Albums Of The Year: Cowboy Carter
In many ways, Cowboy Carter is aligned with the project of its predecessor. Beyoncé’s 2022 masterwork, “Renaissance,” grabbed hold of electronic dance music on behalf of its Black and Queer originators. This collection appears to have similar ambitions around country music, western wear, and the state of Texas. As with any Beyoncé project, engaging a musical genre also means engaging the nostalgia surrounding the genre. When Cowboy Carter is most effective, the symbols, fashion, folkways, and movements we associate with various eras of Americana get refracted through the funhouse contortions of Beyoncé’s fantastic, libidinal imagination. Songs like “Riverdance,” “Desert Eagle,” and “Sweet * Honey * Buckin’,” sonically merge a do-si-do with the stripper pole while lyrically rendering country music’s penchant for cloaking sexual pleasure in a vail of double entendre as sheer as it has ever been. Songs like “II Hands II Heaven” and “Tyrant” meld country music’s signature forlorn melancholy with more acrobatic percussion and more intricate vocal patterns than we are used to hearing it surrounded by. Unfortunately, this section of the record feels like an epilogue to the album’s primary mission, which seems focused on a more personal reclamation.
The cover and gatefold of this LP use a misspelling of Beyoncé’s name — “Beyincé.” It turns out this is an allusion to hospital staff misspelling her mother’s last name on the birth certificate. Cowboy Carter is a demand to be duly recognized.
Since releasing her eponymous 2013 album with no pre-promotion, Beyoncé has been on a run that deserves to be considered alongside Stevie Wonder’s classic period, the Beatles’s final five years, Prince’s 1980s, and Bowie’s 1970s as the most dominant and artistically rich stretches in American pop music history. Beyoncé is notably the lone Black woman who has broken into this pantheon. Over that period, three of her albums, Beyoncé, Lemonade, and Renaissance, were nominated for Album Of The Year at the Grammys, only to lose to a lesser project by a white artist each time. Following the release of Lemonade, Beyoncé produced the highest-rated moment in Country Music Awards history when she performed her song “Daddy Lessons” with the trio formerly known as The Dixie Chicks. The appearance received a torrent of racist reactions, and the song never did crossover into significant country radio airplay.
Beyoncé has every right to demand proper recognition from these institutions. Still, the problem with making music to appease people who can’t dance is that these are people who are appeased by music that is not worth dancing to, and in songs like “Levi Jeans,” “16 Carriages,” and “Texas Hold ‘Em” we get some of the least compelling music Beyoncé has produced in years. Co-signs from Willie Nelson and Dolly Parton feel overcompensatory on the part of all involved, as do covers of the Beatles “Blackbird” and Parton’s own “Jolene.” The gratuitousness of the latter is doubly confirmed by Beyoncé’s own excellent, jilted lover revenge fantasy, “Daughter,” which immediately follows “Jolene” on the tracklist and honors the spirit of the original much more effectively than the cover. I am willing to buy the argument that in 2024, “Jolene” would be a murder ballad.
Not all of the album’s attempts at country radio airplay are failures. Beyoncé delivers a legitimate country pop radio anthem with “II Most Wanted,” a duet with one of the genre’s legitimate princesses, Miley Cyrus. There is also “Bodyguard,” which sways with a safe but seductive bop that would have made for a surefire country chart-topper song if someone who looks more like Megan Moroney had delivered it.
Beyoncé took a careless clerical worker’s misspelling and made it a mononym in the iconic lineage of Elvis, Prince, and Madonna. It is a sad comment on the unconquerability of American white supremacy that she has even partially shaped this album to cater to the few who still don’t recognize her. Too much of Cowboy Carter feels directly addressed to the predominately white authorities overseeing contemporary country and pop music critical consensus. Throughout the album, Beyoncé seems to be asking, “Do y’all seriously think I can’t do this? Do you know how fucking easy this is for me?” when the only people who still doubt her are racist imbeciles with lousy taste. Beyoncé, who has spent a career beating them, still feels the sting of not being invited to join them.
The hospital staff should have correctly spelled Celestine Beyince’s family name. The Grammys should have given Album of the Year to Beyoncé, Lemonade, and Renaissance. Beyoncé and generations of other Black artists, dating back to Ivory Joe Hunter, should claim their due from country music’s gatekeepers. All of that is so, and none of it negates the fact that artistically, Cowboy Carter improves as it becomes more disrespectful to the conventions associated with country radio airplay and Grammy glory. It fails when it bows to them.
