Musical event of the summer, Queen Beyonce released her seventh solo album this Friday. An urgent call to dance under the lights of nightclubs or on the sand of the beaches. Six years after “Lemonade”, which has become a classic, fans have found their queen, “Queen B”, in the midst of “Renaissance”, the title of this album by 16 tracks for a world that’s starting to party again after the pandemic. A world where we meet Donna Summer, the father of disco Giorgio Moroder or James Brown.
“Making this album allowed me to dream and escape during a scary time for the world. It allowed me to feel free and adventurous at a time when not much was moving“, had announced Beyoncé, almost 41 years oldto his 270 million followers on Instagram. “I wanted to create a place where you feel safe, without judgement. A place where you feel free from all perfectionism and overthinking. A place to scream, to release, to feel freedom”she added.
A leak in supermarkets
The singer announced the color with her single, “Break my soul”, a title sampled on a 1990s dance music standard, “Show me love” by Robin S. A reminder of electro but also a way of pay tribute to black, queer and popular artists and communities who shaped this musical genre in the Chicago of the 1980s.
Dance tracks, “Renaissance” includes others, starting with “Cuff it” or “Virgo’s groove”, literally a hymn to sex and love. The album ends in disco apotheosis, with a last title entitled “Summer Renaissance”, which takes up Donna Summer’s hit “I feel love”. Beyonce’s voice has its place on “Renaissance,” but it’s the urgent call to the dance floor that stands out, with so many tributes to the pioneers of funk, soul, house and disco. Collaborations on the album include Nile Rodgers, Skrillex, Grace Jonesand, of course, her husband, rapper and businessman Jay-Z, with whom she forms one of the most glamorous and influential couples in popular culture.
But the album was leaked this week. Supermarkets have placed sesame on the shelves 48 hours too early. Fans of Beyoncé have multiplied on social networks the calls for patience and discipline. “I’ve never seen anything like it. I can’t thank you enough for so much love and protection”, told them the singer, Thursday evening on her Twitter account. She also revealed that “Renaissance” was just the first chapter of a three-part project.
A more classic communication this time
Beyonce is used to creating the event and the surprise as soon as she releases a work. But this time, she opted for a more classic appetizer, with a single, a few posts on social networks and the cover of British Vogue, where she posed on a horse, in a setting of red light on a runway of dance. Since “Lemonade” in 2016, her most successful album, she had released a live album and a film about her performance at the Coachella festival in 2018, titled “Homecoming”.
His song “Black Parade”, released amid mass protests sparked by the killing of African American George Floyd by white police officers in June 2020, has received critical acclaim. This title allowed the one who had made a name for herself in the Destiny’s Child group, to become the most awarded woman in the history of the Grammy Awards, the awards of the American music industry, with 28 victories. But like Jay-Z, who has the record for Grammy nominations, 83 in all, she has often been shunned for the major categories, some seeing it as a symptom of the lack of diversity in these great masses.