Cowboy Carter

If Lemonade taught us anything, it’s that you do not fuck with Beyoncé. Her 2016 opus was her seething response to being wronged, giving us the indelible image of a smiling woman in a yellow dress carrying a baseball bat and the enduring specter of Becky and her good hair. We already know what happens when something meddles with her peace—she puts her whole being into righting the wrongs, enacting her revenge with a twinkle in her eye, extra gumption in her voice, and ice in her veins. There’s a particular edge when one of the world’s biggest music superstars has a chip on her shoulder. This doesn’t often occur—of late, Beyoncé has been acting as a beatific Mother in every way—but when it does, boy howdy, look out.

Lemonade, as it happened, may have helped plant the seed for Cowboy Carter, which was “born out of an experience that I had years ago where I did not feel welcomed… and it was very clear that I wasn’t.” It seems she is referring to her 2016 appearance at the Country Music Association Awards, in which she performed Lemonade’s Texas country triumph “Daddy Lessons” with the Chicks, who were also once exiled by the entire country music apparatus. As they played the song and after it ended, Beyoncé was met with reactions that ranged from cool sneers to racist vitriol, both in the crowd and online.

At that moment, it was clear that even Beyoncé’s Texas bona fides wouldn’t protect her from the longstanding racism and sexism that still existed in the country mainstream, despite Black musicians creating the spark of country music and Black Americans creating the foundations of the country itself. “Because of that experience,” she wrote, “I did a deeper dive into the history of country music and studied our rich musical archive… the criticisms I faced when I first entered this genre forced me to propel past the limitations that were put on me.” The country music establishment got Beyoncé doing homework. The guns they are a-blazin’.

But, as Beyoncé has clarified, Cowboy Carter—or Act II, the follow-up to the 2022 dance album Renaissance—is not a country album. Rather, Beyoncé has ventured into Louisiana Cajun country, the rivers of Alabama, the streets of Memphis, the great Oklahoma plains, and within her memories of multiracial Texas rodeos to create yet another world in her image. It’s partly rooted in Western tropes but with a pointed look toward the America that’s often erased on the CMAs stage—and in the public school history books. The album’s press release reminds us that the etymology of the word “cowboy,” which comes from the Spanish “vaquero,” derives in part from white ranchers calling their white employees “cowhands,” and their Black employees the diminutive “cowboy.” By using country as a starting point for experimentation and recalling genre-porous artists like Ray Charles, Candi Staton, Charley Pride, and the Pointer Sisters, Cowboy Carter asserts Beyoncé’s place in this long legacy while showcasing the ever-expanding reaches of her vocal prowess.

On Cowboy Carter, Club Renaissance is swapped out for KNTRY Radio Texas, an AM station hosted by an ever-hazy Willie Nelson. Here she re-contextualizes roots music—Americana, folk, country—for a contemporary moment, reminding listeners that Black artists were the genesis of these forms and never stopped playing them, despite what Hollywood or Nashville might have on offer. Even before the album dropped, the associated visuals reignited a dialogue about Black country’s legacy that started in 2018 with the success of Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” and Dallas culture critic Bri Malandro’s Yee Haw Agenda. With Beyoncé as conduit, she’s made these historical connections fun, though no one would accuse her of edutainment—she’s performed at the Houston Livestock Show and Rodeo more than once. Nor is Cowboy Carter an explicit fuck you to those who rejected her back in 2016, but it’s a show-and-prove that she knows better, that she belonged on that stage, and so do all the Black country and rock musicians she’s brought along to Carter Ranch. Well—the album’s “rodeo chitlin’ circuit” conceit, which refers to the venues that would allow Black musicians to perform in the segregated South, may be an explicit fuck you.

Cowboy Carter is also a flex, with Beyoncé proffering what may be one of the most expensive albums ever made in terms of royalties—to my ear she’ll be cutting checks to Dolly, Chuck Berry, Nancy Sinatra and Lee Hazelwood, the Beatles, the Beach Boys, Patsy Cline, Mickey and Sylvia, and Hank Cochran, all of whose songs are interpolated or covered here. Cowboy Carter plays out like a classic country murder ballad, the wronged townsgal returning to her dusty outpost to pop off her vengeance—“Your bloodstains on my custom coutures,” as she sings in “Daughter.” The concept is thrilling, though it must be underlined that in the grand scheme of things, Beyoncé is still a megastar with a billion in the bank as she kicks through the swinging saloon doors. She may be bringing a small posse of lesser-known artists with her, but as she noted, this is more about “challenging” herself, not an altruistic endeavor. She is one of the only musicians in the world who can force the hand of her haters by sheer will and ubiquity; the country establishment will have to hear her whether they like it or not, and that seems to be enough.

Cowboy Carter is equally a text and a performance, but let’s first talk about the text. Beyoncé rides in on a galloping horse delightfully named Chardonneigh, wearing a latex flip on a rodeo queen’s regalia (though we’ll leave the physics of such a pose to the trick riders), and carrying a partially visible American flag into album opener “Ameriican Requiem,” on which she deploys Tina Turner power-rasping toward the foundation of the American project. “Can you hear me, or do you fear me?” she wails, indicting the hypocrisy of a country built on freedom by enslaved people before planting her own flag in it—she’s American, too.

The message is underscored with an affecting cover of the Beatles’ “Blackbird,” a folk song Paul McCartney wrote in part as a response to seeing the violence and hatred levied at the Little Rock Nine—nine Black teenagers attempting to attend high school in Arkansas after Brown v. Board of Education made school segregation illegal. She’s joined in its hopeful lullaby by a coterie of talented Black women making country music—Tanner Adell, Brittney Spencer, Reyna Roberts, and Tiera Kennedy of “Jesus, My Mama, My Therapist” fame—and elsewhere, extends her influence to Virginia country hip-hop musician Shaboozey (“Spaghettii,” “Sweet ★ Honey ★ Buckiin’”) and the Shreveport artist Willie Jones on “Just for Fun.” The latter song, a gospel-inflected meditation on journeying through your troubles, moves through piano, acoustic guitar, strings, and a percussive stomp that mimics a horse gallop, just one example of the way Cowboy Carter has largely set aside the synths of Renaissance for a more organic, live-to-tape feel of capturing a band in a very nice studio.

Rhiannon Giddens’ banjo and viola on “Texas Hold ’Em” initially set the tone for Cowboy Carter when it was released earlier this year, but there’s not much else resembling contemporary country on the album. Instead, Beyoncé focuses on American folk music and the golden era of country, with cosigns from legends who forged their legacies in the 1960s and ’70s: Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson, and most notably Linda Martell, the first Black woman to play the Grand Ole Opry. “Genres are a funny little concept, aren’t they?” Martell opens in a voice-over on “Spaghettii.” “In theory, they have a simple definition that’s easy to understand. But in practice, well, some may feel confined.”

To prove the point, Beyoncé ushers in another horse-gallop trap beat and raps about her shooters, though Martell’s argument might be better exemplified on “Daughter,” a cowgirl revenge track that escalates, incredibly, into Beyoncé belting a stanza from the 18th-century aria “Caro Mio Ben”—in Italian, no less. Or maybe on “Sweet ★ Honey ★ Buckiin’,” where Cline’s classic “I Fall to Pieces” gets the Jersey club treatment while Beyoncé does “body rolls at the rodeo.” “My Rose” alternately recalls baroque vocal arrangements, Sweet Honey in the Rock, and ’60s psychedelia on a song about mother-love; “Desert Eagle” is an unlikely slap-bass strip-club anthem. Or, even more explicitly, “Riiverdance,” which interpolates finger-picked bluegrass guitar with a house piano and four-on-the-floor percussion that may be provided by Beyoncé’s nails, Dolly-and-Patti, “9 to 5” style. It’s as though the Renaissance dancers took a detour through Alabama for a little choreo by the Coosa before dipping back to the club.

Despite drawing from the kitsch and fun of ’70s and ’80s country music, Cowboy Carter has an air of melancholy to it, a quality that reverberates through the scores of songs in minor keys about loneliness on the range. But there’s also a musical theatricality, as when Beyoncé and Miley Cyrus “Leather and Lace” themselves across outlaw country on the ride-or-die track “II Most Wanted.” Or on the phenomenal “Ya Ya,” where the electrified live band is in funky mule mode while Bey kicks, shimmies, snaps, and twerks her way through a working person’s lifetime of bullshit. “Whole lotta red in that white and blue… History can’t be erased,” she belts, before summoning the racial wage gap and predatory mortgage company Fannie Mae alongside a sample from Chuck Berry, country and rock’n’roll creator. The reprieve, as with Renaissance, is to dance out the pain and “keep my Bible on the dash.” They’re not permanent solutions, but at least she’ll make sure you’ll have a good time doing it.

The gutbucket sound of the live instrumentation is unique for Beyoncé, but the flexibility of her voice remains unbelievable. On tracks like “Protector” and “Daughter,” her high notes occasionally modulate down like a slide guitar, a breathy technique that’s distinctly country, but only sounds natural when a vocalist is in total control, as Beyoncé always is. The looseness of the acoustic instruments suits her, particularly when she lets herself be languid in the humidity of a song like “Alliigator Tears,” or sings in her lowest register on “Just for Fun.” She doesn’t have to backflip over a horse for the emotion to resonate.

Beyoncé’s persona has become American iconography, and her magnitude tends to cast a shadow over everything before her, no matter the medium. The side effect of this is that some of Cowboy Carter’s songs feel small and ill-suited for Beyoncé’s stature. “Levii’s Jeans,” her branded duet with Post Malone, is a pale attempt at contemporary country that has already been used in a marketing stunt; the shades of Fleetwood Mac on “Bodyguard” feel stock for an album of Cowboy Carter’s aspirations. On the much-ballyhooed “Jolene” cover, requested and cosigned by Dolly herself, Bey transforms its begging into a warning, re-concentrating the power into her own hands (and christening herself a “Creole banjee bitch from Louisiane,” another thread between Acts I and II). “Jolene” is also one of the most-covered songs in history, a choice that requires confidence that it will, at least in those three minutes, belong to you. Like her version of Donna Summer’s “I Feel Love” at the end of Renaissance, “Jolene” remains on loan.

But Cowboy Carter is another volume in Beyoncé’s years-long project to surface and pay tribute to Black culture, the way she spotlighted the queer dance underground in Renaissance and HBCUs in Homecoming. It’s still wild that she can provoke this type of dialogue on such a massive scale; for weeks both social and regular media have been locked into conversations about the history of Black country musicians, a sort of correcting the American musical canon. On the gospel album closer “Amen,” a companion to “Ameriican Requiem,” she alludes to the fact that the United States was built by enslaved Black people—“The statues they made were beautiful/But they were lies of stone”—and circles back to the inciting incident of Cowboy Carter: that what she experienced at the CMAs is part of an America that, you may have heard, has a problem. Though lyrics like “Can we stand for something?” might be vague, her message is quite clear. Beyoncé, too, is an American, so do-si-do on that.

Beyoncé: Cowboy Carter

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