The day before With the July release of Renaissance, Beyoncé’s seventh studio album, her management team announced in a press release that the record would not include images as part of its release. “It’s an opportunity again to be listeners and not spectators,” she said. The choice was strange, if a bit disappointing, for the simple fact that Beyoncé remains one of the foremost image-makers of our time. The surprise release of the singer’s self-titled album in 2013 and Lemonade in 2016 were accompanied by a stunning series of music videos that rewrote the rules of modern art. (The Lemonade Video Collection premiered as a movie on HBO.) Nowadays, when she “talks” outside of an album cycle, it’s mostly through expertly curated Instagram posts, which in turn become the subject of endless fan theories. So the fact that Renaissance entered the world without her own visual language was, well, a bit unnerving.
Images are the dominant record in this era. We exist on and through screens. We long to be seen, and our most prescient social media apps enable that sharing. YouTube was the foundation of our quest, a bottomless video bazaar that gave everyday users the power to create what they wanted, to be who they wanted. Instagram was, for a time, a seductress, impossible to live without. Influencers built an entire economy around the concept of being watched. More recently, TikTok has become the new frontier of cultural production, where moving images flicker on our iPhones with a compelling and almost irresistible kinetic.
As the digital age became a surreal inevitability of my everyday life, social media magnified my gaze exponentially, an almost exhaustive lens through which I looked. It is a province for me to discover and taste the meaning; meaning often derived from all sorts of visual representations. As I have previously written, images make us real. Memes and GIFs are the authoritative vernacular in almost all of my group chats. There are nights when I stalk the grid of hookup apps with a feverish obsession, scrolling through the possibility of what I see and the promise of all those square snapshots—angular faces, cropped brown bodies—can offer. Even the bloated era of streaming TV has provided a wealth of content and images that I continually devour. Images are all around us. It seems natural to yearn for more, to want to find new permutations to define ourselves.
But then I heard Renaissance. And he listened and listened and listened. And I understood. Her songs are meant to live on in us, not necessarily as a reflection of Beyoncé’s artistic invention, but as a reminder of our own fantastic possibility despite the difficulties that surround us. She was not alone in this creative endeavor. Other featured artists this year tried to deviate in a similar way, making music meant to be experienced on a more human and analog level.
Listening to Drake can, at times, feel like watching the History Channel leaked through TikTok. A shameless interloper, yet keen student of the past, his six solo albums are a collage of global influences, a siphon of local scenes, sounds and sensibilities. The most recent, Honestly, Nevermind, launched by surprise in June. Like Renaissance, what I loved was how it veered into the neon haze of the dance floor, looking for a more analog moment where digital realms didn’t dictate so much how we interact, create, and make ourselves. In Drake’s case, he drew inspiration from the club music of Baltimore and Jersey, and set the mood with a fast-paced production from house luminaries like Black Coffee. Bad Bunny and Kendrick Lamar’s respective albums also implored us to get up and move this year. Even now I can hear it; the tremor of Bad Bunny rapping “Titi me wonder,” his own kind of summer spell, echoing from the city blocks, the energy of New Yorkers more alive than ever. It was the sound of a city, of many cities around the world, finding its way again.
It’s been five months since the release of Renaissance, and the demand for visuals hasn’t calmed down one bit. But that longing misses the point. Renaissance’s spirit was never focused on what she could fully visualize through Beyoncé’s eyes. We were her canvas all the time, our bodies in motion, our joy realized, were the very images we were looking for. Upbeat, abundantly black, and perfectly queer, the music turned us into our own avatars of creation and meaning, prisms of joy and resilience. Whether it’s singing the lines “comfortable in my skin” in “Cozy”, randomly yelling “one of a kind!!” or even getting lost in the brilliant production of “Virgo’s Groove” on a Friday night, that’s where the album came to life and was meant to be seen. Those are the images that last. The most compelling images of Renaissance will always be us, together, celebrating ourselves.
In March I lost a friend to suicide, and at the end of the summer I would lose my grandmother to dementia. There were also other losses. It was a year in which everything seemed big, dark and finite. The music that called to me, that saved me, provided the opposite: it was bright, messy, and deeply vulnerable. It offered clarity. Lifted the lingering mist. The best of the year’s musicians got us moving again, not to the office, that bygone invention of pre-pandemic life, but back out into the world and back to the dance floor, where the familiar embrace of friends and new flames was like a spell, and the rubbing of bodies against each other a balm. All radiating electricity and intent. All of us rebuilding life in the thick and continuous aftermath of death.
Source: news.google.com