Diane Warren may be songwriting royalty but she got stuck on Beyonce’s crown on Monday when she asked why the new album “Renaissance”Songs with 24 credited authors.
Twitter had something to share.
“How can there be 24 writers on a song?” tweeted Warren, the writer of nine Number One hits that don’t share credits.
Singer/songwriter/producer The Dream was first to suggest that Warren should’ve known – or at least done her homework – before posing the question that way, and he suggested that the question was racially insensitive, to say the least.
“You mean how’s does our (Black) culture have so many writers,”He asked. “well it started because we couldn’t afford certain things starting out, so we started sampling and it became an Artform, a major part of the Black Culture (hip hop) in America.Had that era not happen who knows. U good?”
Beyonce fans trolled Warren for not being able to understand Black music or how it is made. “Renaissance” – which has garnered near-unanimous critical praise – was made.
The 16 tracks are listed below. “Renaissance,”The one with the most credits is “Alien Superstar,”With 22. There are many other tracks that have at least 10 and two others with 22.“Energy” “Pure Honey”) have 16, a star-studded lineup of soul and funk’s top musicians including Skrillex, Honey Dijon, Big Freedia, Drake, Tems and 070 Shake.
The simple (though incomplete) answer is that multi-layered tracks with several samples – an apt description for most of “Renaissance” – carry credits for the writers on all sampled materials. Though that’s become fairly standard operating procedure in modern hip-hop and R&B, Warren seemed to be genuinely unaware (despite the eye-roll emoji, It is not helpful).
Warren tried to hide behind her curiosity, but many people rallied around her. But it was too late.
The Dream’s tweet – which turned out to be among the more polite responses – kicked off a firestorm of replies and quote-tweets that ranged from “helpful explanation” to full-out drags of Warren who has written, among countless other things too numerous to mention here, Celine Dion’s hit “Because You Love Me.”