital balladry, there’s a moment in its coda that could have come from “glitch” experimental-electronica, where the tail end of a vocal run, heavily overdubbed, is subjected to a deliberately audible edit. It’s a hair jarring but mostly humorous — an audible wink to the listener, one facet of modern pop’s high-tech production laid bare. (For an example from the ’90s, see Oval’s album “94diskont,” or the compilation “Clicks + Cuts,” released in 2000.)Classic disco asserts itself at the album’s midway point. “Virgo’s Groove” features layers of undulating percussion, synthesizer and bass that updates the production work Quincy Jones did with Michael Jackson — a sort of companion piece to Daft Punk’s “Get Lucky.” “Move,” the next track, includes a feature from Grace Jones — disco royalty, just in case anyone wondered where Beyoncé may be coming from.Just as notable on “Move” — and even more noticeably on “America Has a Problem” — is the swarming low end known in the dance world as the “Reese bass.” The term is a reference to a 1988 record, “Just Want Another Chance” by Reese, one of many aliases used by Kevin Saunderson, one of the first producers identified with Detroit techno in the mid-80s.In much the same way that “Chicago house” refers not only to a style and its birthplace but also that swinging octave-hopping sound, “Detroit techno” tends to denote attention to detail and an aura of restless invention. The heavy-fog low end of “Just Want Another Chance” was often repurposed by London bass-music styles like jungle, drum & bass, U.K. garage and dubstep — what the writer Simon Reynolds has called the “hardcore continuum” of Black British musical styles from urban areas that took root on London pirate radio.Beyoncé’s use of the heavy, undulant Reese bass on “Move” and “America Has a Problem” further locates the album in the Black dance-music continuum. “Problem” also opens with orchestral stabs, à la Afrika Bambaataa & the Soulsonic Force’s landmark electronic-rap track “Planet Rock” — or, even more aptly given the title and lyrical theme, Janet Jackson’s “Rhythm Nation.”“Heated” features Beyoncé in commanding neo-dancehall form over a slinky, wood-block-heavy groove. At the end of the song, she mentions tapping out tracks with her fingers on the MPC, an instrument designed by Roger Linn that arrived in 1988. The MPC, made by Akai, isn’t played with a keyboard, but instead features a square grid of pads that trigger different sounds, and it has become a widespread compositional and performance tool.“Thique” sounds like something that would have been all over dubstep dance floors in the days before Skrillex, when the subgenre’s distended bass and variable tempos were primarily the province of British producers. Sure enough, the song’s writing and production credits include an artist influenced by those musicians: Chauncey Hollis Jr., a.k.a. Hit-Boy, who produced a dubstep-inflected hit on Jay-Z and Kanye West’s “Watch the Throne” (2011).The Plasticine sounds of “Thique” segue into the even more heavily synthetic “All Up in Your Mind,” co-produced by A.G. Cook, the main mind behind the London label and art collective PC Music, which arrived in the mid-2010s with a sound built on stylish exaggeration: tones that weren’t just high in a machine-music way, but deliberately squeaky. (Sophie, the producer known for exhilarating hyperpop who died in 2021, came from this camp.) “All Up” is futurist robo-pop, with a sub-bass line that seems to be snorkeling under the speakers rather than emanating from them.“Pure/Honey,” next to last, is another sub-bass monster: The first part, propelled by a nasty kick drum, is a surprising approximation of techno at its steeliest, or maybe its most “pure.” The “honey” comes at the 2:11 mark, a bulbous neo-disco groove with feathery horns that recalls early Sylvester. The track runs in part off a sample of a Kevin Aviance song subtitled “The Feeling” — one of the key recordings in a queer house sub-style known as “bitch tracks.”The album’s final track, “Summer Renaissance,” features Beyoncé singing, “It’s so good, it’s so good, it’s so good, it’s sooooo good” over a very familiar pinballing riff — yes, the finale interpolates Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love,” the 1977 disco hit with an all-synthesizer backdrop and pulsating rhythm that anticipated the future sound of dance music. But the main melodic phrase from “I Feel Love” sounds like it’s being played on the Korg keyboard that anchors “Break My Soul,” subtly tying two eras together in a third one. More

    • 113 Shares119 Views

      in Music

      Beyoncé Unveils ‘Renaissance,’ the First of Three New Projects

      by

      The pop star’s seventh solo album is “Act I” of work born during the pandemic, a time she “found to be the most creative,” she said in a statement.The new Beyoncé album has officially arrived. In a rare breach of the pop queen’s carefully choreographed release plans, an unauthorized version of “Renaissance,” the singer’s seventh solo studio LP and the first part of a teased trilogy, leaked two days early online.Beyoncé acknowledged the hitch in a statement upon the album’s wide release on streaming services at midnight on Friday. “So, the album leaked, and you all actually waited until the proper release time so you all can enjoy it together,” she wrote to her dedicated fans. “I’ve never seen anything like it,” she added, thanking her followers “for your love and protection.”The debut of “Renaissance” followed a marketing rollout that, for Beyoncé, was oddly conventional. After years of ripping up the standard playbook for releasing new music — eschewing early radio singles and interviews for surprise drops and elaborate multimedia spectacles — Beyoncé spent six weeks beating the promotional drum. She announced the album more than a month ahead of time, did an interview with British Vogue, put out the single “Break My Soul,” revealed a track list and finally began posting on TikTok.Yet on Wednesday, about 36 hours before the appointed release time, high-quality copies of the album’s 16 tracks appeared online, spreading across social media even as Beyoncé’s most vigilant fans encouraged one another to hold out (and to tattletale on the bootleggers). “I appreciate you for calling out anyone that was trying to sneak into the club early,” Beyoncé wrote in her statement on social media as the album was released.Sleuthing observers speculated that the tracks may have come from copies of the CD that were being sold in some European stores early. In a perverse way, the old-fashioned leak of a blockbuster album seemed to fit the throwback theme of “Renaissance,” which throbs with the sound of dance music from across the decades.Referencing disco, funk, house, techno, bounce and more, the generally upbeat songs draw from a wide array of writers and producers, with some tracks crediting more than dozen people. In addition to reliable Beyoncé collaborators like The-Dream, Pharrell Williams, Hit-Boy and Drake, experimental songs like “Energy” and “All Up In Your Mind” also feature electronic producers including Skrillex, BloodPop and A.G. Cook of PC Music among their eclectic personnel.The samples and interpolations run the gamut as well, from the regional and esoteric to the indelible: “America Has a Problem” pulls from the Atlanta bass pioneer Kilo, while “Summer Renaissance,” the closing song, includes an interpolation of Donna Summer’s 1977 electro-disco classic “I Feel Love.” On “Move,” a feature from the cultural chameleon Grace Jones is paired with the rising Afrobeats star Tems; elsewhere, Beyoncé links the sounds of traditional Black music genres like soul and R&B with subcultures like ballroom vogueing.“I’m one of one/I’m number one/I’m the only one,” she intones on “Alien Superstar.” “Don’t even waste your time trying to compete with me/no one else in this world can think like me.”In an explanatory statement posted to Instagram last month that Beyoncé expanded on her website on Thursday, she said “Renaissance” was part of a “three act project” she recorded during the pandemic. She called the album, which she refers to as “Act I,” “a place to dream and to find escape during a scary time for the world.”Adding that she hoped the dance floor-focused tracks would inspire listeners to “release the wiggle,” she added: “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.”Beyoncé also cited her late “Uncle Jonny,” whose battle with H.I.V. the singer has spoken about before, as an influence for the music and its historical ties to the L.G.B.T.Q. community.“He was my godmother and the first person to expose me to a lot of the music and culture that serve as an inspiration for this album,” she wrote. “Thank you to all of the pioneers who originate culture, to all of the fallen angels whose contributions have gone unrecognized for far too long.”Since “Lemonade” (2016), her last solo studio LP and accompanying film, Beyoncé has tided fans over with a number of ambitious in-between projects.In 2018, she performed as one of the headliners at the Coachella festival, where her show paid tribute to the marching band tradition of historically Black colleges and universities, and was widely hailed as a triumph — one that “reoriented her music, sidelining its connections to pop and framing it squarely in a lineage of Southern Black musical traditions,” as The New York Times critic Jon Caramanica wrote. The performance was later turned into a Netflix special and an album, both titled “Homecoming.”Also in 2018, Beyoncé and Jay-Z, her husband, released a joint album, “Everything Is Love,” credited to the Carters. And in June 2020, at the height of national protests in wake of George Floyd’s murder, she released a song, “Black Parade,” with lines like “Put your fist up in the air, show Black love.”“Black Parade” took the Grammy Award the next year for best R&B performance, one of four prizes that night that brought Beyoncé’s career haul to 28 — more than any other woman. This year, Beyoncé was nominated at the Academy Awards for best original song for “Be Alive,” from the film “King Richard,” a biopic about the father of Venus and Serena Williams.How the early leak will affect the commercial prospects of “Renaissance” remains unclear. Years ago, the unauthorized release of music in advance could have devastating consequences for an album. But that danger has been mitigated by the shift to streaming.And Beyoncé, like most other artists today, took advance orders for physical copies of her album, which will count on the charts as soon as they are shipped — usually the week of release. On Beyoncé’s website, the four boxed sets of “Renaissance” and its limited-edition vinyl version are sold out. More