Beyonce's epic Cowboy Carter is outlaw country in the truest sense

Beyonce, Cowboy Carter

In the pre-release buildup to Cowboy Carter, Beyonce’s long-threatened country music about-face, the 42-year-old – to borrow a line from her lead track Texas Hold ’Em, the first single by a Black woman to ever top Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart – laid her cards down. Like most great art, it seems the impetus for the album was spite. Pure, glorious spite.

In a note posted to Instagram, Beyonce nodded to her ordeal with Daddy Lessons, the maligned country song featured on her 2016 landmark Lemonade, saying her new project “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.”

The saga of Daddy Lessons is well-documented: country radio refused to play it; a performance at the 2016 CMAs – with fellow pariahs the Dixie Chicks, over a decade into their Bush-bashing blacklist – sparked backlash from Nashville NIMBYs; and the Grammys’ country committee rejected the song from its genre nominations. That country music, even in its current boom, has struggled with racial politics in the near-decade since Daddy Lessons makes Beyonce’s return to the genre prescient. Her statement, meanwhile, instantly upped the stakes.

In that sense, Cowboy Carter functions much like 2022’s Renaissance, Beyonce’s reclamation of dance music’s Black roots (Cowboy Carter is “act ii” of what she’s dubbed her “Renaissance trilogy”). It’s a sonic pivot of sorts but, like much of Beyonce’s recent work, done with the studious eye of a pop academic, with her Black identity at the fore, and with a spiritual score to settle. The clear message? F--- your genre limitations, country’s whatever she says it is.

At 27 tracks and 79 minutes, the album’s sprawling. But as Beyonce stated, “This ain’t a country album; this is a Beyonce album.” There are tracks that straddle the genre’s conventions – the infectious Bodyguard is country-disco, like Beyonce’s doing Kacey Musgraves; II Most Wanted is a road trip duet with Miley Cyrus that sounds like Fleetwood Mac’s Landslide but featherlight; and Levii’s Jeans, a cute tune with Post Malone, is that ubiquitous country signifier, a chugging song about being some lover’s blue jeans.

Interpretation is also a country staple and Beyonce tackles some intriguing covers, including The Beatles’ Blackbird and, as promised, Dolly Parton’s Jolene. Knowing what we know of her husband Jay-Z’s infidelities (I mean, she made a whole album about it), the cover’s loaded; Beyonce sings it with venom and freestyle energy. Sparser tracks like single 16 Carriages and ballad Protector also tap into country’s love of powerhouse vocals and offer Beyonce space to emote more than anything on Renaissance did.

But then there’s Daughter, an evocative murder ballad that straddles flamenco and fado; Spaghettii, a drill-meets-Sergio Leone cut where Beyonce furiously chants “I ain’t in no gang, but I got shooters and I bang bang!“; while Ya Ya is a frenzied go-go throwback where Beyonce evokes the ’50s and ’60s Chitlin Circuit. The second half of the album seems to make a case for regional hip-hop’s claim to “country”, and it’s convincing.

Look, if Morgan Wallen can make an R&B song and call it country (Last Night), then surely Beyonce’s got free rein to follow her whims anywhere. Still, I can’t wait to hear how country radio or the Grammys handle Sweet * Honey * Buckin, an epic track that opens with Beyonce reverently covering Patsy Cline’s I Fall To Pieces and ends with her chanting “Buck it, like a mechanical bull!” over a stomping Jersey Club beat.

That’s the surprise of this album, just how playful it is. You can sense Beyonce’s glee in trampling all over the sensibilities of country cronies clinging with cold hands to their closed-off traditions, plus the idea of genre conventions altogether. If we assumed Cowboy Carter was Beyonce clamouring for the country establishment’s acceptance, we were wronger than roadkill.

Her trilogy’s wider agenda is apparent across several interludes on the album too, including The Linda Martell Show, a nod to the first Black woman to perform at the Grand Ole Opry in 1970, who was forced to retire in 1974 after her success stalled; and Smoke Hour * Willie Nelson, where the country legend plays radio DJ.

Like everything on the album, his presence feels pointed: not just a genre icon and a fellow Texan, even at 90 Nelson remains a card-carrying progressive in country’s conservative milieu, routinely advocating for marijuana legalisation, LGBTQ rights, biofuels and vaccinations, often to the chagrin of the rednecks in his crowds. More to Beyonce’s thesis, in 1960 he famously kissed Black country star Charley Pride during a live concert, silencing racist hecklers in his audience and helping propel Pride’s acceptance into Nashville. If Beyonce doesn’t make a cameo at Willie’s annual picnic this 4th of July, I’ll eat my star-spangled bandana.

Some had already labelled Beyonce’s pivot “country cosplay”, but this is genre experimentation in service of personal and political expression. For all of pop’s Taylor-inspired forays into toying openly with tabloid meta-narratives, no pop star’s music feels as personal as Beyonce’s.

Cowboy Carter is ambitious in its free-form genre-bending, it’s fun and emotionally rich, a superstar taking back country’s reins on her own terms, on behalf of her Black forebears who were ostracised and a generation still struggling to break through – essentially, anyone anywhere excluded by small-minded gatekeepers. This is “outlaw country” in the truest sense.

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