Beyoncé - Break My Soul
A Summer Soirée for survivors…
Where do we start?
19 years since *Beyoncé *shifted the axis of pop culture with the 70s funk-soul frenzy of *‘Crazy In Love’*, the Houstonian does so once again, this time reconfiguring soulful 90s gospel house tropes into her own free-falling affirmation anthem.
Lasting a whopping four minutes 38 seconds (frankly unheard of in this current climate and its fixation with minute-long viral soundbites), ‘Break My Soul’ is a searching odyssey through clubland eras performed with exquisite elan. Honouring her Southern roots and continuing her streak of mainstreaming innovators in her work, she calls on *NOLA bounce pioneer Big Freedia* to bring her brand of clarion call-and-response chants to the party, interpolating a vocal snippet from her song 'Explode’ and the synth line from Robin S’s 1993 diva house crossover, *‘Show Me Love’* (it’s since been revealed that American singer Andrea Martin actually sang the demo…)
Beyoncé’s protean vocals becomes one with the cyclical churn of the production courtesy of regular co-collaborators The Dream and Tricky Stewart; her cadence richer, darker and more colourful than the siren that made her solo debut in 2003. Cajoling coos, elaborate coloratura and a campy rapped second verse all build to an apotheosis with a multitracked choir that is so enveloping in surround sound splendour and ecstatic rise and falls, you’ll be genuflecting on the dancefloor in act of deliverance before you know it.
Lyrically the song is a charged, at times kitschy communiqué to break the wheel, break out of post-pandemic inertia and low-grade mundanity, seek personal comforts and look within for divine purpose. Beyoncé’s last solo offering ‘Lemonade’ was heavy on bruised meditations and socio-political invectives: On ‘Break My Soul’, that evangelising strain is still there, just this time she’s mobilising her fanbase to seek the thrill of euphoria, to find a “new salvation”.
The song’s embrace of camp sloganeering (“release the trade, release the stress”) at the height of Pride coupled with references to the liberating fiefdoms within ballroom culture is both a salutation and vital appraisal of the queer black tradition that influences and feeds off Beyoncé’s craftsmanship. ‘Break My Soul’, like the prideful ambition of ‘Formation’ and ‘Black Is King’, serves as a celebration and reclamation of “house” from the diluted tendrils of white homogeneity stretching across dance music.
Merging mass market appeal with deft editorial precision only a star of her calibre could muster, ‘Break My Soul’ is a pitch-perfect primer for Act 1 of Beyoncé’s Renaissance.
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Words: *Shahzaib Hussain*
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