Initial Sketch
Beyoncé’s album Renaissance came out a couple weeks ago and I’ve been listening to it for the past few days. The spectacular work deserves a whole volume of analysis but I want to focus on one particular aspect of Renaissance: its string of rebirths and their implications for streamed media. Beyoncé and Lizzo both re-released songs, HEATED and GRRRLS respectively, after audiences confronted them about the use of the word “sp*z,” an ableist slur outside of the US. Beyoncé also re-released her track ENERGY when confronted by Kelis about an uncleared sample of her song Milkshake. The conversation around these post-release edits has mostly circled around the tired bad-faith argument of “cancel culture has gone too far,” but I’m much more interested in how the dominance of streaming services enables this slower gestation period for artists and implications for both artists and audiences.
Linework
I’ve always loved the physical completeness of an album: the jewel case or record jacket, the art in the album booklet, and of course the songs: their order, the way they flow into one another and take you from one place to another. I stopped my streaming subscriptions because they diminished that experience from me: I missed the idea of building my record collection. I don’t have access to Spotify’s endless catalog and the albums I own are just a folder full of MP3 files, but they’re a reflection of who I am and that matters more to me.
It’s the finished album that engages me as an artist as well. When I self-published Be Well! I wanted the songs to tell a story, to have a digital booklet that augmented the listening experience. I still have dreams of pressing a record of it someday, just to hold it in my hand. But still, I know this album of songs I wrote could be better, or different at least. I could re-record some parts, I’d like to add another act to the story, change instrumentation, whatever.
That’s what’s so interesting about Renaissance‘s rebirth. Even after the physical editions hit shelves, the record wasn’t done. Whether you think the original version of HEATED was better or not is your own decision. The interesting thing is that because streamers don’t buy the song, it stays mutable, more a public draft than a finished product. Conversely, this lack of finished-ness invites the audience’s contribution: the Beyhive and Kelis were the ones who prompted changes in the album, they are as much authors of Renaissance as Mrs. Knowles-Carter.
Streamed music is a completely different animal from the album you grab from a shelf, and there are endless possibilities for what this new kind of music could be: An album could be a Ship of Theseus, where instruments, lyrics, and samples change one-by-one until the album is completely reborn. A song could represent a wave/particle duality where the song is constantly shifting until you start to listen to it and it suddenly snaps into focus for a moment. Or an artist can build a song publicly alongside their audience, taking their input and even their own recordings into the process. Criticisms of “cancel culture” republishing seem almost disingenuous in asking streaming music to behave like its purchasable relatives.
Ink & Paint
When Kelis took to Instagram to ask Beyoncé to remove the Milkshake sample from ENERGY, she said “I know what I own and what I don’t own,” in reference to incorrect claims that producer Pharrell Williams actually owned the right to license the song. In an era of interpolation, which Renaissance plays with to great effect, ideas of ownership, “copying,” and theft become incredibly complicated.
Streaming, too, has interesting implications for ownership. Services like Spotify license tracks from artists and record labels, who they pay from a static pot of money based on their percentage of total streams. Spotify doesn’t own the music, but they dictate a huge part of the terms on which artists are paid today. Listeners don’t own the tracks they listen to; their favorite album could disappear off the platform, or just never get added. My personal take is that, in order to realize the potential of streaming to create a more dynamic and interactive kind of music, we need platforms that don’t exploit folks on either side of the stage.
Anyway here’s a Junglepussy tweet I love:
What’s love got to do with making me come? @JUNGLEPUSSY11:19 PM ∙ Apr 6, 202249Likes7Retweets