#Beyoncé #Cowboy #Carter #departs #country #reimagines #USA #Illustrated
São Paulo
“This isn’t Texas,” is the first sentence he Beyoncé sings on the single “Texas Hold ‘Em”, which featured on the album “Cowboy Carter”, released this Friday (29). Born in Houston, the largest city in the American state she mentions, and raised by a mother from Louisiana and a father from Alabama, she is a daughter of the southern USAwhere country has its roots, but on his new album that’s just the starting point.
Treated informally as the music Beyoncé’s country song, “Cowboy Carter” was born out of a challenge. In 2016, when featured the track “Daddy Lessons” —a country song released in “Lemonade“, that year—with the Dixie Chicks at the Country Music Association Awards, she received some criticism for sounding out of place in the genre—or perhaps simply for being black in a mostly white music industry.
“Because of this experience, I delved into the history of country music, and studied our rich musical archive,” she said in the statement showing the album cover. In the photo, in fact, she appears sitting on a white horse, with cowboy outfit and cowgirl hat, holding a United States flag that is only partially shown in the image.
In a way, the American flag in context represents Beyoncé’s conceptual struggle, which brings the song a political battle. It’s as if, by showing that you have talent and ability to make country musicone of the biggest references for the black population in the United States, also said that it is as American as the conservative and rural whiteness so linked to this style of music.
To do this, she seeks inspiration from black people who have worked in country music throughout history. In “The Linda Martell Show”, it presents the singer who released a single album in 1970, the first major release by a black woman in the genre, and had a career marked by difficulties. In “Texas Hold ‘Em”, she features Rhiannon Giddens, a black artist with a career based on country and blues, playing banjo.
This defense of black country is imagined in the first part of “Cowboy Carter”, with more acoustic tracks. In the opening, “Ameriican Requiem”, Beyoncé sings that “they said I spoke ‘country’ too much, but the rejection came, they said I wasn’t ‘country’ enough”. In the sentences, she plays with the word that names the musical genre, also used as a synonym for caipira, country person.
Beyoncé performs her version of “Blackbird”, the famous song by Beatles what Paul McCartney composed inspired by the struggle of black Americans for civil rights in the 1960s. She calls out black singers prominent in current country music, such as Tanner Adell, Brittney Spencer, Tiera Kennedy and Reyna Roberts. She also records “Jolene”, drawing connections between the character sung in Dolly Parton’s classic and Beyoncé’s “Becky with the good hair” in the 2016 song “Sorry”.
Parton, in fact, appears speaking in an interlude, as does another American country icon, Willie Nelson. He appears as a radio announcer guiding the listener on a kind of break, “time to smoke”, and the singer is known as a great advocate of marijuana —drug whose criminalization is responsible for a large part of the arrests of black people in the United States.
But over the course of the 80 minutes of “Cowboy Carter” the rural American musical style becomes just a pretext. This aesthetic of guitars and banjos dissipates as it merges with a sound menu as vast as the singer’s own discography. Beyoncé takes the ingredients of country music, mixes them in different ways and adds other spices until it becomes something else.
Beyoncé goes soft-rock from the Fleetwood Mac style of “Bodyguard” to the psychedelic soul of “Ya Ya”, with samples of Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made For Walking” and the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations”. In “Tyrant”, he proposes a trap-country song — with a different result, despite a similar proposal, to the hit “Old Town Road”, by Lil Nas X. In “Desert Eagle”, he plays with words to make analogies with sex and food over a funky, echo-filled bass base, in the Funkadelic style.
The landmark of this change of direction is the 12th track, “Spaghetti”. The artist opens with a reflection on musical genres — easy to define, but which can represent a prison, as Linda Martell says. From there, fit a sample of “Aquecimento das Danadas”, Brazilian funk Mandrake, with the participation of DJ Xaropinho, and the song becomes a pop sharp in a Beyoncé fashion, and she embodies her rapper persona to spit rhymes with quotes about her husband, Jay-Z, and basketball player Stephen Curry, while saying that she is not a conventional singer.
In fact, if the expectation was to hear the shining voice of the former Destiny’s Child singing about broken hearts and a longing for the countryside, themes present in the most commercial American country music, over traditional guitars and banjos, it is partially frustrated. There are songs typical of the style, such as the duet with Miley Cyrus on “II Most Wanted”, but “Cowboy Carter” is more of a Beyoncé album than a usual country work.
Conceptual sequence of “Renaissance”, disco of 2022 in which the artist examined the dance floor music, the new work is more diffuse and has undeniably less pop appeal. Distributed in 27 tracks, it is as if the new work could be two albums — the first half, with an aesthetically more conservative look at country, in which the singer presents her racial claim about the genre, and the second, aesthetically more inventive, in that she shakes up her style to achieve unlikely results.
If the path is long —especially in times of TikTok— and, sometimes, also boring, at least the arrival is more interesting than the departure. The final stretch of “Cowboy Carter”, with “II Hands II Heaven” and “Sweet Honey Bucket”, is especially intriguing, in which Beyoncé creates an electronic pop with elements of hip-hop interspersed with acoustic guitars and a country theme in the lyrics. “Amen”, the final one, brings the black influence of American gospel.
If it is not the most innovative or cohesive work in the career of one of the biggest music stars on the planet, “Cowboy Carter” also doesn’t make Beyoncé sound jaded or trapped in the pop and R&B sound she’s developed over her previous seven albums. Like “Renaissance”, it shows a restless artist willing to leave her comfort zone to face new creative challenges — imposed by others or by herself. While doing so, Beyoncé also reclaims and injects blackness into the aesthetic expression most identified with white people in the United States. It’s no small feat.
