Beyonce came at us with “Renaissance” on a hype wave. But the results are in and they ain’t so good: just 335K sold in the debut week, down by 300K copies from 2016’s “Lemonade.”
She’s taken lemonade, and made lemons.
“Renaissance” sales were almost evenly divided between paid downloads/CDs/LPs and streaming. The former part was 197K.
“Renaissance” has been hurt by a bunch of things starting with Kelis finding a sample of her hit “Milkshake” on there– it’s since been removed. Then there was the issue of Beyonce singing the word “spaz”– as in spastic, and not a colon. “Spaz,” like “retarded,” is no longer allowed in the PC world. (Also, it’s just terrible no matter what. Sounds like a demented grade schooler.)
The whole album is made up samples and covers aka interpolations. I think the audience is getting tired of songs written by committees. One song has 24 writers, some others 14 or 15. Diane Warren made a comment about that on social media and immediately had to backtrack rather face the wrath of social media misfits who can’t write music but think it’s okay for existing songwriters to be ripped off, etc. Just great.
Just FYI: “Renaissance” has been replaced at number 1 on iTunes today by Eminem’s latest greatest hits package, “Curtain Call part 2.”
One last thing: I love Beyonce’s voice. I’d like to hear her sing some actual songs. She’d have much bigger hits if she did some cool covers produced properly.
