First Listen
I really enjoy the new Beyoncé album. No work is perfect and neither is Renaissance but it’s beautifully crafted, infinitely danceable, and effortlessly fun. But until this week I’ve been enjoying it primarily solo, putting it in my headphones while I walk to the office or clean my room. The one exception has been blasting it in the car while I was visiting my friend Lily in north Kerry, when we decided the lyrics were more appropriate as “you won’t break Listowel.”
Doppler Effect
But that has all changed as I’ve been back in New York this week as part of a whirlwind trip through these so-called United States visiting friends, family, and all the places that still feel like home – despite no longer having keys to my own place. I had forgotten how New York, by which I primarily mean Brooklyn, is a place where you can’t help but experience things collectively. There are so many people in this city that you can’t help but passively absorb the lives of other folks on the street, notice what people are wearing, pick up snatches of conversation, and wonder where they’re coming from, where they’re headed, who they’re waiting for.
After walking and biking through these streets all week, I’ve decided that the music of Beyoncé is meant to be experienced collectively. I walk through Prospect Park and hear Virgo’s Groove pumping from the LeFrak center where a roller-disco is taking place. Waiting for the light to change at Church Avenue, a car rolls by playing Church Girl with their windows down. Someone passes me in the Williamsburg Bridge bike lane and Grace Jones compels me to “move out the way” from the bluetooth speaker clipped to their backpack. It feels less like I’m listening to this album than living in it, soaking it up in snatches of lyrics and doppler-effected drum beats from the collective breath of the city.
The phenomenon is familiar to me, I remember it happening in the early months of the pandemic before I left for Dublin. When the remix of Megan Thee Stallion’s Savage came out in April 2020, I was stuck in our apartment on Gates Avenue, but between the ambulance sirens, it was hearing Queen Bey belting “THEM JEANS” from car speakers and apartment windows on our block that made me feel like we were all taking part in – instead of just getting through – something.
It seems Beyoncé knows that she can count on this collective listening experience; her releases are tailored for it. Instead of an extended PR campaign and a parade of singles and music videos, Mx. Knowles-Carter is fond of an unannounced release. Renaissance has no music videos yet, just teasers and “cliquebait.” It’s one of the refreshing things about the way she does music, I never feel like she’s overhyped. I always listen because someone else who listened liked it enough to tell me about it, choreograph a drag number around it, or play it from the rooftops.
Reverberations
As Lena and I were talking this weekend, I kept thinking how New York, and other large cities, are full of gaps: spaces between buildings, unoccupied steps, abandoned lots, and empty parking spaces. These gaps are where the city really lives, where people intervene in the urban fabric like Lena’s dad pasting prints of trees to the mailbox outside their building, a vendor selling tamales from a shopping cart on a street corner, or a flock of pigeons perched on an NYPD security camera. Renaissance seems built for the sonic gaps, the spaces between car honks and the sounds of my suitcase wheels on the pavement. The 12 minute gaps between Q trains where crickets serenade us from the track.