Beyoncé’s ‘Renaissance’ Album 3 Favorite 

Beyoncé’s album Renaissance is grounded in black queer ballroom culture. It debuted at no. 1 on the Billboard 200 and had the third highest album debut of 2022.

Contradictingly, Beyoncé’s Renaissance features a wide range of music: disco, electro-funk, afrobeat, techno, breakbeat, and house, which ballroom culture used as a form of resistance against racism and homophobia during drag pageants for gay black men and transgender women. Beyoncé samples drag icons of the era such as Kevin Aviance and Moi Renee, and on her lead single “Break My Soul” she samples Big Frieda’s 2014 track “Explode.” DJ Honey Dijon, who worked on the production of Renaissance, is a black trans-activist herself and remixed “Break My Soul” with Beyoncé. The album cover of Renaissance is a shout-out to designer Telfar Clemons and pays homage to Harlem’s ballroom scene. A remix of “Break My Soul,” The Queens Mix features a reworking of “Vogue” by Madonna that replaces the names of golden-age Hollywood singers and actors with powerful black women and queer artists such as Lizzo, Janet Jackson, Aretha Franklin, Grace Jones, Missy Elliott, Diana Ross, and Lauryn Hill. The song also pays homage to multiple Drag houses—a house of chosen family that one competes with at Drag Balls—in the following verse. This brings the song back full circle to the title of the classic Madonna hit. Voguing is a dance that is judged in ballroom pageants. Voguing’s roots are in the Harlem Renaissance—a dance form created to rebel against the “traditional” dance that was used to express the flow of movement and sexuality, as well as a way to fight against racism and homophobia. The reason why the outro of the Renaissance track “Heated” is so iconic is because it portrays the life, celebration, and queerness of a drag ball seen in the lyrics “tip, tip, tip on hardwood floors / ten, ten, ten across the board (with a waist that whines like it) / Give me face, face, face, face, yah / Your face card never declines my God.”

By embracing black queer culture, Beyoncé raises awareness for the community that threw the first bricks at Stonewall and is responsible for the majority of queer culture we have today.

BY LIAM FRENCH '25 POSTED ON FEBRUARY 9, 2023