the day before released in july regeneration, Beyoncé’s seventh studio album, will not include visuals as part of its launch, her management team announced in a press statement. “This is yet another opportunity to be a listener rather than a spectator,” it reads. The choice is odd, even slightly disappointing, given the sole fact that Beyoncé has always been one of the most important image-makers of our time. The surprise release of the singer’s self-titled album in 2013, and lemonade, in 2016, with a series of breath-taking music videos that rewrote the rules of modern art. (Video collection is lemonade Premiered as a movie on HBO. ) these days, when she “speaks” outside of album cycles, it’s mostly through professionally curated Instagram posts, which in turn have been the subject of countless fan theories.so the fact is regeneration To enter this world without a visual language of its own is, well, kind of inexplicable.
Image culture is now the primary record of this ever-changing, insatiable digital generation. We exist in and across screens. We crave to make ourselves seen, and our most prescient social media apps allow for such communication. YouTube is the foundation of how we watch videos, a bottomless video marketplace that empowers everyday users to create what they want and be who they want. For a while, Instagram was like a seducer, one couldn’t live without it. Influencers have built entire economies around the concept of being watched.Recently, TikTok has become this The new frontier of cultural production, where moving images flicker across our iPhones with eloquent, almost irresistible dynamism.
As the digital age became a surreal inevitability of my daily life, social media magnified my appearance exponentially, a near-detailed lens for my gaze. This is the province where I discover and examine meaning; meaning often comes from various visual renderings. As I’ve written before, images make us real. Memes and GIFs are the definitive vernacular in almost all of my group chats. Some evenings, I wandered the checkered grids of dating apps with manic obsession, scrolling through the possibilities I saw and those square snapshots — angular faces, cropped brown bodies — All promises that can be delivered. Even the bloated streaming age of TVs provides an abundance of content and images that I keep devouring. These images are everywhere. It seems natural to crave more, to want to find new permutations to define ourselves.
but then i listened regeneration. Listen and listen and listen. I see. Its songs are meant to live in our hearts, not necessarily as reflections of Beyoncé’s artistic inventions, but as reminders of the wondrous possibilities we hold despite the odds that surround us. She is not alone in this creative endeavor. Other big-name artists this year have attempted similar detours, allowing music to be experienced on a more analog, human level.
Sometimes, listening to Drake is like watching the History Channel filtered through TikTok. An unashamed interloper, if ever an eager student of the past, his six solo albums are a collage of global influences, absorbing local scenes, sounds and sensibilities. recent, honestly, it’s ok, released unexpectedly in June.picture regeneration, what I love about it is how it veers into the neon fog of the dance floor for a more analog moment where the digital terrain doesn’t dictate so much about how we interact, create and shape ourselves. In Drake’s case, he took inspiration from Baltimore and Jersey club music, setting the mood with hits from big names like Black Coffee. Bad Bunny and Kendrick Lamar’s respective albums also beg us to stand up and act this year. I can hear it even now; Bad Bunny’s pounding rap “Titi me pregunto,” a summer spell of its own, booming from city blocks, New Yorkers more alive than ever. This is the voice of a city, many cities around the world, finding their way again.
It’s been five months since it was released regeneration, the cries for the visual effects have not died down in the slightest. But that desire misses the point. regenerationThe spirit has never been about what it can imagine through her eyes. We have always been Beyoncé’s canvas, our bodies in motion, the joy we achieve, the image we seek. The music — upbeat, black-tinged, utterly queer — turns us into avatars of our own creations and meanings, prisms of joy and resilience. Whether it’s singing “comfortable in my skin” on “Cozy,” casually blurting out “unique!!” or even basking in the sparkly production of “Virgo’s Groove” on a Friday night, it’s the album’s liveliest place, Also where it should be seen. Those are enduring images. regenerationThe most compelling image will always be of us celebrating ourselves together.
In March, I lost a friend to suicide, and by the end of the summer, my grandmother died of dementia. There are other losses. It was a year when everything felt big and dark and limited. Call Me, Save My Music, offers the opposite: it’s bright and messy, and very fragile. It provides clarity. It dispels the lingering fog. Musician of the Year gets us moving again — not back into the office, a bygone invention of pre-pandemic life, but back into the world, back to the dance floor, where the loving embrace of friends and new flames is as heart-warming as it gets. Fascinated, the sound of bodies colliding against each other is a comfort. We all radiate electricity and intent. All of us rebuild our lives in the thick, ongoing aftermath of death.
