Renaissance (Album)

Subterms

    More stories

    • 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

    • 75 Shares199 Views

      in Music

      Is Beyoncé’s ‘Renaissance’ Rollout (Gasp!) Conventional?

      by

      The singer, who has prioritized innovation over commercial domination, has opted for a more standard playbook ahead of her seventh solo album, “Renaissance,” out Friday.An upbeat lead single ready for radio. An album title and release date with plenty of notice. A magazine cover story, followed by a personal mission statement, a fresh social media account, a detailed track list and a merchandise pre-sale.For most musicians, these are time-honored bullet points in the playbook for introducing a major new album. But for Beyoncé, who has spent the last decade-plus upending all conventions about how to market music, the rollout of “Renaissance,” her latest album due out Friday, is a striking shift — and perhaps a tacit acknowledgment that the game has changed.Before “Renaissance,” Beyoncé’s seventh solo studio album, the last time the singer participated in such industry-standard baby steps, with “4” in 2011, President Barack Obama was still in his first term and a European music start-up called Spotify was just arriving in the United States. Since then, there hasn’t been much about the formula for selling new music that Beyoncé hasn’t tweaked, disrupted or dismantled altogether.First there was “Beyoncé,” the paradigm-shifting surprise “visual album” from 2013. Then came “Lemonade” (2016), an allusion-packed tour de force that arrived with more mystery as a film on cable television. By partnering closely with Tidal, the streaming service then controlled by her husband, Jay-Z, and with media behemoths like HBO, Disney and Netflix, Beyoncé has positioned one ambitious multimedia project after another as something to be sought out and carefully considered, rather than served up for easy access and maximum consumption.That work, and the innovative way she has released it, has helped Beyoncé skyrocket in artistic stature. Yet it has also served to distance the singer somewhat from the pop-music mainstream, siloing her material — the “Lemonade” album wasn’t widely available on major streaming platforms until three years after its initial release, while its full film is currently available only on Tidal — and potentially hamstringing her commercial performance.Beyoncé’s last No. 1 single as a lead artist, “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It),” came in late 2008. Despite the fact that her 28 Grammy Awards make her the winningest woman in music, she has not taken a trophy in a major category since 2010. Radio play for her new solo releases has dipped significantly since “4.” And while her six solo albums have all gone to No. 1, in-between projects like “Everything Is Love” (a surprise joint album with Jay-Z), the “Lion King” soundtrack and her concert album “Homecoming” have each failed to reach the top.Still, the paradox of Beyoncé has meant that even as she has slipped somewhat on the charts, her larger cultural prestige has remained supreme, driven by the mystique and grandeur she brings to each project. (“My success can’t be quantified,” she rapped on “Nice,” from 2018, sneering at the importance of “streaming numbers.”)“She’s still the leader of the culture, regardless of relatively minor data points in her world like album sales and radio play,” said Danyel Smith, the veteran music journalist and author of the recent “Shine Bright: A Very Personal History of Black Women in Pop.”“There are people that exist in this world to shift the culture, to shift the vibe,” she said in an interview. “It matters to some degree, the singles or the albums or radio play, but what really matters is that they make us look in a new direction.”From the start, however, the rollout of “Renaissance” has been different — more transparent, more conventional. Described by Beyoncé, 40, in an Instagram post last month as “a place to be free of perfectionism and overthinking,” the album is being positioned for mass consumer awareness and fan excitement, with four different boxed sets and a limited-edition vinyl version having already sold out on the singer’s website.“She and her representation are recognizing that things have changed since her last album release, and she has to go full-court press,” said Rob Jonas, the chief executive of Luminate, the music data service behind the Billboard charts.One major risk of the old-fashioned release strategy — which requires physical copies of the album to be produced far in advance — came to pass on Wednesday, when “Renaissance” appeared to leak in full online. Fan accounts on social media speculated that the early, unofficial version could have come from CDs that had been sold prematurely in Europe.Right away, Beyoncé’s famously protective base, known as the BeyHive, leaped into action, seeking to discourage early listens and band together to report those spreading the bootleg.While advance leaks of major albums were common as the CD era gave way to digital downloads, and could devastate a new album’s prospects, a crackdown on digital piracy and the shift to a streaming-first model — along with surprise releases like Beyoncé’s — have greatly reduced that threat.The last time Beyoncé suffered a major leak was with “4” in 2011, when she told listeners, “While this is not how I wanted to present my new songs, I appreciate the positive response from my fans.” (Representatives for Beyoncé and her label declined to comment on her release strategy, and did not immediately respond to questions about the leak.)Behind the scenes, the luxury of having advance notice and — hallelujah! — an early promotional single can give industry gatekeepers, like radio stations and streaming services, the runway to get themselves involved before an album’s launch.“To have anything prior to the drop is a gift,” said Michael Martin, a senior vice president of programming at Audacy, which runs more than 230 radio stations around the country. “When you have time to prepare, you can be a better marketing partner with the artist and label and management. You can have everything ready to push out at the moment the project hits the ecosystem. That’s what you want. You don’t want to scramble.”“Break My Soul,” a throwback to 1990s dance music and the first single from “Renaissance,” was released more than a month ago. With 57 million streams and 61,000 radio spins in the United States, according to Luminate, the song currently sits at No. 7 on the Billboard Hot 100 — its peak thus far and only the third time Beyoncé has hit the Top 10 in the last decade as a principal artist. (Her two most recent chart-toppers came as a guest: “Perfect Duet” with Ed Sheeran, in 2017, and “Savage Remix” with Megan Thee Stallion, in 2020.)Yet as with most things Beyoncé, the commercial and the artistic can work hand-in-hand. Smith said that the preparations for the release of “Renaissance” matched its teased vintage touchstones — for example, the special attention paid to the album’s elaborate vinyl packaging, which has once again become a fixture of big-tent pop releases.“Once I realized that Beyoncé was reaching back a bit, musically and artistically, with her sound and her allusions, then the rollout began to make sense to me,” Smith said. “It’s all very meta.”Another recent key development is Beyoncé’s arrival on TikTok, the home of bite-size, shareable videos that has been one of the most reliable drivers of music hits for at least three years now, as well as a go-to hype platform for younger stars like Lizzo and Cardi B.This month, Beyoncé’s official account posted its first TikToks — a montage of fans, including Cardi, dancing to “Break My Soul,” followed by the vinyl artwork reveal for “Renaissance” — and the singer recently made her entire music catalog available to score user-generated videos on the platform.Short-form videos drive “massive awareness and downstream consumption,” said Jonas, of Luminate. “We’ve got a clear line of sight on that.” Even before her participation, Beyoncé songs like “Savage Remix” and “Yoncé” thrived on TikTok.Whether or not the straightforward release of “Renaissance” represents a return to total pop domination for Beyoncé, there is still the chance that she has more moves to make. The album, after all, has been teased by the singer as “Act I,” indicating that it could be just a piece of a larger project.“It all feels a little bit too much like she’s playing by the rules right now,” Jonas said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if there is some twist that we are not aware of yet.”Part of Beyoncé’s cultural mastery, Smith said, has included the ability to make herself scarce at some moments and then to once again become center of everything when she chooses. “At this point, she allows air to others, but it’s at her whim, as she sees fit,” Smith said. “Her overall impact — how she moves, what she wears — is unmatched.”She added, “I believe if Beyoncé woke up and decided, at the age of 42, 45 or 50, that she wanted to rule the culture across all data points and impact then she could — like Cher before her, like Tina Turner before her — really without breaking a sweat.” More

    • 100 Shares189 Views

      in Music

      Beyoncé Announces New Album ‘Renaissance,’ Out Next Month

      by

      The new project, apparently with the subtitle “Act I,” will be released on July 29, according to the singer’s social media accounts.Cue up the celebratory tweets: A new Beyoncé album is coming.Early Thursday, Beyoncé updated her social media accounts to indicate that a new project called “Renaissance,” apparently with the subtitle “Act I,” would be released on July 29. A link on her website allowed fans to add the album in advance to their collections on streaming music services, and her site is selling four “poses” — versions, or at least bundles — of boxed sets for the album, containing items like T-shirts, posters and a collectible box.“Renaissance” will be Beyoncé’s first solo studio album since “Lemonade” in 2016. But she has released other material since then, including “Everything Is Love,” her joint album with Jay-Z, her husband, in 2018 (credited to the Carters); “Homecoming” (2019), a live album and concert film from her appearance at the Coachella festival; “The Lion King: The Gift,” a companion album to the 2019 remake of “The Lion King”; and songs like “Black Parade” (2020), which won a Grammy Award for best R&B performance, and “Be Alive” (2021), which appeared in the movie “King Richard” and was nominated for an Oscar.Most surprising is that Beyoncé teed up “Renaissance” in advance at all. Back in 2013, she blew up the music industry’s marketing playbook by releasing her visual album “Beyoncé” with no notice, simply telling fans via social media that it was available to purchase. The album, and its novel method of release, became a global news story, demonstrating the power of superstars on social media to corral their fans and bend the rules of the business to their favor. For years after, artists and their record companies sought to “pull a Beyoncé” and repeat her success. Of course, only Beyoncé could pull it off again, as she did in 2016 with “Lemonade.”To Beyoncé’s superfans in the BeyHive, who constantly scour the internet for any clues about their heroine, the news about “Renaissance” was not a total surprise. In recent days, fans have tweeted about the registration of what appear to be new Beyoncé songs on industry databases, like the one for ASCAP, the licensing agency for songwriters and music publishers. More