It’s been a week since RENAISSANCE – how are we all doing? Has she been f-cking up your nights? For me it’s been night and day. RENAISSANCE is my soundtrack to everything right now. It’s in the car to and from work. It’s in the car on the way to and from golf. We had it playing on the course the other day during a tournament. I worked out to it yesterday after I got home from a rough day at the office. I have it on in the shower before I get into bed. And every day it’s a different favourite track. For the first weekend “Cuff It” was my jam. And then it became “Pure/Honey” because I wish I had the technique to be able to say…

 

“Get your money, money, c-nty, hunty”

“It should cost a billion to look this good”

Mid-week, though, my obsession was “Plastic Off The Sofa” – and I could go on about how each and every song has its day but the point here is that RENAISSANCE is an album that is excellent off the first listen…and then just gets better and better the more you unpack it. As Jason King wrote earlier this week in NPR’s review:

“Renaissance is such a barreling head rush of creative musical, sonic and lyrical ideas that the work of deconstructing and making sense of it is inherent to the album's coded power.”

That’s what I keep saying: Beyoncé did her homework so we have to do ours. And that NPR piece, featuring the aforementioned Jason King, LaTesha Harris, and Ann Powers is an excellent analysis of what Beyoncé is trying to do with this work. Harris at one point compares RENAISSANCE to a disco ball, “a space of infinite possibilities” and in that sense, this album, which pays tribute to the Black and queer dance and disco pioneers of previous generations, uses “disco’s infinite potential [to] showcase […] the Black diaspora”. 

 

Which is why King later writes that: 

“Renaissance deserves to be considered in relation to other important culture-hopping, curated dance music albums like the ingenious 1997 Masters at Work-produced Nuyorican Soul. I'm even prepared to think of Renaissance as a document of historical black music research in the spirit of Quincy Jones' Grammy-winning 1989 Back on the Block.”

Like I said, it’s a long “thique” read, three music critics exchanging scholarship – and not always in praise – on Beyoncé and her process, highly recommend.

Speaking of “Thique” though, and specifically the spelling of it… 

We’ve all been waiting on the visuals. Beyoncé knows we’ve been waiting on the visuals. So she trolled us, dropping this yesterday: 

 

 

I mean, she’s honest in that this is “Cliquebait”, so it’s not like we can say she lied to us… but she did play us in those first 30 seconds of her posing, gloriously, before transitioning to a slide that remains in place, “act i/RENAISSANCE”, for the next four f-cking minutes, as you keep hoping that she’ll show up again but she doesn’t, LOL. 

When are we getting an actual music video? Pointless to predict, because the Queen is unpredictable, but I’ll try it anyway. The MTV VMAs are coming up on August 28. Is it possible?