About an aeon ago in pop years – in reality, 2008 – Beyoncé released I Am… Sasha Fierce, an album that sought to unleash the uptight, upstanding R&B singer’s more adventurous side. It’s very hard to conceive of this long-ago Beyoncé, a figure who smiled and said very little in public, who had yet to make an explicitly political statement during a Super Bowl half-time, call herself a feminist or reveal her most vulnerable inner workings in public, as she did on 2016’s instant classic Lemonade. That record tackled her husband’s infidelity and that of her own father, pinpointing the roots of both experiences in the rupture of Black life caused by slavery.
Renaissance – her seventh solo outing – finds Beyoncé at her very Sasha Fiercest, dropping F-bombs like loose change, straddling lovers like a dominatrix, strutting around a loud, bass-filled space carved out in great part by queer music-makers of colour, an arena explicitly dedicated to Black joy and sensual pleasure. Her stated intent is to draw a line under recent pandemic strictures and cut loose in “a place without judgment”, all the while foregrounding the freedom from prejudice created on dancefloors from Chicago to Detroit, Berlin to Jamaica, Miami to New Orleans. If courage calls to courage everywhere, Beyoncé’s flexing – about her sexual prowess, the Basquiats on her wall – elides into a celebration of Black pride and female agency. “Comfortable in my skin,” she sings on Cozy. “Cozy with who I am.”
