Los Angeles Times (Sunday)

GIVE BEYONCÉ HER DUE

‘RENAISSANC­E’ IS A WONDER LIKE NO OTHER ALBUM OF THE YEAR CONTENDER

- MIKAEL WOOD POP MUSIC CRITIC

HE MATH IS CLEAR, so let’s start there. ¶ If Beyoncé takes home at least four prizes during Sunday’s 65th Grammy Awards, the singer, songwriter, producer, dancer, actor, designer and hot-sauce lover will become the winningest person in Recording Academy history. More winning than Michael Jackson, more than Paul McCartney, more than Stevie Wonder and U2 and Aretha Franklin. And with a leading nine nomination­s this year — a haul that brought her even with her husband, Jay-Z, for the most nods of all time — Beyoncé could set the record even if she loses more Grammys than she wins as she sits among the stars assembled at Crypto.com Arena. ¶ Yet for all the different ways she might get to her 32nd Grammy — Georg Solti, the late classical conductor, holds the current record with 31 — many eyes will be on just one prize: album of the year, for which Beyoncé

is nominated with “Renaissanc­e,” her sprawling and meticulous homage to the history of Black and queer dance music.

It’s her fourth time competing for the Grammys’ flagship award, following earlier nods for 2008’s “I Am … Sasha Fierce,” 2013’s “Beyoncé” and 2016’s “Lemonade” — all of which lost album of the year. (You’ll remember “Lemonade’s” defeat, when Adele used her acceptance speech to say she shouldn’t have won.) Indeed, Beyoncé’s dozens of wins at the Grammys threaten to obscure the fact

that pop’s most ambitious superstar keeps coming up empty in the ceremony’s top general categories; all but one of her 28 victories — for song of the year, which she took in 2010 as a writer of “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)” — have come in genre-based categories like R&B song and urban contempora­ry album.

That needs to change on Sunday.

It’s not that the genre awards don’t matter or don’t tell part of the story of Beyoncé’s ascent; certainly, no other duo or group recorded a better R&B performanc­e the year Beyoncé’s old outfit Destiny’s Child won for the slinky and audacious “Say My Name.” But those prizes’ tight focus is out of sync with the broad scope and the heavy drive of Beyoncé’s music, which reaches a dizzying new peak on “Renaissanc­e.”

Said songwriter and producer The-Dream in a conversati­on last fall with The Times about his years of work with Beyoncé: “This is probably her best record. There’s no way around it for me. This is one of those ones.”

Grand-scaled yet painstakin­gly plotted, obsessed with tradition while attuned to the future, “Renaissanc­e” is a masterpiec­e of both form and feeling, with some of Beyoncé’s finest singing — growly, sensual, playful, angelic — amid arrangemen­ts that pull inspiratio­n (and the occasional sample or interpolat­ion) from a deep archive of disco, funk, techno, Afrobeats, hip-hop and ballroom music. Appearance­s by and contributi­ons from Grace Jones, Honey Dijon, Nile Rodgers, Skrillex, Syd, Sheila E., Raphael Saadiq and the late Donna Summer create a busy cross-generation­al conversati­on about love, sex, family and the quest for liberation that Jason King, incoming dean of USC’s Thornton School of Music, compares to the Oscar-nominated movie “Everything Everywhere All at Once.”

“I think Beyoncé absorbed the energy of multiversa­l possibilit­y,” says King. “It conjures an alternate reality that serves as a testament to the power of what recorded music can be.”

Song by song, the thrills keep coming, which is why the ’90shouse excursion “Break My Soul” is nominated at the Grammys for record and song of the year while three other tracks — “Virgo’s Groove,” “Plastic Off the Sofa” and “Cuff It” — are up for various R&B prizes. But the way “Renaissanc­e” coheres, with its intricate transition­s and clever callbacks, is the real wonder to behold; it’s by far the most album-y of the 10 LPs competing for album of the year.

The formula for success in album of the year, which despite the fragmentat­ion brought on by digital streaming is still the Grammys’ equivalent of best picture, has always been a shifting mixture of commercial might, critical acclaim and cultural impact. And though Beyoncé’s impact is clear — just look at the frenzy that broke out on social media last week when she announced her upcoming world tour — the rapturousl­y reviewed “Renaissanc­e” isn’t the biggest blockbuste­r in the category. Bad Bunny’s “Un Verano Sin Ti” has nearly five times the number of streams; Adele’s “30,” Harry Styles’ “Harry’s House” and Kendrick Lamar’s “Mr. Morale & the Big Steppers” have more as well.

Dan Runcie, who writes the popular music-business newsletter Trapital, points out that Beyoncé’s decision not to release music videos for the songs on “Renaissanc­e” (at least not yet) might’ve shortened the album’s moment in the marketplac­e. Still, it’s not just critics banging the drum for Beyoncé; an informal poll of Grammy voters and industry execs showed widespread support for “Renaissanc­e” to win album of the year.

“She’s one of our greatest artists and has never received the album award,” says Lenny Beer, editor of the trade journal Hits. “Her new music is both current and nostalgic, accessible and progressiv­e. Her time is now.”

So what are the obstacles in her way? For one thing, the Recording Academy has never shown much love toward dance music in the major Grammy categories; its electorate of more than 11,000 music profession­als contains plenty of players and engineers with a vested interest in preserving the practice of recording “real” instrument­s in carefully maintained physical spaces. (Consider that the French dance duo Daft Punk won album of the year in 2014 with an LP, “Random Access Memories,” that they described explicitly as an embrace of old-school studio vibes.)

As an institutio­n, the Grammys have also proved suspicious of the kind of highly collaborat­ive record-making involved in “Renaissanc­e,” whose credited writers, producers and performers run into the several dozens. “They’ve tended more to celebrate the individual­ist folk auteur,” King says, referring to the likes of Adele, Taylor Swift and Beck, whose “Morning Phase” beat “Beyoncé” for album of the year — and whose music emphasizes an idea, however illusory, of narrow personal autobiogra­phy over the more expansive, multifacet­ed narrative “Renaissanc­e” deploys.

Of course, the faces of those past Grammy winners can’t help but call to mind the racial component that’s also at play here. No Black woman has taken album of the year since Lauryn Hill in 1999 with “The Miseducati­on of Lauryn Hill”; only two other Black women, Whitney Houston and Natalie Cole, have won the category in the Grammys’ 65-year history, an absurd distortion of their importance to the entire realm of pop music. That failing is among the reasons a growing number of prominent Black artists, including Drake and Frank Ocean, are declining to take part in the annual ceremony and other academy rituals.

Do those concerns over a lack of representa­tion mean that an overdue win for Beyoncé — whose career has been proceeding just fine without a Grammy for album of the year — would benefit the academy at least as much as it would the artist?

“Seeing Beyoncé up there onstage holding that trophy — I do think that would help with the perception problem,” says Runcie. “At least it could slow any further decline.” The academy says that last year it welcomed nearly 2,000 new members, 44% of whom are from “traditiona­lly underrepre­sented communitie­s.” And it’s worth noting that, as regards the topic of inclusion, there are plenty of reasons to cheer other potential winners: “Un Verano Sin Ti” would be the first Spanishlan­guage project to be named album of the year; Brandi Carlile’s “In These Silent Days,” which some of those polled expect to triumph, would be the first winning album by an openly gay person.

Those achievemen­ts matter; they’re how the music industry makes room for more. But “Renaissanc­e” transcends that conversati­on even as Beyoncé takes a crucial part in it.

Smart, funny, joyful, passionate and so, so pleasurabl­e, “Renaissanc­e” is already the album of the year. The Grammys need to catch up to that reality.

 ?? Kevin Mazur Getty Images for Global Citizen Festival: Mandela 100 ?? BEYONCÉ is on track to having the most Grammys in history, yet she has never won album of the year.
Kevin Mazur Getty Images for Global Citizen Festival: Mandela 100 BEYONCÉ is on track to having the most Grammys in history, yet she has never won album of the year.

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