Beyonc’s imagination is unlocked on the freewheeling ‘Cowboy Carter’

Mikael Wood April 1, 2024

A costume, an accent, a narrative mode, a homecoming: For Beyonc, country music is all that (and more) on Cowboy Carter, the pop superstars boot-scooting blowout of a new studio album. Its as sprawling and as rigorous as weve come to expect from the most intellectually ambitious artist in music; it also can make you wonder and this of course is easy for me to say whether Beyonc should stop seeking the approval of those whove shown themselves unworthy of bestowing it.

Determined as always to introduce her work on her own terms, Beyonc wrote on Instagram before the LPs release on Friday that Cowboy Carter was born out of an experience that I had years ago where I did not feel welcomed a reference, presumably, to the racist backlash that greeted her performance of her song Daddy Lessons with the Dixie Chicks at the 2016 Country Music Assn. Awards. The episode led her to immerse herself in the rich musical archive of country musics undersung Black pioneers, just as shed studied the Black and queer roots of dance music to make 2022s Renaissance. (Renaissance and Cowboy Carter are billed as the first and second acts in a proposed trilogy, though Beyoncs reign as pops foremost musicologist really began with the tribute to HBCU tradition she brought to Coachella in 2018.)

As a proud Houston native the grandbaby of a moonshine man, as she puts it in the new albums opener, Ameriican Requiem Beyoncs connection to country music runs deep: Got folk down Galveston, rooted in Louisiana, she sings in Ameriican Requiem, a surging march layered with guitar, sitar and the hum of an electric church organ. Used to say I spoke too country / Then the rejection came, said I wasnt country nough. The same went for Renaissance, whose excursions into house, disco and ballroom music she linked to her close relationship with a gay family member named Uncle Johnny.

And, indeed, its the particulars of Beyoncs identity that give her music much of its cultural weight that position her here as a Black woman endeavoring to make space for people of color in a field thats long prove

dn

inhospitable to anyone other than straight white men. Already shes been criticized by some on social media for doing less than she could in that regard on a record that prominently features Miley Cyrus and Post Malone while it convenes four Black female country singers Tanner Adell, Brittney Spencer, Tiera Kennedy and Reyna Roberts to serve as her backing chorus in a moving cover of the Beatles Blackbird. Other guests include Shaboozey and Willie Jones, both country-rap fusionists, and the country elders Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton and Linda Martell, all of whom provide spoken interludes.

Beyonc, the all-time leading Grammy winner, should never attend another Grammy Awards

Yet its the pop stars prerogative to borrow freely from whatever and wherever she likes; the determinist thinking around Beyonc can downplay pops true promise, which is that ones talent and ingenuity are all the license one needs. Certainly, that freedom is enjoyed more readily by the likes of Malone (whose presence on Novembers CMA Awards appeared to rankle nobody) and Morgan Wallen (whos done as much as any country act to import elements of Black creativity into a putatively white genre always a more frictionless process than the reverse). But the most thrilling moments on Cowboy Carter arent feats of reclamation so much as achievements of invention: hard-to-classify songs such as Sweet Honey Buckiin, in which Beyonc croons Patsy Clines I Fall to Pieces over a thumping Jersey club groove, or II Hands II Heaven, a celestial trance-folk fantasia that evokes a long night in the desert.

As a grand statement on America the kind the albums cover sets you up for with its striking stars-and-bars symbology Cowboy Carter feels a bit mushy. Beyonc sings in Ameriican Requiem about a pretty house that we never settled in and notes in Ya Ya that theres a whole lot of red in that white and blue; the latter tune, which quotes Nancy Sinatra and the Beach Boys and summons memories of Tina Turner, also lamely addresses the anxieties of people exhausted from working time and a half for half the pay: We gotta keep the faith, Beyonc advises. Oh, is that all?

Shes said that each song was conceived in response to a specific Western film (among them Urban Cowboy and The Hateful Eight), which means they might be less strictly autobiographical than Beyonc has trained us with LPs like Lemonade to assume. The breezy II Most Wanted, for instance with Beyonc and Cyrus harmonizing about smoking cigarettes while flying down the 405 may well be a riff on Thelma & Louise. (Two highly personal exceptions are the stately 16 Carriages, about the youth she spent building a career on the road, and Protector, a tender acoustic ballad in which she describes the bond between mother and child and which starts with Beyoncs daughter Rumi asking her mom for a lullaby.)

Yet that slightly gimmicky storytelling approach seems to have unlocked her imagination; its gratifying to hear her lean not just into country musics history but into its wit and style and pageantry. Leviis Jeans all these double is are evidently meant to reinforce Cowboy Carters Act II status is a sexed-up duet with her and Malone trading cheeky lines about the charms of hip-hugging denim; Riiverdance blends programmed beats and a speedy finger-picked guitar lick like nothing since Rednex scored a left-field hit with Cotton Eye Joe in 1995. Her singing is just as vivid and varied across the LP, with gutsy growls and breathy trills against multi-tracked harmony vocals that approximate the heavenly abundance of a gospel choir.

Like Renaissance, Cowboy Carter reflects the great care Beyonc takes in structuring her albums: Witness the way she moves from Bodyguard, a 70s-style soft-rock jam, to an interlude by Parton, whose I Will Always Love You was covered by Whitney Houston in The Bodyguard, to a rendition of Partons Jolene, in which Beyonc remakes the original lyric as a bare-knuckle threat, to Daughter, a stark murder ballad that explores a familys legacy of violence.

That belief in the potential of the album format is one reason that Beyoncs tortured past at the Grammy Awards, where shes lost album of the year four times, remains such a vexing part of her story up there with the CMAs incident that set Cowboy Carter into motion. Still, its hard not to cringe when she evidently refers to her most recent defeat in album of the year AOTY for short with the eminently deserving Renaissance. A-O-T-Y, I aint win / I aint stuntin bout them,” she raps in Sweet Honey Buckiin, “Take that s on the chin / Come back and f up the pen.

Beyonc used that motivation to deliver the fascinating Cowboy Carter. But no gatekeeper can take credit for her vision.