Beyoncé - Renaissance

“Calculated” is a meaningless word, anyway

Rock 'n' roll is s'posed to be spontaneous, maaan.

Well, any art is calculated but must feel simple - easy, you get to perfection not by adding but by removing etc. that's what I meant.

“Beyonce's mentioning her queer uncle strikes me as defensive, which, of course, she didn't intend.”

I’m sure someone is already writing this, but there’s a 2022 Kendrick/Beyoncé think piece in this theme, maybe.

ooh

Lots of good posts! I'm not making the argument that she's not allowed, just pointing out that what she's doing at points on this album feels different than what she (or maybe any big popstar who dabbles in regional/subcultural sounds?) has done before. Possibly in a good way.

Would also like to point out that I'm not solely talking about queer culture, ie NOLA bounce is not a primarily queer music, even if some of its most well-known exponents are.

My rejoinder to that is that there is a reason why “Break My Soul” was mashed up with “Vogue” and that the phenomenon you’re describing has been paramount to most of Madonna’s career, and that’s before getting to the Whitney/Mariah remixes or Crystal Waters/CeCe Peniston/Martha Wash etc. Like, if this is a line of thought worthy of interrogation, should we also be questioning Bette Middler’s career?

or judy garland etc. etc.

the thing that bothers me about resident advisor's general approach to dance music is that it often seems to trot out an authenticity discourse that is ideological, class-signaling and pretty white in its own way. i think people like say omar-s pick up on that. trying to make authentic queerness into something class-based and just sort of gesturing rather than doing an actual class reading that looks at the past and thinks about the contradictions of the culture industry when it comes to producers vs. consumers serves no one but the writer and ra i guess. i would actually love to see terre thaemlitz on the subject, i'm sure he would do a much better job of it.

that being said, writers aren't exactly well supported for their work, so i don't want to be overharsh

judy garland was not a great addition to that list

I think that this is in part a case of rhetorical transplant, where writers deploy the same logical device from one issue to another that superficially looks the same to them. Within queer circles, most discussions of appropriation are about white cis male gay culture appropriating from black culture (in most cases straight-presenting cis female black culture), in large part through the inflection point of black trans culture. There’s obviously a lot of sense to the frame, though whether and how it applies in a variety of specific contexts is heavily contested as you might expect.

Bette Midler probably bypasses interrogation because of the sociocultural variants of the queer communities her career is most heavily associated with.

Beyoncé superficially provides a better fit in terms of the appropriation site (ballroom culture) but the specificity of her relationship to that scene, if any, is not really examined (though who has the time or the capacity, when they’re required to pump out a hot take review?), and that aporia gets skipped over with a handwaving “oh but she is wealthy so”

Not sure I would invoke Omar-S at this point though. He was very happy with the progressive pipecockification of music criticism right up to the point where it came after one of his friends.

My specific irritation with this entire line of thinkpiecing is that Black queer culture was perfectly happy to elevate vocally-slightly-better-than-average Beyonce to diva status over a decade ago, so it really feels like now that she is taking a strain that always existed in her musical output and spends an entire album exploring it, large swathes of people are ignoring the reception of her past output and how she intersected with the circles she is explicitly drawing from and celebrating with this album, seemingly because she's a light-skinned billionaire and not really because of the music itself or any claim she might have to incorporate it into her work. Bette Midler has a story that is much more explicit in its ties to gay fandom, which is why I brought her up; policing Beyonce of all people on this axis strikes me as being equally ridiculous as policing Bette, so my thesis is that bringing up the argument means you're using it as a proxy to attack her for being rich. Which, if that bothers you, just say it; it's 2022, half the people you encounter online want to murder anyone making more than $100K

(Going to state for the record that that last statement is knowing hyperbole so that people hopefully don’t get hung up on the specifics and grapple instead with the rhetorical intent behind the exaggeration)

yeah agree with DJP. also, to Tim's point:

I think that this is in part a case of rhetorical transplant, where writers deploy the same logical device from one issue to another that superficially looks the same to them.

― Tim F, Wednesday, August 10, 2022 4:18 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

one might even call it 'rhetorical appropriation.' lol

not speaking of the beyonce RA piece specifically -- but of that maneuver in general

The problem with writing to a thesis.

Yet! Not using Beyonce's putative exploitation of subcultures as a paragraph-by-paragraph critique cripples that piece; but such an approach would've required a rigor that in itself wouldn't have satisfied me, for there's no way to write such a thing without getting into intentions.

I'm not talking about the RA review personally, just thinking about the moments on the album where she fully emulates a bounce mc and a ballroom mc respectively. To me they're the most striking parts of the album and also probably my favorite, but they also take me out of it because they're so specifically referential. Really they make me want to put on other records of that music.

one might even call it 'rhetorical appropriation.' lol

― xheugy eddy (D-40), Wednesday, 10 August 2022 23:14 (yesterday) link

haha.

All this is part of a broader problem I have with current music writing which I alluded to above, being the twitter-induced collapse of the space between cultural studies and celebrity gossip (all of which is driven by the brutal economics of what most effectively induces reader responses), squeezing out anything that occupied a space in between those two poles (most notably any detailed or thoughtful consideration of the music) but also doing a big disservice to the "cultural studies" end of the resulting frankenstein's monster.

Like, to map's point above, I think there is an arguable basis to say that class analysis, wielded thoughtfully, can act as a skeleton key for the purpose of understanding the dynamics at play in various forms of social inequality, marginalisation, appropriation, co-optation etc. (I'm not sure I fully agree with this proposition, but I can appreciate the argument). But there's a certain... performative irony in then deploying that critical overlay primarily in the context of discussions of celebrity culture.

Trying to say something useful about the marginalisation of black trans communities and culture by reviewing a Beyonce record and then basically concluding that the problem is that Beyonce, personally, is not marginalised enough, strikes me as only marginally more useful an exercise than trying to identify sustainable environmental policies from the starting point of considering Taylor Swift's private jet carbon emissions. If your critical intervention boils down to "okay, but let's get serious about the broader social issues at work here" then get fucking serious about them, rather than writing what amounts to a vapid extended tweet about a celebrity. Critic, heal thyself.

Tim, I hope you can hear my applause and cheers faintly in the distance

Tim, wanna meet for a beer

this album is a dud but I gotta admit, they went all out on the vinyl packaging

album is absolutely not a dud but why would you want vinyl of something you don't like?

I had to stop playing it. Indelibly an August album.

I think it will sound good at Christmas

can't believe i still love this terry hunter remix, like andre squared. legit organ solo too.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=_b9wQjg6qi8

andres that is

I think it will sound good at Christmas

― your original display name is still visible

For sure. About the only reason I like driving is to blast bumpers like this album.

album is absolutely not a dud but why would you want vinyl of something you don't like?

― your original display name is still visible (Left), Monday, October 10, 2022 2:53 PM (one hour ago) bookmarkflaglink

it’s not a dud according to my gf!

I can't spin vinyl in my car :(

fair enough your gf is correct though xp

I had such high hopes for this that I don't think it would have ever lived up the potential it had in my head, but I've really not felt myself drawn to return to it at all

THIS ALBUM IS SO GOOD WTF k3vin???

u guys are crazy

in conlcusion i'm mad

possibly appropriative of queer culture which i'm poorly qualified to evaluate, but SO GOOD

i played "Heated" for my 1 year old daughter and got a little carried away dancing along...she looked alarmed

yesterday, i mean. i'm not eternally playing "Heated" for my daughter

OR AM I???

i had this same argument with my students at the beginning of the school year. they are also RONG about Renaissance

horsehoe otm

so you're saying that it's the children who are wrong

precisely

a horseshoe theory I can get behind

A game of horseshooooooe

good luck to everyone including me who will be trying to get tickets

may we not get another Taylor situation (this will most likely be another Taylor situstion)

if it's the "verified fan" thing then...yeah, it'll be the same as taylor (and springsteen and countless others). Godspeed.

I always find it funny when these tours are marketed as "world tours" when they really just mean parts of North America and Europe. Hopefully she will make it to Australia later in the year - the last time she did was in late 2013 pre-s/t (and it so happened that at that time I was living overseas)

lol one night here to Taylor's three ... gonna be a shit show.

Two Toronto dates were announced at first but the second date was removed a bit after, which makes me think extra dates will be announced when the first date inevitably sells out

yeah if you look at the dates there’s a lot of gaps in between, i’m sure they’re gonna announce multiple shows in most cities