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.
