The star’s new album Renaissance weaves Black dance music history, feminism and queer thought into an ecstatic masterpiece that defies marginalisation
Oh, to be an “un-American girl” in the year of our Lord 2022. One of the greatest pop stars of all time knows only she has the juice, the genius and the audacity to seize this middle-fingers-in-the-air moniker on I’m That Girl, the “still pimpin’”, mystical prologue to Beyoncé’s latest masterpiece, Renaissance. The track immediately reacquaints us with versions of Beyoncé we met on her 2016 watershed Lemonade: Beyoncé the outlaw, the bandit, the baller; a sister who is “indecent”, “such a heathen”, “thuggin’” for her “un-American life”. But whereas Lemonade boldly and allusively traced the fuel for her errantry (armed with a baseball bat, no less) all the way back to the historical nightmare of slavery and its lasting systemic problems – broken Black intimacies, alienated lovers, fractured families and generations of Black women left behind to clean up the mess – her seventh studio album paints a portrait of a dancefloor rebel-with-a-cause whose joyous uncoupling with what it means to be “American” right now demands that we redefine that word altogether.
To be “un-American” in Beyoncé’s Renaissance age is to be “comfortable in my skin”, as she sings on the slinky Chicago house banger Cozy. The song features trans icon Ts Madison’s soundbite “Black as I want to be” and a verse that not only sets out to “paint the world pussy pink”, but drench it in the colours of Daniel Quasar’s expansive Progress Pride rainbow flag. If, in other words, to be “American” in 2022 means living in everyday physical, social, political and existential peril as Black and Brown peoples, as women, trans and queer peoples – and especially as Black and Brown queer folk – then count her out. Beyoncé knows, like the rest of us in the margins, that curating a radical life is a “litany for survival”, as the late Black feminist poet and essayist Audre Lorde put it. Conceptually, Renaissance leans into this tradition of queer-of-colour thought forged by scholars influenced by Lorde and her generation of thinkers (Rod Ferguson, Kara Keeling, Tavia Nyong’o, Marlon Ross, Jafari Allen, Madison Moore, to name but a few): folks who have excavated and championed alternative sites of plenitude and pleasure in the face of intersectional violence and exclusion. As Keeling notes of pop empress Donna Summer (who Beyoncé references on Renaissance’s closing track) and I Feel Love, this queer freedom music is rooted in ecstasy, “whose root comes from the Greek ekstasis, meaning ‘standing outside oneself’. It transduces one into more than one, someone who is many. They.”
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by Daphne A Brooks via Electronic music | The Guardian
