Trans star Ts Madison honoured by Grammys for Beyoncé’s Renaissance
Trans icon Ts Madison has been honoured by the Grammys for her work on Beyoncé’s Renaissance (Gilbert Flores/Variety via Getty Images, Kevin Mazur/WireImage for Parkwood)
RuPaul’s Drag Race judge Ts Madison has been honoured by the Recording Academy for her work on Beyoncé’s Grammy-Award-winning album, Renaissance.
Beyoncé’s Renaissance was a love letter to the queer community, with the house album featuring and sampling a host of queer and trans Black artists, including MikeQ, Big Freedia, Kevin Aviance.
Madison appeared on fan-favourite track “Cozy”, with snippets from her “B***h, I’m Black” monologue from 2020.
With Madison previously revealing how she reacted to being featured on Queen B’s album, and how she came to realise that it was Beyoncé asking to sample her voice, she has now been honoured by the Grammys.
Posting the “unexpected gift” on her X/Twitter account, Madison wrote: “Thank you [Beyoncé] for letting me be apart [sic] of your masterpiece. I’m so honoured to be a piece in a legacy of meaning.
“Thank you [to the Recording Academy] for my Grammy certificate… I’m framing this and putting it on my wall in the work room.”
The certificate reads: “The Recording Academy presents this certificate to Ts Madison Hinton in recognition of your participation as songwriter on the Grammy-Award-winning recording, Renaissance, [by] Beyoncé.”
Renaissance famously lost out on the album of the year Grammy in 2023, beaten by Harry’s House, by Harry Styles. It did, however, win best dance/electronic album, with Madison credited as one of the songwriters.
Speaking about being sampled on the album, Madison previously told Essence that she received a mystery memo that read: “Madison, this is a powerful piece that you did on YouTube, and we’re interested in sampling fragments of your voice for a record.”
Commenting on the message, Madison said: “I was like ‘OK, well how much you got?’ We figured it out so I still owned the rights.
“A few months later, I ran into someone who was working on Renaissance, but I didn’t know what the project was at the time. We’re sitting down to eat in LA and he says, ‘B***h, your voice sounds amazing on this track that’s coming up’.
“And I was like: ‘What are you talking about?’ He said the ‘B**ch, I’m Black’. I asked which album and he told me he couldn’t say… I just laughed and moved on, but by process of elimination – this was an international artist who is known for standing in their Blackness – I thought it might be Beyoncé.”
