(Also known as Johnny Dangerous, Foremost Poets is a progenitor of deep house.) But wait, there’s a third new sample, too! The “We walk a certain way …” vocal originates from an interview with National Black Theater founder Barbara Ann Teer, as sampled in “Do It Your Way,” a 1996 deep-house cut from Mood II Swing. “Alien Superstar” also references a more obscure song, Foremost Poets’ “Moonraker,” which gives it the “Please do not be alarmed, remain calm” introduction. Give it a read, then get back to grooving.īeyoncé joins the likes of Future and Taylor Swift by tackling Right Said Fred’s “I’m Too Sexy” unlike them, she manages to pull it off, twisting the hook about being “too classy for this world” into another house track. Wondering where that bass line came from, who crafted that beat, or what exact style that song is? We’ve got you covered with a track-by-track guide to all the dance references on Renaissance. The album’s core producers include Beyoncé go-tos The-Dream and Mike Dean, and recent collaborators Nova Wav, but each song also brings new faces to the party. Renaissance is a rich text - dauntingly so, with some songs featuring multiple samples, shifting subgenres, and Easter eggs. Sure, the record may not have any visuals yet - a stark break from her work over the past ten years - but that’s just another homage to dance music, where the best way to experience a song is to listen and move. Given the roots of disco and house, Renaissance also continues Beyoncé’s ongoing interest in spotlighting Black culture. It’s a remarkably focused approach, in a similar vein to the Pan-African music on The Gift and the ballads–pop songs split on I Am … Sasha Fierce. Instead, over the album’s hour-long run time, Bey is channeling dance across various subgenres, attempting to make as full of a tribute to the club as she can. ![]() But on Renaissance, Beyoncé’s seventh solo album, she is no longer dabbling. She’s been doing it her whole career, from early songs like “Naughty Girl,” which sampled Donna Summer, to later ones like “Schoolin’ Life” and “Haunted,” which are rooted in disco and trance. ![]() There’s little left for Beyoncé to conquer at this point - including dance music. And the object of such a sound is to get the music to the listener, and the listener to the music, now.Photo: Carlijn Jacobs/Parkwood Entertainment ![]() The object of this extreme economy of design is to produce a sound that is immediate, forthright, rich, and very clean. The touch is so light that you can play a note by blowing on it. When the player presses a key, a wooden jack holding an eighth-of-an-inch long and sixteenth-of-an- inch wide quill cut from the shaft of a crow feather rises about a quarter of an inch during which it plucks and passes the string. The wires, made of a soft brass, are about the thickness of toothbrush bristles. It has a range of four octaves, which comes to ten pounds per octave as compared to the modern grand piano’s roughly one hundred pounds per octave. The instrument is six feet long and weighs forty pounds. My thanks to friend Norman Sheppard for building this instrument through the Fall and Winter of ‘96 and on into the Spring of ‘97 it was a joy to visit his shop on an almost daily basis, where, while he worked, we would talk at length about the Italian Renaissance as its miraculous keyboard invention grew to life atop two sawhorses. The harpsichord heard is a replica of a 1665 Italian instrument by Ridolfi. As I listen now to the CD master back at my home in the comparatively noisy city of Madison, I am delighted that the particular flavor of the silence at the cabin pervades the music still. ![]() I made this recording of Italian harpsichord music during the Autumn of 1997 at a small, quiet cabin in the woods. Excerpt from the CD booklet essay by Trevor Stephenson:
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