Here she comes round again, the horse goddess. When Beyoncé released âRenaissance,â in the summer of 2022âa paean to house music and disco, and to the Black queer people who invented themâthe album cover featured the artist perched on a glittering beast. Now, on âCowboy Carter,â her new country-inspired album, she sits sidesaddle on a live horse, an iteration of the animal that had shattered the disco. She wears latex Stars-and-Stripes rodeo-queen gear, an écru cowboy hat, as if a crown; her hair is blonder than blond, basically ash white. She is holding a large American flag, but half of it has been cut out of the frame; the country has been brought to her scale. The albumâs backdrop is pure black, the picture of pre-Genesis nothingness. All manner of culture and history and personality, then, is concentrated in Beyoncéâs image, hovering over a spotlighted patch of rodeo dirt.
The cover art arrived ten days before the music, setting up a long runway for the kind of radiating psychodrama that no American pop artist stirs quite like Beyoncé. Who does she think she is, bringing her extravagance to country music? Is she a patriot, waving that flag in the air, or is she a satirist, like Mark Twain? Will the keepers of modern Black country music, artists such as Mickey Guyton and Brittney Spencer, be eclipsed or validated? Oh, and does her skin look lightened? Louder than all this is the protective cry from her fans, who stand at the ready to make fools of her doubters.
A Beyoncé album is never just an album. The statement that accompanied the imagery for âCowboy Carterâ was about cultural reclamation. There is a reference to the cold reception she got at the Country Music Association Awards, back in 2016, when she performed her song âDaddy Lessons,â supported by the then Dixie Chicks, well-known dissidents of the genre. (The bandâs criticism of antebellum worship and white-male pontification extends even to themselves; some years ago, they dropped the âDixieâ from their name.) That performance, to me, is appealing exactly because of the tension, which was captured on camera: Beyoncé the siren, frustrated, bidding her audience to respond to her. The artist took justified offense to the idea that a Black woman could not lay claim to the most American genre. The slight inspired a years-long investigation of the blacked-out Black roots of country music. The Black fiddler gave the idea of syncopation to what would become the genre; the banjoâs origins lie in West Africa. All that research ended in a kind of playful rebuffing. âThis ainât a Country album,â the statement said. âThis is a âBeyoncéâ album.â
âCowboy Carterâ is just thatâfor better and for worse. On the album, Beyoncé wants to make Beyoncé the synecdoche for an American. (A Texas girl sprung from an Alabama daddy and a Louisiana mamaâshe frequently invokes these home states, in her lyrics, as a shorthand for biography.) But the album highlights only the artistâs singularity, her distance not just from the American public but from the rest of the music industry. Beyoncé is no maverick isolationist, of course: she has an arrangerâs genius for collaboration, bringing together a cadre of producers and songwritersâNo I.D., Raphael Saadiq, Pharrell, and The-Dream, with the last being her musical soul mateâalongside newer, younger specialists, such as Ryan Beatty, Raye, and Mamii. They have bottled a centuryâs worth of music tradition into seventy-eight minutes. Beyoncé takes on the role of griot for this nationâs marginalized musical stylesâroots music, the blues, zydeco, bluegrass, folk, honky-tonkâall of which she presents to us alchemized, and buffed to high sheen. The production is maximalist: vocal stacking as high as the Tower of Babel; the guitar slide that transports you, given to a player from Heaven or Hell; the whispered jam session; the vast reserve of treasure-hunt interpolations, made to submit to alternative keys; the single song as radio medley or tripartite suite; social criticism as interlude; expository lyricism. And her finest instrument, that voice, which knows no limit. All together, itâs a spectacle executed to wild perfection, so declarative and definitive that it forgets pathos, lacks the wisdom to grow still, to question.
âCowboy Carterâ runs for twenty-seven tracksâeleven more than âRenaissance,â although âCowboy Carterâ was meant to be released first. The albums are the first two acts of a musical trilogy. âCowboy Carterâ âs opener, âAmeriican Requiem,â is a kind of Pyrrhic victory. (When Beyoncé adds that extra vowel to a song title, as she does in more than a few of the albumâs tracks, we know the quasi-blueswoman is house-training language, making it drawl in spelling as it does in her Houston throat.) The arrangement is a brilliant amalgamation, beginning with gospel penitence, and revving up to the big-hair grandeur of Queen and Buffalo Springfield, whose song âFor What Itâs Worthâ Beyoncé appears to have sampled.
A little less than two minutes into the track, she diffuses her choral blanket with a sound that is thrillingly shrillâa frog croak, a rock godâs scream of existential release, as if the spirit of Prince possessed her. But itâs only his voice that sheâs able to harness. A title like âAmeriican Requiemâ promises something like the sociological insight of Princeâs âAmerica,â which we barely receive, beyond Beyoncé making reference to her own experiences: âUsed to say I spoke too country / And the rejection came, said I wasnât country ânough.â It is as if the sound is so big because itâs begging the narrator to abandon her platitudes, to go down in the mud of tragedy and sorrow that is the spark of Black American music. âCan we stand for something?â Beyoncé sings. Tell us what that something is.
She is a storyteller, not a truthteller. âItâs a whole lot of talkinâ goinâ on / While I sing my song,â she sings, on the opener. Art over discourse, it would seem. I dwell on âAmeriican Requiemâ because the barn it aims to burn is still intact. âCowboy Carterâ recovers from its introductionâthe album gets freakier, realer, as it approaches its funk-inflected B-sideâbut it takes a while. The next few songs strand us on a mountaintop of sentimentalism, while subtly rebuking race and genre lines. The second track is a cover of âBlackbird,â by the Beatles. (âBlackbiird,â as Beyoncé calls it.) She sings alongside four Black country artists, all women: Tanner Adell, Brittney Spencer, Tiera Kennedy, and Reyna Roberts. The prominence of her voice in the arrangement cuts a figure of her as the übermatriarchâan idea echoed in the subject of later songs such as âProtectorâ and âMy Rose,â lullabies to her children.
Beyoncé has not made a country album, but she is still playing with its tropes: the masochistic wife, the lady murderer, and, always, the dance leader. âTexas Hold âEm,â one of the first two singles, which features Rhiannon Giddens on banjo and viola, is almost absurdly anthemic. On â16 Carriages,â the other single, which features pedal steel by Robert Randolph, Beyoncé throws her voice, melding the story of her gruelling adolescent stardom with that of a day laborerâs exhaustion: âSixteen dollars, workinâ all day / Ainât got time to waste / I got art to make.â Itâs a downbeat echo of the working girls on âRenaissanceâ tracks like âBreak My Soulâ and âPure/Honey,â who ran toward euphoria despite the âquarter tank of gas / worldâs at war, low on cashâ of it all. Here, Beyoncéâs fantasies of populism have been transposed to the back road and the dive bar, the pickup truck and the tent church. There are whistles and toe taps and yowls and warbles and percussion produced by acrylic nails. Surprisingly, there is no yodelling.
The artistâs own back catalogue gave glimpses into her deep knowledge of Americana (âIrreplaceable,â âKitty Kat,â âDonât Hurt Yourself,â I could go on). What is different, at this stage in her career, is the atmosphere of history-making. On âRenaissance,â she played the role of an ally, a vessel. Queens bestowed queenery on her. The Beyoncé of âCowboy Carter,â with her bona fides and autobiography lifting her, is a researcher bent on ennoblement, the soul of her project vulnerable to the forces of her stridency. Her vision of America is pat.