Beyoncé’s new album ‘Renaissance’ Consciously steeped in dance music history, it embraces decades of samples and sounds: Donna Summer’s 1970s disco and Chic, Jamaican dancehall, internet-speed hyperpop. She chose collaborators, references and even specific keyboard sounds that pay tribute to the memories of clubland while making her own 21st century statement. Here are some of the sources she celebrates, and an exploration of their significance.
The second and third track of the album, “snug” and “Alien Superstar,” feature film writing and production by Chicago-born house music DJ and producer Honey Dijon. “Cozy” also includes a writing credit for Curtis Alan Jones, known as Cajmere of Green Velvet — one of the greatest producers of Chicago house music.
That locale is key here. Chicago is the birthplace of house music, and Chicago house in particular often moves with a strong swing, accentuated by octave-jumping staccato bass patterns. The canonical example is “No Turning Back” by Adonis from 1986, and the bass line of “snug” plays as an inversion of it. The song is almost mnemonically recognizable as early Chicago house without sounding simply homage.
on “Alien Superstar,” the cadence of the hook (“I’m too classy for this world/Forever I’m that girl”) is attributed 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 song “Look What You Made Me Do,” and Drake sampled the 1992 song on 2021’s “Way Too Sexy.”
There is still a direct callback on “Cuff It”: The bass line is instantly recognizable as the progeny of Bernard Edwards’ monster riff from Chic’s “Good Times”, a number 1 hit in 1979, and Edwards’ Chic partner, Nile Rodgers, gets credit for writing and playing guitars here. (On bass and drums: Raphael Saadiq.) As Ken Barnes noted in his liner notes to “The Disco Years Vol. 4: Lost in Music,” a compilation on Rhino Records, which rewrote Chic, became something of a national pastime in the early 1980s, not least through 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 the writing and production of Skrillex, an EDM festival superstar up until early 2010 who was known for his drops – dramatic build-up that transitions into a fresh beat – but since his heyday he has largely worked behind the scenes. (See Justin Bieber’s 2015 smash “Where are you now,” which he made with Diplo.) “Energy” seems to work on wires; it’s sleek minimalism, with the smoothest 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 variety of singers and rappers from the 1990s. On Thursday, before the release of “Renaissance,” singer and songwriter Kelis took to social media, saying that those credits were for a sample of one of her songs (it turned out to be an interpolation of 2003’s “Milkshake”), and that she had not given permission for its use. Kelis was not a well-known writer or producer on most of the early albums she made with the Neptunes, and had no credit for ‘Milkshake’. In a 2020 interview with The Guardian she said she signed an agreement with the duo when she was “too young and stupid to double check.”
A similar situation arose with the album’s lead single, “Break My Soul”, indebted to the central Korg motif from Robin S.’s pop house hit “Show Me Love”. But whether her 1992 remix was sampled was unclear at first, 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 was robust: The riff appeared in Brooklyn producer AceMo’s 2019 “Where are they???” with John FM, which became an important underground dance song before and during the pandemic, as well as in recent releases of Charlie XCX and Daddy Yankee.
Another key to “Break My Soul” is the screams of exhortations (“Release your wiggle!”) by New Orleans bounce artist Big Freedia, whom Beyoncé had previously sampled on “Formation” (2016). Bounce is a New Orleans-bred dance music style that is staggeringly fast, bass-intensive and heavy on call and response; twerking arose in response to that.
Beyoncé looks back to the late 90s “Plastic from the sofa.” While most of the track is luscious digital balladry, there’s a moment in the coda that could come from “glitch” experimental electronics, where the tail end of a vocal run, heavily overdubbed, is subjected to an intentionally audible edit. It’s hair-shattering but above all humorous – an audible wink to the listener, exposing a facet of the high-tech production of modern pop. (For an example from the 1990s, see Oval’s album “94disk,” or the compilation “Clicks + Cuts”, released in 2000.)
Classic disco emerges halfway through the album. “Virgo Groove” contains layers of undulating percussion, synthesizer and bass that updates the production work Quincy Jones did with Michael Jackson – sort of an accompanying piece to Daft Punk’s “Get happy.” “Movement,” the next song, contains a function of Grace Jones – disco royalty, in case anyone was wondering where Beyoncé might come from.
Equally notable on “Move” — and even more prominent on “America Has a Problem” — is the teeming low end known in the dance world as the “Reese bass.” The term refers to a record from 1988, “Just Want Another Chance” by Reeseone of several aliases used by Kevin Saunderson, one of the first producers to identify with Detroit techno in the mid-’80s.
Just as ‘Chicago house’ refers not only to a style and its birthplace, but also to that swinging octave-hopping sound, ‘Detroit techno’ leans towards attention to detail and an aura of restless ingenuity. The heavy misty layer of “Just Want Another Chance” was often repurposed by London bass music styles such as jungle, drum & bass, UK garage and dubstep – what writer Simon Reynolds has called the “hardcore continuum” of Black British musical styles from urban areas that took root on London’s pirate radio.
Beyoncé’s use of the heavy, undulating Reese bass on “Move” and “America Has a Problem” places the album further in the black dance music continuum. “Problem” also opens with orchestral stabbings, à la Afrika Bambaataa & the Soulsonic Force’s signature electronic rap song “Planet Pride” – or, more appropriately given the title and lyrical theme, Janet Jackson’s ‘Rhythm Nation’.
“heated” shows Beyoncé in impressive neo-dancehall form over a slinky, woodblock-heavy groove. At the end of the song, she mentions tapping her fingers on the MPC, an instrument designed by Roger Linn that arrived in 1988. The MPC, made by Akai, is not played with a keyboard, but has a square grid of pads that trigger different sounds, and it has become a widespread composition and performance instrument.
“fat” sounds like something that would have been all over the dubstep dance floors in the days before Skrillex, when the subgenre’s expanded bass and variable tempos were mainly the domain of British producers. Sure enough, the song’s writing and production credits feature an artist influenced by those musicians: Chauncey Hollis Jr., aka Hit-Boy, who produced a dubstep inflected hit on Jay-Z and Kanye West’s “Watch the Throne” (2011).
The plasticine sounds of “fat” switch to the even heavier synthetic “Everything in your head”, co-produced by AG Cook, the main mind behind London label and art collective PC Music, which arrived in the mid-2010s with a sound built on stylish exaggeration: tones that were not just high in a machined way, but deliberately squeaky. (Sophiethe producer known for his electrifying hyper-pop who died in 2021 came from this camp.) “All Up” is futuristic robo-pop, with a sub-bassline that seems to snorkel under the speakers instead of coming out.
“Pure honey,” all but one is a sub-bass monster: the first movement, propelled by an annoying kick drum, is a surprising approach to techno at its steeliest, if not its most ‘pure’. The “honey” comes at the 2:11 mark, a bulbous neodisco groove with feathered horns that recalls early Sylvester. The track runs in part from a sample of a Kevin Aviance song subtitled “The feeling” – one of the most important recordings in a queer house sub-style known as ‘bitch tracks’.
The last track of the album, “Summer Renaissance”, make Beyoncé sing “It’s so good, it’s so good, it’s so good, it’s sooooo good” over a very famous pinball riff – yes, the finale interpolates Donna Summer’s “I feel love,” the 1977 disco hit with an all-synthesizer background and a pulsating rhythm that anticipated the future sound of dance music. But the main melodic phrase of “I Feel Love” sounds like it’s played on the Korg keyboard that anchors “Break My Soul,” subtly connecting two eras in a third.