Renaissance beyonce

On “Renaissance,” the pop star's seventh solo album, she finds escape, rebirth, community, pleasure and control in decades of dance music steeped in Black ...

There’s also Beyoncé’s vamp at the end of “Heated,” which she recites to the crack of a splayed hand fan. It sustained and delivered delight and provocation in spite of the surrounding crisis, it gave people looking for a house something that approximates home. The sternness she applies to the word “No” on “America” alone would be enough. This is to say that “Renaissance” is an album about performance — of other pop’s past, but ultimately of Beyoncé, a star who’s now 40, an age when the real risk is in acting like you’ve got nothing to lose. But there’s her impersonation of Grace Jones’s imperiousness on “Move,” some sharp-elbowed dancehall refraction in which the two of them command the plebes to “part like the Red Sea” when the queen comes through. “Dark skin, light skin, beige” — Madison drawls on “Cozy” — “fluorescent beige.” Thank the tabloid-TV keyboard blasts on “America Has a Problem.” But Beyoncé herself has never been funnier than she is here. The album’s final song is “Summer Renaissance,” and it opens with the thrum of Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love.” It’s not the first time she’s quoted La Donna. But the nod is not only there, where the reference is explicit. The exercise of control is as entertaining on this album as the exorcism of stress. And C) The person actually performing this song knows “that booty gon’ do what it want to.” Now’s the time to work your body in lieu of losing more of your mind. The range of her voice nears the galactic; the imagination powering it qualifies as cinema. Now’s the time to remind yourself — to be “telling everybody,” as she sings on the first single, “Break My Soul” — that there’s no discourse without disco. Were I that musician, now might be the time to call my freestyle jam “America Has a Problem” and not say what the problem is because A) Psyche! B) What I’ma say you don’t already know?