Last night, Taylor Swift unexpectedly turned up at the London premiere of Renaissance: a Film by Beyoncé, a documentary concert movie centred on the singer’s 2023 stadium tour. Swift apparently flew by private jet from Arizona to be there, a reciprocation for Beyoncé showing up at the premiere of Swift’s own concert movie, when her presence led Swift to post an adulatory note on social media: “She’s taught me and every artist out here to break rules and defy industry norms.”
You could dismiss it as back-scratching celebrity gush, but amid the superlatives, Swift has a point. Beyoncé’s recent career is suggestive of an artist who’s clocked that she occupies an unassailable position within pop culture, where whatever she releases is greeted with a critical reception that borders on hysteria, then sells in vast quantities (“I have nothing to prove to anyone at this point,” she notes during the Renaissance movie) and views that as space to do whatever she wants.
The Renaissance album saw her immersed in house music, a genre that R&B and hip-hop artists tend to steer clear of. Not only was it a huge commercial success, it received reviews that, at their most deranged, seemed to suggest Beyoncé had single-handedly validated house music’s very existence. The subsequent tour featured a pretty daring set list – it was three hours long, light on greatest hits and heavy on her new album – but no matter: it broke box office records, and the BBC suggested that its arrival in Sweden had affected the entire country’s economy.
And you get a distinct hint of “I have nothing to prove to anyone at this point” from My House. Unexpectedly released as a single after featuring in the Renaissance movie (it plays over the end credits), it is as far from a craven bid for audience-pleasing pop success as you’re likely to get from a big star.
Co-produced by Beyoncé and The-Dream, its title is initially a misnomer. It steps away from Renaissance’s four-to-the-floor beats: the beat stammers, and seems equally inspired by Houston hip-hop and abstract electronica. But the song then proves to be episodic in structure, deploying one of the beat switches that rappers such as Drake and Travis Scott have recently favoured (another inspiration is perhaps the breakbeat-into-Miami-bass shift on Rae Sremmurd’s Flaunt It/Cheap from earlier this year).
The whoop-laden lurch between the first, backed by a honking synth fanfare, and the second, where a fiendish bassline kicks in, is genuinely unexpected and thrilling on first listen. It is emphatically club music, somewhere between the vogue balls she visited on Renaissance and pop’s current vogue for the raw, insistent Jersey club style; wilfully repetitious and reliant on shifting dynamics rather than melodies for effect, you’ll search in vain for an earworm. There isn’t anything that resembles a chorus, beyond a chant in which every line ends with the word “house”, but there is a spoken-word section: in fact, you get a lot more of Beyoncé the snarling rapper – “me and my thug bae gon’ slide tonight” – than Beyoncé the singer. Although there’s a burst of powerful, wordless extempore vocals about 1:50 in, and it closes with another switch into a brief a cappella coda.
The lyrics are pretty risque: pink diamond-encrusted nipple rings, drinking until you pass out, the word “fuck” 22 times. From anyone else – Taylor Swift for example – it would count as an unexpectedly leftfield preconception-baiting gesture. But, as has already been established, Beyoncé currently occupies a realm in which she does whatever she wants, something the powerful, uncommercial My House serves to underline.