It’s been exactly one month since Beyoncé released her seventh studio album, “Renaissance," into the world.
And I’ve listened to it nearly every day since.
Now, this isn’t Beyhive propaganda about how Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter is the greatest entertainer and singer alive since the dawn of time, but even a cynic like me can admit that “Renaissance” is Beyoncé at her best.
Her 2016 album, “Lemonade," was a mixture of sad ballads, revenge fantasies and empowering anthems – primarily stoking the rumors of her husband Jay-Z’s infidelity. We were all getting in formation, united in our contempt for him, the villain in the album’s narrative – though simultaneously satisfied that we now knew why Solange was trying to fight him in that elevator.
A lot has changed since “Lemonade.” Beyoncé gave birth to her twins, Rumi and Sir Carter, in 2017. That same year, Jay-Z was inducted into the Songwriters Hall of Fame and used those renowned skills to publicly apologize through his own album “4:44.”
The couple then collaborated on a more upbeat and optimistic project in 2018 called “Everything is Love,” full of Black capitalist anthems about their wealth and the wealth of their great-great-grandchildren and assurances that their marriage was back on track.
And then the world fell apart.
It’s fair to say that nothing has been the same since the ongoing global pandemic that started in 2020. Since then, over a million people in the U.S. have died from COVID-19 and the rest of us are left with our grief and have to navigate a new normal.
And the pandemic is only part of what feels like the never-ending chaos of the past few months and years. There’s war in Ukraine. An outbreak of monkeypox. Inflation and the increased cost of housing, groceries, gas and more. An exacerbated mental health crisis. The overturning of a constitutional right that was upheld for nearly half a century prior.
