B’Day is here: our music critic dives deep prior to Beyoncé’s ‘Renaissance’ Tour stop in South Philly on Wednesday

Beyoncé’s accomplishments are various and sundry.

The singer and unstoppable force who will play the first U.S. show of her “Renaissance Tour” at Lincoln Financial Field on Wednesday has won more Grammys than anyone else (32).

In 2018, she become the first Black woman to headline Coachella. And oh yeah, she’s also credited with inventing the visual album, though there’s some argument about when.

Was it with her 2006 sophomore release B’Day, for which she made a video for every song, though they weren’t released until a full year after the album’s release?

Or was it with Beyoncé, the 2013 album on which music and videos were surprise released simultaneously? That album created the world we now live in, one in which each Beyoncé release arrives as an event of major cultural significance.

The point is this: When she’s been in culture-shifting superstar mode in the mature phase of her career, the singer who came to fame with Destiny’s Child has always been a visual as well as musical-minded artist.

All this is to underscore one of the curious aspects of Renaissance, her seventh studio album, which was released a year ago to universal acclaim.

The album celebrates dance music culture and Black LGBTQ+ creators and participants — including Beyoncé’s late Uncle Johnny who was her “godmother and the first person to expose me to a lot of the music and culture that serves as inspiration for this album,” she has said.

But until she took Renaissance on the road with a European tour that began in May and opened in North America in Toronto this past weekend, the album had no significant visual component.

When Renaissance was released, Beyoncé's management company, Parkwood Entertainment, explained that though Beyoncé is “the preeminent visual artist,” she decided to put the emphasis, first and foremost, on the music, this time. This way, fans have “the opportunity to be limitless in their expansive listening journey,” the statement read. “It is a chance again to be listeners, and not viewers.”

Listening without watching, hearing without looking. What a concept! What an old-fashioned idea befitting an artist who is more concerned with creating cohesive, album-length works to stand the test of time than spinning out hit singles.

That is what Beyoncé has become, 20 years into her brilliant career. Renaissance plays out as one continuous club mix. It’s a thumping, clattering COVID-19 shutdown-conceived invitation to get back out there and (as she says) “release the wiggle.”

It’s also an ambitious, hardworking project that means to make a statement — an album-length statement — about renewal and rebirth, and acceptance and inclusion in a format that conveys seriousness.

It aims to give dance music the respect it deserves, without flooding the market with singles. Only “Break My Soul” and “Cuff It” were released to promote the album last year, and now there’s a remix of “America Has a Problem” with Kendrick Lamar to coincide with the American tour.

Maybe one reason for a lack of Renaissance videos is that Beyoncé already had lots to do. “Four, three, I’m too [expletive] busy,” the 41-year-old working mom counts down on “Pure/Honey,” one of several tracks that feature Philadelphia ballroom star Kevin JZ Prodigy, whose voice will be heard at several junctures at the sold-out Linc.

But the no-visuals policy is also good business. It’s made fans that much hungrier to see Beyoncé. To be in the presence of their Queen Bey. (And yes, she does, during one segment, dress as a Queen Bee.)

There’s been plenty of “where is my visual album?” bellyaching. So much so, that during the European tour, Prodigy’s booming voice scolded fans before “Formation”:

“You’ve asked for the visuals. You’ve called for the Queen. But a Queen moves at her own pace, b-,” he intones. “Decides when she wants to give you a f- taste. So get your fork and your spoon, if you got one.”

Eye-popping sights will be part of the communal experience on the tour that now joins Taylor Swift’s “Eras” as the two most attention-commanding megastar events of the summer.

Like Swift’s “Eras” tour, the live “Renaissance” experience will not be short. (And complicated to mount, it seems: A Pittsburgh date next month was canceled due to “production logistics and scheduling issues.”)

European shows clocked in at 2 1/2 hours, a length that seems the minimum these days for stadium-sized artists returning post-pandemic with lots of new material.

Unlike “Eras,” which had two opening acts at the Linc, the “Renaissance” show will find its groove with a DJ, in keeping with the stadium as a giant club motif.

With nearly all of the 16-track Renaissance on the set list — plus a sampling of six previous albums — the looks fans have been clamoring for will be served up in abundance. Beyoncé with a scallop shell à la Botticelli’s Birth of Venus; Beyoncé on horseback, like Bianca Jagger at Studio 54 in 1977.

And maybe the tour’s equine iconography has an additional Philadelphian source, “Break My Soul (The Queens Remix),” which mashes Beyoncé with Madonna’s “Vogue,” honors a host of Black women. Among those is Philly’s Santigold, whose 2012 video for “Disparate Youth” featured her atop a horse in a club.

In “The Queens Remix,” which Beyoncé performed nightly in Europe, she rhymes: “Rosetta Tharpe, Santigold / Bessie Smith, Nina Simone.”

Those four women are all Philly connected. Tharpe and Smith are buried in the area, and Simone studied at the Curtis Institute of Music and paid her dues in Atlantic City. Philadelphians Tierra Whack and Jill Scott also get shout-outs on the song.

But wait, there’s one more Philly feature. “Renaissance” sets have included “Before I Let Go,” the song that played over the credits of the Beychella special on Netflix. The song, a modest 1981 R&B hit by Maze, was written and sung by Frankie Beverly, the East Germantown native and Beyoncé's favorite.

“Before” is one of two covers that’s been sung nightly on the “Renaissance Tour.” The other is “River Deep, Mountain High,” added after Tina Turner’s death in May. Other than that, the 30-plus song set list remained pretty much consistent from night to night.

But now that “Renaissance” is finally arriving in Philly will there be any surprises or tweaks in store? Will Kevin JZ Prodigy MC appear in the flesh, rather than as a disembodied voice? Will Beyoncé make us bow down by actually performing “Bow Down”?

Will the other Jay-Z — the guy Beyoncé is married to — make an appearance in the home of his Made in America festival to rap on “Crazy In Love” in person? We’ll have to wait for B’Day to see.