Beyoncé

Beyoncé Giselle Knowles, known simply as Beyoncé, is an American singer, actress and dancer. Over the course of her career she has sold more than 200 million copies worldwide and is the artist with the most Grammy Awards in history (32).

Beyoncé began her musical career in 1998 with Destiny's Child, an all-female group that started out as a quartet (with Kelly Rowland, LaTavia Roberson and LeToya Luckett) before becoming a trio made up of Queen Bey, Kelly Rowland and Michelle Williams. The group released five albums, the first two of which featured the original line-up. The third record, “Survivor” (2001), sold 12 million copies and was nominated for the Grammy Award for Best R&B Album, an award later won by the fourth album, “Destiny Fulfilled”, in 2004.

In 2003 Beyoncé released her debut solo album, “Dangerously In Love”, featuring the famous hit “Crazy In Love”. Riding the wave of her debut's extraordinary success, she then released the album “B’Day” in 2006, which included “Listen” and the Shakira feature “Beautiful Liar”.

2008 saw the release of “I Am…Sasha Fierce”, which took home 6 Grammy Awards out of 10 nominations. It featured international hits such as “Single Ladies”, “Halo” and “If I Were A Boy”. These were followed by “4” in 2011 and the self-titled “Beyoncé” in 2013, in which a new Mrs Carter emerges: where Queen B once came on with her usual sheer power, she now lets her most intimate feelings show through, reining in her voice while still keeping the emotional intensity high. The atmospheres have grown rarefied, and the new mother poured more of herself into this record than ever before.

Her follow-up LP "Lemonade" (2016) won a Grammy Award for Best Urban Contemporary Album, marking a new turning point in Beyoncé's sound. Mrs Carter shows she's ready to use her status as an icon to take a few liberties, delving into the tangle of contemporary r&b to craft fully realized long players. And if her sometimes haughty, slightly alienating attitude splits audiences with the same ferocity reserved for Madonna, then perhaps that's a sign that Queen B is truly starting to spread her wings.

The American artist's latest album to date is "Renaissance" (2022), the opening chapter of a trilogy, marked by a style much closer to electronic music and the dancefloor. It's no coincidence that it won Best Dance/Electronic Album at the Grammy Awards. Sixteen tracks running sixty-two minutes, a good fifty or so writers and collaborators, samples and interpolations drawn from everywhere, "Renaissance" is a sonic carnival as shifting as a rainbow and as dense as unstoppable magma flowing down a mountainside. As already signaled by the singular lead single "Break My Soul," rhythm becomes the focal point of a work that looks at the movement of the human body in all its expressions, from object of desire to tool for building community and facing life's flow together. The soundtrack? Old-school Chicago and Detroit house, viscous bass excursions, rap inflections, modern afrobeat and amapiano influences, sharp vogue contortions, r&b choruses and skeletal trap and dub frameworks — in short, a true rebirth, one that attempts to embrace the whole of humanity after two years of social restrictions.