[music]

Melissa: Renaissance a French word meaning rebirth, or revival. The renaissance those centuries following the Middle Ages in the arts, science, commerce, and innovation flourished. Renaissance Act 1, the seventh studio album of Beyonce Knowles-Carter, emerging from the darkness of the pandemic as an innovative sonic exploration of humanity, independence, love, sexuality, and possibility.

[Beyonce's Break My Soul plays]

Melissa: This album reflects a new maturity and exploratory playfulness for Beyonce. It's 15 tracks have a mix tape quality blending from one to the next.

[music]

Melissa: Go ahead and disable the random shuffle on your music player, because this album is meant to be experienced in order. In that way, it harkens back to an era of vinyl albums at 8-tracks when artists made their offerings as wholes whose sums were greater than their parts. Like the European Renaissance of the 15th 16th and 17th centuries, Beyonce's new album draws on foundational traditions to make something new. Grounding itself in Dancehall, house, techno and Afrobeat and yes, we're going to talk about the fact that she bounced this one too.

[music]

Melissa: Joining me now is Mankaprr Conteh she's a music journalist and staff writer at Rolling Stone. Welcome back to, The Takeaway Mankaprr.

Mankaprr Conteh: Hey, Melissa, great to be here with you.

Melissa: Do you have a favorite track?

Mankaprr Conteh: Do I have a single favorite track? No, do I have a top four or five? I could even narrow it down to a three for you.

Melissa: All right, let's hear it.

Mankaprr Conteh: All right, so the songs that immediately grabbed me upon my first listen are the ones that tap into African Sonic. I'm Sierra Leonean, as you know and so the music that I grew up with just always speaks to my heart and so I hear it in Energy.

[Beyonce's Energy playi]

Mankaprr Conteh: I hear it in Move.

[Beyonce's Move plays]

Mankaprr Conteh: There's an afro house quality to those songs and so I love that about them.

[Beyonce's Plastic Off the Sofa plays]

It's the way you wear your emotions on both of your sleeves, ah-ah-ah

Mankaprr Conteh: I love Plastic Off the sofa because Beyonce is just the queen of love songs. There's romance on this album. There's love on this album, for sure, but there's this unmitigated joy and Plastic Off the Sofa, I think combines those elements of the album really, really well. It's so pretty. It's floating. There's a part where her voice just flutters across the track and it's one of my favorite songs to listen to on the album as well.

Melissa: As you're describing Plastic Off the Sofa that I feel like you're capturing some of certainly what I've seen in social media in terms of how folks are initially responding to the particularities of this album, when you talk about the vocals. Talk to me a little bit about what you're hearing, and how Beyonce is using her voice this time.

Mankaprr Conteh: I think that there's such a sense of play on this album and I think that she's having just a great time zeroing in on all the magnificent things that she can do with her voice. There's the singing which is beautiful, it can be really light, it can be grave and powerful but then also, she's screaming on Heated.

[Beyonce's Heated plays]

Mankaprr Conteh: Which is written by Drake and if you're a Drake fan, you can tell in the first half of the song, it really sounds like things that Drake might say or melodies that he might use. In the second half, she's rapping and it sounds like really almost like primal like it's coming from the depths of her. I think that she's utilizing her voice of course, as a technically talented singer, but also just as like a really personal means of expression.

Melissa: It's interesting to hear you talk about your immediate attraction to the tracks that sound like home for you so for me, the moment that I cranked in the car while I was listening, was once we got to Break My Soul and Church Girl.

[Beyonce's Church Girl plays]

Melissa: The ways that Beyonce in those tracks with Big Freedia with Church girl is bouncing her music is bouncing her songs. I think in a similar way, I'm responding there to the New Orleans that sounds like home to me.

Mankaprr Conteh: That makes perfect sense. Before you even said-- as soon as you said it sounds like home, I was like, "She's going to talk about Church girl." Beyonce is just so good with all different types of music and I think that one thing that's really impressive is no matter what she's playing or exploring, it all sounds very authentic to her.

Melissa: That's a good point. On Lemonade she gave us a little country, and was reminding us of the country roots of Black folks and the Black roots of country music. What are some of the roots you see her tying into here?

Mankaprr Conteh: She didn't get into big detail about the influence that her Uncle Johnny had had on her, but we know that from her website, she had talked about the influence of a family member exposing her to the types of music that we're hearing on Renaissance. A lot of that is like house music. She's pulling from 90s Club, underground club music with the Pure Honey sampled--

[Beonce Pure Honey plays]

Amoorre Renee and Kevin Aviance, who were queer influencers in the truest sense, influencing music influencing a scene in the 90s. She is also pulling from disco, Beyonce is always pulled from funk and I feel like we're hearing some of that here. Like you'd mentioned earlier there's these electronic elements that she's playing with. I think that all of it comes together so beautifully in the sequencing in the transitions. Even though she's going from era-to-era across dance music, which is a huge umbrella, it feels very whole.

Melissa: We're going to take a quick break more on Beyonce is Renaissance Act 1. Coming up here on The Takeaway.

[music]

with you on The Takeaway. I'm Melissa Harris-Perry. I've been speaking with music journalist Mankaparr Conteh about Beyonce's new album, Renaissance. All right, let's talk about some of the controversies surrounding the album. First, the album was leaked, but then the leak didn't go nearly as far as you might think a leak might talk me a little bit about that.

Mankaprr Conteh: I was certainly surprised that the album has leaked, for at least the past decade, Beyonce has been the queen of surprises, it seems like she runs a really, really tight ship. Of course, there were physical releases of this album that might have complicated protecting source material. I was definitely surprised to see that the album has leaked, but I was not super surprised to see that in my little corner of the internet, people were not willing to talk very openly about listening to the leak, even if they had. Twitter just unveiled a close friends application and I saw some people here and they're mentioning that they were listening to the leak but only two people that they trusted.

Widely people waited to discuss the content of the album until the actual release date and I think that speaks to the way that a lot of us really respect Beyonce artistry, knowing that there's a way that she intended for this album to be received and to be processed and folks wanted to honor that. I think it's partially fear and I think it's partially respect.

Melissa: All right, let's talk about Kelis and Milkshake, a song that is sampled in Beyonce his Energy. Kelis says that, that for all of the crediting that she did and all of the releasing that she didn't credit Kelis' songwriting here, what's going on here?

Mankaprr Conteh: Kelis'has spoken out about feeling misled and undervalued in the way that her rights were attributed to her not attributed to her rather by Pharrell and Star Trek, the label that she was signed to her point in time. Her disappointment in her anger seems to come from the fact that one she was not credited properly, but then two, was not even approached by Beyonce or people in Beyonces camp to be informed that her music was going to be used or that they would have liked to use some of Milkshake on Renaissance.

I think one of the things that's been really important to me is to hold and respect both women. I think that we can respect Beyoncé's artistry, the amount of collaboration on Renaissance, how beautiful it came out and also know that someone may have been harmed in the process and may have felt hurt, betrayed what have you. That both of those things are legitimate and we should be able to hold them at the same time.

Melissa: We've talked about the vocals from a sonic perspective, but there's also the lyrics. Beyoncé is doing some fairly political work at various points, even from the beginning. Even from I'm That Girl. Talk to me about what you read as the politics of this album.

Mankaprr Conteh: I think that there is really a deep investment in personal freedom on this album from Church Girl saying, "No one can judge me, but me," in the context of a song steeped in religious industry and Christian imagery and knowing that maybe people under that belief system might say, "Well, no one can judge me, but God." I think that Beyoncé calls herself a God. She encourages the people who are listening to Renaissance to think of themselves as God.

There's very few instances of pain across the album. There's so much investment and hope and possibility and in personal freedom. The world has been really crazy. I think that it's important for us to think communally and collectively. I think that the way that Beyoncé is communicating the importance of that is thinking about the world like a dance floor, thinking about the world, like a club where we're all together, we're enjoying ourselves, our bodies are moving and pulsing at the same rate. I hear a collective spirit in Renaissance, but I also definitely hear a politic of personal freedom too.

Melissa: Yes. Which makes it quite different Lemonade. It makes it different than Formation than Black Parade than the halftime show, dressed as panthers. It does feel more individualistic and I'll say you and I have a relationship that goes way back on talking about Beyoncé. One of the critiques that you raised early for me of Beyoncé's music was this question of individualism versus the communal, does this feel like a return to individualism or is it a spin on it? Is it a different way of thinking about individualism?

Mankaprr Conteh: Of course, there's a lot of flexing about material things, about beauty, about things that we might see on the surface, but I think that the personal freedom that I hear Beyoncé encouraging us to explore on Renaissance is so deeply about being in tune with your body, being in tune with the people that make you feel good about yourself, about feeling good about yourself. I think that that feels a little different than, let's all go be Black Bill Gates.

Melissa: I'll never forget you saying that. It's also worth saying that, when we hear a 20-something young woman talking about how beautiful and sexy she is, it is different than a 40 year old woman who's had three children in including a fairly difficult second pregnancy with twins. For her to make a reclamation of her body does have a different gender politics to it and a different positionality.

Mankaprr Conteh: Yes, there's a line I want to say it's on Heated where she talks about having stretch marks on her breasts and she's not hiding under this like false guise of perfection. What I hear on Renaissance is I am whole and I am flawed and I am still a god in spite of or because of all those things.

Melissa: Since I've got you here, I just want to ask you about a fellow Houstonian. You wrote that you penned the cover story for the June Rolling Stone in conversation with Megan Thee Stallion. Can you tell me a little bit about the experience of writing that extraordinarily personal piece about that artist?

Mankaprr Conteh: Thank you. That was definitely one of my favorite and like most treasured writing experiences thus far. I spent a lot of time with Megan. We did an escape room in LA. We went to the studio in Miami. We talked over Zoom and I really honored the opportunity to tell the story about someone who a lot of people might feel like a part of. Many of us watch Megan come up from ciphers to super stardom, but she also is her own person that is going through a really, really difficult time in her life that has dealt with unimaginable violence, a lot of loss. Just being able to tell that story in a way that answers the questions that so many of us have about how she's doing and how she's feeling, but also capturing the little, like fun, joyful, the breath of idiosyncrasies that make her who she is, what she likes to eat, how she likes to play, that was really one of the best writing experiences I've had so far.

Melissa: Mankaprr Conteh is music journalist and staff writer at Rolling Stone. She's been my interlocutor about Beyoncé for nearly a decade now. Thanks so much for being here Mankaprr.

Mankaprr Conteh: Thank you so much for having me.

[music]

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