Renaissance reveals a gross Queen Bey, reveling in stereotypes.
That shocked look on Madonna’s face when Beyoncé’s group Destiny’s Child first performed at the 2000 Grammys showed recognition that her pop reign was over. Now, with the release of Renaissance, Act 1, Beyoncé finally attains Madonna’s cultural prominence. Her seventh solo album has been given the same event status and media-wide praise that Madonna used to command. Numerous articles in the New York Times and Los Angeles Times — and most other media in between — contribute to the cultural deification.
But don’t trust it, because Renaissance, Act 1 confirms how the entertainment industrial complex conspires to sculpt the popular mindset. After the Machiavellian political platitudes and faux black feminism of Lemonade, Beyoncé hones her bubble-gum R & B to inveigle responses to the current sexual-rights movement. She’s become the black Madonna. Not a good thing.
When the press overrates Renaissance, Act 1, it’s as if Madonna’s Erotica album, from 1990, never happened. Erotica borrowed from the same subculture that Beyoncé does, only the media praises this album for its authenticity — based on publicity that it’s dedicated to Beyoncé’s late gay uncle Jonny, who died of AIDS. So when Beyoncé appropriates the genre of black gay underground music known as House, it’s treated as a politician winning over a new demographic — and the habitually compliant media gives full support.
Demagoguery is indeed apparent throughout Renaissance, Act 1’s sub-cult manipulations. The opening track, “I’m That Girl,” initiates the exploitation with repeated street vulgarities: “These muthaf***as ain’t stopping me!” But nobody’s stopping Beyoncé, who has spent the past six years away from the recording studio while she made endorsement deals and flaunted conspicuous consumption. She means to convince her audience that she’s still “real” (from the black drag queen underground term “realness”).
Just as Madonna’s wannabes followed her bad-girl example, Beyoncé’s base identifies with her new “ratchet” postures as proof that they, too, can achieve low-down eminence. “Cuz I’m on that ho . . . Knocking Basquiats off the walls . . . My un-American life” out-sluts Cardi B. This is Beyoncé’s version of Kanye and Jay-Z’s “Otis,” where vintage music samples measured black social progress by the standards of contemporary consumerism and celebrity bacchanalia.
Corporate media loves this image tying black advancement to social degradation. (“Elegant and raunchy / Nasty is my guilty pleasure.”) Boasting the license to cuss, Beyoncé confesses behind-the-scenes commonality with the fans who will never achieve the detachment she buys with her enviable F-U money. (“U hate me cuz you want me.”)
For stupid topicality, the disco track “Energy” begins: “Voting out 45 / Don’t get outta line . . . I just entered the country with derringers / Cause them Karens just turned into terrorists.” But the album’s overall politics insist on racial identification (“Black, beige, light skin. Comfortable in my skin”). It’s a blatant exercise of the sub-cult pathology that House music embraced in order to transcend. Wild and compelling musically, it doesn’t work politically because it still marginalizes.
“Alien Superstar” expresses desperate black pathology as its own sub-cult, which is not the same as James Brown’s natural self-acceptance expression (1967’s “Say It Loud I’m Black and I’m Proud”). Changing negritude to dragitude, Beyoncé reifies racial stereotypes. Borrowing black gay emphasis on sexuality conforms to the fascination once defined in “The White Negro,” Norman Mailer’s famous essay about spiritual envy and social appropriation. Beyoncé updates Mailer using House samples: “You know all of these things we do in a unique, specific way that is personally ours.” Thus, in Renaissance, Act 1, tribalism becomes the new segregation — and the guilty, self-hating white media is buying it up and promoting it — using the academic term “Black Joy,” another expropriation.
But let’s not give Beyoncé too much credit. Renaissance, Act 1 is neither an advance nor greatly imaginative. Madonna already augured this tag sale, and her redefinition of House music was preceded by Jungle Boys’ “I’ll House You,” from 1988, and De La Soul’s “Kicked Out the House,” from 1991, which satirized the whole idea of underground ultra-authenticity. As a repository of House music styles, her protean mimicry sometimes comes close to that parody YouTube clip “LaFway.”
Beyoncé pays props to her dance-music forebears Grace Jones (who appears on “Move”) and Donna Summer, whose “I Feel Love” transformed disco into ambient art-pop and is sampled on the closing track “Renaissance Summer.” Beyoncé’s faint echo cannot match the power of that Summer–Giorgio Moroder composition or the exhilarating gestalt of Summer’s Bad Girls album. Any Beyoncé fans who don’t know it, don’t know what they’re missing while worshipping at Bey’s shrine. They don’t realize that, like Madonna, Beyoncé’s artistic freedom is another term for hegemony.