- As house music bleeds into mainstream pop, expert cultural documentarian Beyoncé hops on the bandwagon with a comeback single sampling "Show Me Love."
- Robin S.'s 1990 hit "Show Me Love" features one of the most enduring basslines in house music. It's been sampled or interpolated in pop and hip-hop songs for decades, though in 2022 it's become a new kind of ubiquitous, borrowed by mainstream pop stars like Charli XCX on "Used To Know Me" and, as of yesterday, by the Queen B of pop, Beyoncé.
Landing just in time for the longest day of the year, the lead single of Beyoncé's upcoming Renaissance album, "BREAK MY SOUL" is an uplifting comeback anthem that references post-vaccine summer hedonism and the Great Resignation with lines like "Now I just fell in love / And I just quit my job / I'm gonna find new drive." The track incorporates that luscious Robin S. melody with snippets of Big Freedia's 2014 track "Explode," marking her second time cribbing from the famous bounce MC after 2016's "Formation" single.
The art of sampling a classic is dicey. Making a timeless track is challenging to begin with, so when multi-millionaire musicians borrow from classic sounds—particularly those that were birthed out of marginalized communities—it could easily be interpreted as a cash (or clout) grab. House music developed and derived its name from a members-only gay club called The Warehouse, where resident DJ Frankie Knuckles merged disco, house and rock for crowds of Black gay men. Beyoncé seems to nod to this queer history by tapping Big Freedia, a Black and queer icon from New Orleans, for the track.
The song is a classic Beyoncé comeback single: catchy, with awe-inspiringly precise vocal production and a finger on the pulse of the happening music and cultural movements of today. The track isn't phenomenal—aside from the stuttering bounce chants, the production is more or less an unchanging sample loop. The rapping bits ("You said you outside / But you ain't that outside") also feel a little contrived. But it's fun, accomplishing what an established artist like Beyoncé—who is perhaps beyond her years of musical innovation—is meant to do at this stage in their career: inform us about the direction contemporary pop music is taking.