With a new album ready to drop this week, we celebrate the R & B superstar and her imprint on American culture.
Beyoncé is getting ready to bring the world her seventh studio album this Friday. Rumors are already swirling about what genre she’ll showcase, what themes she’ll explore and more.
We already got a hint with the single “Break My Soul,” which has popped across dance floors all summer. Even if you’re not part of Beyoncé's Beyhive counting down the days until the album release, it’s hard to deny that the artist is iconic — a total game changer.
But how did she get here, and how does she remain relevant? We get into that today. Read the full transcript here.
Host: Gustavo Arellano
Guests: L.A. Times pop music critic Mikael Woods
More reading:
Beyoncé has made music history — again — with chart-topping ‘Break My Soul’
Beyoncé's ‘Renaissance’ album cover is here. Saddle up and bow down to the queen
Beyoncé returns with liberating house jam ‘Break My Soul’
Gustavo: Beyonce is back. And she's decided it's a summer to rediscover yourself and dance.
Ms. Carter is getting ready to bring the world her seventh studio album this Friday.
Rumors are already swirling about what genre she'll showcase, what theme she'll explore and more.
Because even if you don't care for her, you know, that Beyonce is iconic…a total game changer,
But how did she get there…and how does she continue to remain relevant?
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AP Clip : I'm Gustavo Arellano. You're listening to The Times, daily news from the LA times. It's Monday, July 25th, 2022.
Today, a fanboy or fangirl or fan person meditation on Beyonce and her upcoming release, Renaissance.
It's summer folks, so surrender to her groove.
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AP Clip : Here to talk about all this is Mikael Wood, LA Times pop music critic, and fellow member like me of the Bey hive. Mikael, welcome to The Times.
Mikael Wood: Thanks Gustavo. Good to be here.
Gustavo: Okay. So Beyonce's most recent single “Break My Soul.” What do you think of it?
Mikael Wood: It’s great. What a song, man. Really just going right for the sort of zeitgeist. I love it. I mean, a great beat, a great groove. It's got this great sample of big Frida.
WEAVE SAMPLE OF BIG FREEDA FROM BREAK MY SOUL
Mikael Wood: …the New Orleans bounce icon, and just like a great, growly, vocal performance from Beyonce.
Bey clip
Mikael Wood: I love it when she does sort of pretty R&B singing, but I also love it when she gets kind of down and dirty, which she definitely is doing on this one. And, you know, it's interesting, Beyonce is maybe the most alert pop star that we have in the world and she's always kind of looking at what's going on. And I think that there's a little bit of a connection with a larger cultural moment right now with this song. You know, there's kind of a wave of ‘90s to like early Y2K nostalgia among young people. We're talking about low rise jeans and miniskirts, and this song kind of hearkens back to, like, a ‘90s house music vibe. That really comes through in that way. Makes you think that she's sort of paying attention to that throwback.
Gustavo: Yeah, right off the bat. When I heard it, like took me back to my high school and college years, and not to any parties of course, I'm talking about radio, but those xylophone sounds just at the very beginning, like kind of pinging onto I'm like, yep. This is house music. This is a house party. This is a place for us to just jam.
Mikael Wood: There's sort of a brewing house music revival. Drake, who's always kind of in dialogue with modern pop music as well, he put out a couple weeks ago called “Honestly, Nevermind.” Which is, like, pretty much like a full fledged immersion into house music.
Music Clip: Oh, when you're ready behind.
Mikael Wood: Charlie XCX has dabbled in the sounds, too. I think that it's fair to say that some of this is like post-COVID, like, malaise lifting, right? Like people want to be out and dancing and this is the music to make that happen.
Gustavo: And Beyonce's always been about getting into genres from the past. Like she looks forward, but she looks back in the past and especially giving respect specifically to the artists who inspire her.
Mikael Wood: She's always super, super deliberate in like tracing the cultural lineages that she's pulling from. On this song, “Break my Soul,” if you look in the writing credits, she's giving a shout out to the people who wrote the song. “Show me love” by Robin S which people from the ‘90s certainly know it's been sampled.
Gustavo: You've got to show me love.
Music Clip: You've got to show me love.
Gustavo: I love it.
Mikael Wood: Exactly. It's been sampled countless times. And like I've listened to musicologists say that, like she's not even really sampling it. It's not exactly a sample, but she's just clearly showing her work. You can think of it like that, right. She's like acknowledging where the music that she's making came from. I think another way to see that illustrated is when she played Coachella a couple years ago // or Beychella, as you know, it's also known. And that was, that whole show was this really sort of elaborate homage to historically Black colleges and universities and the kind of marching band culture that prospers there.
Clip of 2018 coachella performance.
Mikael Wood: Or you can think about Black is King, which was like the sort of visual album that she made to accompany the live action remake of, um, The Lion King.
black as king clip
Music Clip: Your way back your way back.
Mikael Wood: She sort of pulled from a lot of different African music now, you know, it's interesting, obviously Africa is an enormous place and it has all kinds of different genres and traditions. It's not a monolith and as universally beloved as Beyonce is, there were folks who, during that little phase thought, eh, you're playing a little fast and loose here. You're using music from countries that aren't the same countries where The Lion King takes place. You know, there was also a time when she was in a Coldplay video and she sort of was accused of culturally appropriating some of the looks of Bollywood. So that this happens, even Beyonce is sort of criticized for this, but I think on the whole, she's been pretty good at I guess appreciating rather than appropriating would be a way to put it. You think about her song, “Daddy Lessons” from her lemonade album, which was more or less a country song.
daddy lessons clip
Music Clip: Daddy liked his whiskey with this tea…
Mikael Wood: She used her little lot of recognizable country tropes so much that, later on the Dixie Chicks joined her to cover the song at a Country Music Awards show.
dixie show clip
Mikael Wood: Which of course then apparently came in for controversy where people were like, Beyonce, you're not a country singer, but we digress.
Gustavo: Yeah, no, the music always hits me first when I hear a song and then actually pay attention to the lyrics. And so for “Break my Soul,” you talked about musically getting the zeitgeist of where house music's coming, but you listen to the lyrics and it, everything in “Break my Soul” sounds like a sound check of the last two years.
Mikael Wood: Oh, totally. I mean, it's like right in tune with the great resignation and it's just this sort of moment of thinking about wealth and equality and so forth. Beyonce, it's not just that she thinks about sort of like the music is that she's making, but also how she releases it. It's no coincidence that Beyonce put out, “Break my Soul” during Juneteenth weekend. Also during the middle of pride month, you know, in 2020, she also put out a song, “Black Parade” during Juneteenth.
Black parade clip
Mikael Wood: So, and then in “Break my Soul,” you know, she's obviously kind of aligning herself with the history of house music, which was developed by queer people and people of color in the late ‘70s at the time of the AIDS crisis, a sort of symbol of resilience. Beyonce's always thinking about these things. She's always thinking about the traditions that she's kind of dipping into and borrowing from and “Break my Soul” is a song about liberation at a moment when a lot of people are clearly questing for that. She joined TikTok, which is an interesting sort of thing that we can get into, but she joined TikTok and did a post where she showed a lot of people who were dancing and making videos to “Break my Soul.” And a lot of these folks were people who were dancing the song while they're preparing for pride. And of course that's, during a summer, that's had an unusual amount of conservative lawmaking, you know, limiting the rights of trans and queer people. Beyonce knows this and she's making a stand at that time for those reasons.
Gustavo: You know, she gets to these points where she's calling what's out there and yet she still gets criticized for doing this. It's like, oh, you're a pop star. And you're trying to, you know, glomp onto, uh, the struggles of other people. Like it's like she has to fight every step of the way for the industry to take her seriously.
Mikael Wood: For sure. And some of that is just classic pop music stuff. Right? Beyonce, as most people probably know started out in Destiny's Child and any musician that starts out in a, girl group or a boy band even if you have like instant superstardom, you're selling millions of records, yada, yada, you're still having to battle to be taken seriously by the music industry. Of course, in Beyonce's case the fact that she's a Black woman, who's also navigating through this industry, which is obviously dominated by white men. She's getting into fashion, which a lot of the same thing applies. So she's always having to blaze the trail that some are just generally reluctant to let her blaze. You know, the Grammys I always think is such a fascinating illustration of this.
Tape: Breaking the all time record for the most Grammy wins ever by any female artist or any singer male or female, the Grammy goes to…Beyonce!
Mikael Wood: In some ways you could say Beyonce is like the queen of the Grammys. But then you kind of dig into the details and the vast majority of her awards are in genre categories, best R & B song, best dance music recording, whatever. Not to discount those, but they aren't in the big general categories. And so it sets up this thing where like, we're not really properly measuring her success because the awards aren't really showing the effect she's had on the music industry as a whole, you know what I mean?
Mikael Wood: So many of the things that she has done have become sort of widely emulated. People remember her self-titled album, “Beyonce,” which pioneered the surprise drop, where she had made no mention that the record was coming. And then it just magically appeared one day. And that really was so widely emulated in the years after that all kinds of artists, you know, Frank Ocean and, and, uh, all, all kinds of people. And in fact, people who have long memories and people who bought CDs might remember that music used to come out on Tuesdays. Well, when Beyonce did the surprise drop of the self-titled record, it was on a Friday. And eventually the music industry came over to her side and said, okay, we're gonna start putting records out on Fridays as opposed to Tuesdays.
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Gustavo: So, how did Beyonce go from just super talented to a cultural icon? We'll talk about it after the break
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Gustavo: Michael, when you think of Beyonce, singer member of Destiny's Child, also solo artist, sometimes an actress, you know, she's a big thing, but when did she make that turn from just being a popular performer, into someone with all the influence that she has now today?
Mikael Wood: I think different Beyonce fans would target different moments. For me, I think it really coalesced around her record “Lemonade,” which was an album basically about the sort of dissolution of her marriage to Jay-Z, the famous rapper who is also her husband. This was a record about how, in the narrative of the record, Jay-Z, cheats on Beyonce.
lemonade clip
Music Clip: Hold up; they don't love you like I love you.
Mikael Wood: She discovers it. They go through all kinds of trials and tribulations, and then they come together and their marriage is restored at the end of the record. So it's a very personal tale, but Beyonce took such pains to frame the story in a way where it connected to all these larger themes and narratives and struggles of women and of people of color. And she did that through some of the musical signifiers, but also this was another one of her visual albums. And so she's building all kinds of signifiers into the music videos where she's connecting it to all these other narratives and stories she has some of the mothers of Black men, who've been killed by police in the past few years, and they're holding pictures of their sons who've been killed by police. And so it took the personal story, but in a larger sort of sociological context.
Gustavo: What's remarkable to me about her is that she's been ubiquitous in our lives for the past 20 years. I mean, she was in one of the Austin Power movies back in the day and she's been on television and all that, but she's so deliberate in how she presents herself and what she presents, like her work is what she releases and that's it. Even, like you mentioned earlier, she just posted her first TikTok this month. Whereas so many of her contemporaries are on TikTok and other social media all the time it seems.
Mikael Wood: I mean, TikTok has become like the defacto sort of place where pop music happens now. And here Beyonce is just finally being like, eh, I'll give it a try. As culturally dominant, as Beyonce is despite her cultural influence, commercially, she's not the same powerhouse that some of her peers are. You think about some of the humongous records this year, Bad Bunny for instance is a great example who's just absolutely dominating the streaming ecosystem. I mean, as far Beyonce's “Break my Soul,” big hit, but not a Bad Bunny size hit. And I won't be surprised if the album, as important as it is, and as amazingly reviewed as it is, and as much as it moves the cultural needle, it probably won't be the same size of commercial hit because she's just playing on a different field. And part of that is, yeah, she declines to participate in the kind of hurlyburly of social media and of TikTok. And she sort of builds everything she wants to say into her albums or her videos or her rare, but thrilling, concert tours. And that kind of gives the work just a humongous amount of weight that a lot of other acts can't really match because their album or their video is just part of this eternal stream of content, but for Beyonce it's like a world stopping event when she puts out a record.
Gustavo: What do you think then has been her strategy through all these years? Like what connects everything? I imagine a pop star, they wanna sell as many albums as possible, but it seems like with her, she does wanna sell millions and millions of albums, but she cares more about whatever the message is…
Mikael Wood: I think she's just thinking bigger, right? Like she wants to have hit singles. Of course she wants to sell records. She wants to sell concert tickets. But I also think that she is playing on a longer term schedule where she's thinking about the sort of legacy already. You can see the Beyonce effect on Jay-Z on her husband. When he did his record, 444, a few years ago, he was kind of using his music in the same way that Beyonce has, where he was like telling the world certain things about his life that he had declined to like mention, they don't do interviews, they don't talk to, you know, YouTubers or whatever.
Gustavo: It's all them on their thing…
Mikael Wood: Exactly. They control the story. For instance, there's a song where he talks about the fact that his mom is gay and she came out late in life.
Music Clip: In the shadows, people see you as happy and free because that's what you want them to see
Mikael Wood: And that's just such a fascinating thing, with so many other pop stars or musicians we'd be accustomed to like, hearing them talk about that, like in a cover story for a magazine or something. And Jay-Z like actually uses his songs to talk about stuff like that. That's in a, in an interesting way, that's like the Beyonce effect. And you know, it'll be interesting to see her sort of arms length relationship with TikTok, I'm interested to see how that changes things. uh, In the past few months, a lot of singers Halsey and Charlie XCX and FKA twigs, they've been talking about how they're sort of tired of TikTok and they feel like it's like this thing that they have to feed the beast all the time. And they're growing tired of doing that all the time. And so I'm interested to see how Beyonce's album does knowing that she doesn't really use TikTok. I'm interested to see if that resets the needle in some way.
Gustavo: How does her relative silences push her messages at the end?
Mikael Wood: She doesn't talk about a bunch of stuff so that when she does talk, it just carries a ton of weight. And over these past few years, she's really used her music, like we were saying with “Lemonade” and the stuff since then, she's getting increasingly political and she's really centering Blackness and the sort of experience throughout the Black diaspora. That's really becoming like one of the main overarching themes of her music, whether it's in “Lemonade,” talking about men who've been killed by police. People probably remember the music video for her song “Formation.”
Music Clip: now let's get information,
Mikael Wood: Where a young Black guy, black kid is dancing in front of a line of cops and stop shooting us graffiti in the background. Her song “Don't hurt herself,” like an amazing, like soul rock song. Uh, It's got a sample of a Malcolm X speech
Music Clip: Most disrespected person in America is the black woman.
Mikael Wood: Beyonce and Jay-Z, they've also backed this up with cash. They donated like a million and a half dollars to Black Lives Matter in 2016. And obviously this stuff. People critique it. Tfter the halftime show in 2016 at the Super Bowl, people probably remember that was a pretty political show with dancers who many people thought evoked the Black Panthers. And Rudy Giuliani had to just put his voice out there that he wasn't into this. She said you know, she was not against cops, she's against police brutality, but most of the time, I think it's fair to say. She doesn't really spend too much time responding to her critics, which just reinforces her initial message.
Gustavo: It's really telling that…as the years go along, as she becomes more political in her own way. That's when she's getting more criticism like you didn't see this criticism when she was with Destiny's Child, singing songs, like “say my name” or “survivor” or even “soldier.” And it's almost like the critiques against her is like, oh, what, we're supposed to believe this billionaire woman about revolution and taking into the streets and all that? But // sadly, that's not anything new in the history of pop music.
Mikael Wood: Beyonce is not an anti-capitalist. I consider “Break my Soul” to be a capitalist critique. That's what the song sounds like to me, but that isn't to say that Beyonce is anti-capitalism. I think that she believes in a Black entrepreneurship. That's the sort of message of her songs and of her so much of her music and Jay Z too, for that matter. Thinking about using the means of capitalism to benefit people who have historically been marginalized from those systems. That for me, the locus of so much of her activism, which I think is a crucial point.
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Gustavo: After the break, what we know about Beyonce's new album.
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Gustavo: Michael. So back to Beyonce's single this summer, “Break my soul,” it's part of this upcoming album that she's gonna release “Renaissance.” What do you expect is gonna be different from her past solo albums? What clues do we have so far?
Mikael Wood: We know the record has 16 tracks and Beyonce has announced the titles. There's a song called America has a problem. And one called thick, which are interesting pointers to where her head is at. She's mentioned some of her collaborators, uh, JayZ and Drake and Skrillex, uh, are credited. And so is Rafa Saddi, a great R&B and Neo soul producer and composer. There's been some reporting that the record has country music on it and also dance music. Like, you know, presumably what we heard and break my soul on Instagram. When she announced the record, she said that creating this album allowed me a place to dream and to find escape during a scary time for the world. So I think you can kind of assume that, uh, those topics were on her mind. And also the album cover it's it's her, but she's on a horse, which is sort of this old fashioned image, except the horse is also kind of like a cyborg, you know, it's futuristic, but it's ancient at the same time, which feels very Beyonce.
Gustavo And then finally, Mikael. Okay, after this album drops, what do you see next for Beyonce?
Mikael Wood: I mean, I think anything she wants, right? People are surmising, that this is gonna be like a two-part album, maybe a three-part album. And I think also fans wanna see Beyonce back on the road. I beat this drum a lot of times, but like Beyonce at Coachella was probably the best concert I've ever seen. So I am eager to see her get back on the road, just to see what she's imagined and what she was gonna bring to the stage.
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Gustavo: Mikael, thank you so much for this conversation.
Mikael Wood: Yeah, man. Good to be here.
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Gustavo: That's it for this episode of The Times, daily news from the LA times. Ashlea Brown, Surya Hendry and David Toledo were the jefes on this episode. And Mark Nieto mixed and mastered it.
Our show's produced by Shannon Lin, Denise Guerra, Kasia Broussalian, David Toledo and Ashlea Brown. Our editorial assistant is Madalyn Amato. Our intern is Surya Hendry, which congrats, you got another episode under your belt. You're doing great this summer. Our engineers are Mario Diaz, Mark Nieto and Mike Heflin.
Our editor is Kinsee Morlan. Our executive producers are Jazmin Aguilerra Gill and Shani Hilton. And our theme music is by Andrew Eapen.
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