Beyoncé decided a long time ago to let her music speak for itself.
“I’m grateful that I can choose what I want to share,” she told Harper’s Bazaar last year in a short, ultra-rare interview that reads like it was emailed. “One day I decided I wanted to be like Sade and Prince. I wanted the focus to be on my music because if my art isn’t strong enough or meaningful enough to keep people interested and inspired, then I’m in the wrong business. My music, my films, my art, my message – that should do it.”
Accordingly, Beyoncé hasn’t said much about her excellent new album, Renaissance, which hasn’t stopped her lead single, Break My Soul, from becoming her first number-one in 14 years. Nor has it stopped the album from dominating musical discourse for weeks, with both exegesis of its thicket of references to dance music history and messages gleaned from the twists and turns of a seemingly endless series of controversies.
The new episode of Rolling Stone Music Now delves into the details of these controversies, while also offering an exclusive look at the making of one of his songs about producer Hit-Boy. To hear the full episode, which includes segments featuring Rolling Stone’s mancaprr Conteh and Jeff Ihaza, listen to Apple Podcasts or Spotify, or press play above.
Some of the controversies addressed in the episode include:
Activists pointed out ableistic language in “Heated,” while Kelis complained about Beyoncé, including interpolating her hit “Milkshake” without notifying her in advance; In both cases, Beyoncé responded with a subsequent change to the album. Below, we discuss that criticism and the change itself that transforms recorded music into an endlessly repeated digital product rather than a fixed work of art—a moment Kanye West anticipated with his famous 2016 tweet, “Ima fix Wolves.” Jeff Ihaza explains why such changes can feel “dystopian”.
Bishop Patrick L. Wooden Sr. said from the pulpit that he found the gospel samples in the album’s lecherous “Church Girl” sacrilegious, not long after Fox News also criticized the album’s gleefully salacious lyrics. Wooden went so far as to accuse Beyoncé of “selling her soul to the devil.” In a section with Mankaprr Conteh, we discuss Conteh’s piece, in which he breaks down the album’s true messages, including the “clear notion of devotion as unchallenged by the profane” on “Church Girl,” as well as how the song can be read as a critique of religious motivated homophobia.
In a well-commended subtweet, for which she later apologized, songwriting legend Diane Warren asked how a single song could have 24 authors – a clear nod to “Alien Superstar” on Renaissance. “It started with not being able to afford certain things initially, so we started sampling and it became an art form, a big part of black culture (hip-hop) in America,” shot frequent collaborator The- dream back
In the episode, hit-boy explains how he was part of the team behind Travis Scott’s “Sicko Mode,” which has even more writers credited than “Alien Superstar” — and how the credits tend to reflect multiple producers, melody writers, and lyric writers, in addition to multiple names attached to samples and/or interpolations a song might use. After Marvin Gaye’s estate successfully sued Pharrell Williams and Robin Thicke over “Blurred Lines” for merely borrowing the feel of Gaye’s “Got to Give It Up,” artists seem to be attributing seemingly insignificant or questionable borrowings to older songs, for purely legal reasons Found.
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