"Them big ideas are buried here"
Beyoncé's most ambitious album yet interrogates the nature of genre, the forgotten histories of Black women, and the complexities of family.
Beyoncé - Cowboy Carter
Midway through Cowboy Carter, the extraordinary new album from Beyoncé, we hear the voice of Linda Martell, the first Black woman who ever sang at the Grand Old Opry. “Genres are a funny little concept, aren’t they?” she muses. “In theory, they have a simple definition that’s easy to understand. But in practice, well, some may feel confined.”
By this point in the album, it’s already abundantly clear that Cowboy Carter isn’t just a collection of songs. It’s the continuation of the conceptualist era that Beyoncé started on Renaissance (if not Lemonade), a dissertation-level research project that’s ideologically rigorous, rhetorically engaging, and annotated with a list of credits that might as well be dubbed the bibliography. It even has an operatic overture— the bombastically titled “Ameriican Requiem”— that functions as a kind of thesis statement, laying out the album’s intersecting themes.
“Them big ideas are buried here,” Beyoncé declaims. She’s not kidding. Like Renaissance before it, Cowboy Carter balances pop music thrills with astonishing intellectual density. It’s a sophisticated text that can be enjoyed on a surface level, but begs for the deeper work of excavation.
So what is Cowboy Carter about? Ostensibly, it’s about country music— a genre that can be defined as a historical narrative, one that has studiously erased many of its Black participants, or as a community that has too often flexed the power to regulate its own membership. More broadly, it is about the the notion of genre itself, suggesting how this “funny little concept” can be defined as much by its sense of exclusion as by its consensus values.
It’s also, jarringly, an album about Beyoncé. No artist, not even Taylor Swift, is as exacting in the way she controls her narrative and self-presentation; even on an album like Lemonade, seemingly a show of vulnerability, there is always a clear feeling that Beyoncé is portioning out her inner secrets in a way that leaves her with the upper hand, preserving an aura of opacity even in its most startling moments of revelation.
Cowboy Carter feels just as tightly controlled, but even still, reveals more than any previous Beyoncé album about exactly what makes the singer tick. “There’s a lot of talkin’ going on,” she muses in her opening thesis, and it turns out much of that talking has been about Beyoncé herself— specifically her CMAs performance alongside The Chicks back in 2016, a cultural lightning-rod moment that galvanized country music’s gatekeepers, their claims of genre purity a flimsy camouflage for institutionalized misogynoir. Who told this Black woman from Houston that she could sing country? Where does she find the nerve?
In “Ameriican Requiem,” she furnishes what feels like a long-gestating answer, essentially demonstrating her rural authenticity by way of a genealogy: “The grand baby of a moonshine man/ Gadsden, Alabama/ Got folks down in Galveston, rooted in Louisiana.” The singer has insinuated that the brouhaha surrounding her CMAs appearance was the catalyst for the entire Cowboy Carter project, and the whole album brings big chip-on-the-shoulder energy. Think of it as an album-length equivalent of that Michael Jordan meme from The Last Dance: “… and I took that personally.”
The CMAs dust-up isn’t the only baggage Beyoncé has been carrying around. Cowboy Carter goes deeper than any of her previous records in interrogating the formative influences of her family members, particularly her philandering father Matthew. “16 Carriages” recasts Beyoncé’s teen-prodigy origin story as a tale of stolen innocence and ultimate triumph, while the rustic “Protector” is a gorgeous expression of maternal instinct. Coming on the heels of “16 Carriages,” the latter song can’t help but feel like a familial inflection point— a resolution to end the cycle of wayward parenting and relational friction.
Given the way Beyoncé has centered her father’s faithlessness in her own personal mythology, it’s hard not to hear her “Jolene” cover as another song about the lingering influence of parents on their children. (Presumably, she sufficiently dealt with her husband’s indiscretions back on Lemonade.) Beyoncé replaces the plaintiveness of Dolly Parton’s original with a steely, murderous resolve— her jilted woman isn’t begging anybody for anything. The performance isn’t just an interpretive feat, but a show of dominance— as if Beyoncé is serving notice that she’s not merely playing by country’s rules, but remaking them in her own image.
The other noteworthy cover here is Paul McCartney’s “Blackbird,” a tender ballad originally written to honor the Little Rock Nine. The very inclusion of a Beatles song here is a reminder of how the stories of Black women have always been encoded in popular music, even the iterations most closely associated with Boomers and dads. Beyoncé uses the song to cede the spotlight— briefly— to three other Black women who have striven for country success: Tanner Addell, Brittney Spencer, and Tiera Kennedy.
All three singers have seen modest Beyoncé bumps in their streaming numbers, yet as a work of pure advocacy, Cowboy Carter feels restrained. Later songs provide full duet opportunities to Miley Cyrus and Post Malone, while these three Black country singers share a glorified cameo. It’s worth noting that, in what’s ostensibly a gesture of inclusivity and generosity, Beyoncé ensures that the album is still fundamentally about her.
The tropes of traditional country show up repeatedly, most centrally on “Texas Hold ‘Em.” Here, Beyoncé leans hard into twang, throwing an old-fashioned acoustic hootenanny with banjo and viola support from Rhiannon Giddens— another performer who’s demonstrated a professional interest in telling the stories of Black women in American roots music.
Giddens’ presence is welcome, not least as a point of contrast: While she is very much a folklorist and preservationist, Beyoncé is a modernist through and through. She bends old-timey signifiers to her will but remains committed to making music that’s colorful and contemporary. It’s telling that Linda Martell’s abbreviated TED Talk is followed by “Spaghettii,” a blistering rap song with nary a banjo to be heard. It’s as if Beyoncé is baiting country purists into a debate about whether a song like this has any space in the genre— never mind that so much of modern country is built on electronic hip-hop rhythms, nor that Beyoncé’s ferocious bars deliberately invoke the gunslinging bravado of outlaw country.
Her borderless, boundary-pushing spirit leads to moments of thrilling juxtaposition. An old-west ballad called “Daughter” veers, delightfully, into the Italian aria “Caro Mio Ben”— another show of Beyoncé’s imperious command, and just maybe a nod toward the cinematic spirit of Ennio Morricone. The album’s most irresistible song is “Ya Ya,” a rowdy Tina Turner-style rave-up. Here, Beyoncé reengages with the sense of total freedom that made Renaissance such an unfettered joy. In the best way possible, the song is bonkers.
Even when adhering more closely to a nominal definition of “country,” Cowboy Carter feels expansive and adventurous. The lithe “Bodyguard” grooves to a light disco pulse, recalling the neon-lit sensuality of the 80s urban cowboy movement. The Post Malone feature “Levii’s Jeans” co-opts the denim-loving, ass-fetishizing ethos of bro country, surely one of the things Beyoncé was put on this earth to do.
What she’s doing throughout Cowboy Carter is litigating the idea of canon— highlighting its utility, exposing its prejudices, illuminating its weaknesses. She does it not only for country music, but for any strain of purism that self-governs through gatekeeping and exclusion. To absorb the scale of her critique, note that “Blackbiird” has a Beatle credited on it, while “Ya Ya” interpolates lyrics from The Beach Boys; one wonders if she tried recruiting a Rolling Stone to play a few licks. The act of marshaling these white male masters in service of her own sprawling vision may actually cause Jann Wenner’s head to explode.
That Beyoncé sings the hell out of this album goes without saying. She is equally commanding when breaking into Italian on “Daughter” or tossing off James Brown-style ad libs in “Ya Ya.” In “Just For Fun” she explores the lower registry of her voice like never before, and throughout the album she leans on her Texas drawl— hearing how she describes herself as a “sanger” on “Spaghettii” is just one moment of pleasure on an album that’s full of them.
So full, in fact, that the sheer magnitude of Cowboy Carter can seem daunting. Beyoncé has provided a couple of narrative devices to help pull it all together. The album can be heard as a loosely-structured revenge story, in which our mysterious heroine pledges to atone for the sins of her father while doing better by her own children. Or, it’s a cross-country trek through AM radio static, a framing device that makes sense of the jumbled genres while also allowing space for spoken-word cameos from Dolly Parton and Willie Nelson, to say nothing of a time-warped Chuck Berry interlude.
These structures help direct Cowboy Carter’s ambition, but they hardly contain its inspired sprawl. Naturally, the sheer magnitude of this project entails some moments of agreeable filler— “Flamenco” and “Desert Eagle,” say. But even the minor moments help to contextualize what a major work this is. For evidence of a popular artist working at this level of creative, commercial, and intellectual excellence, you might have to go back to Sign ‘o’ the Times-era Prince.
On the eve of the album’s release, Beyoncé put out a statement saying that Cowboy Carter wasn’t meant to be a country record— it was meant to be a Beyoncé record. But of course, there’s no reason it can’t be both. The album attests to genre as something that’s open to constant renegotiation— even as it attests to its auteur as someone who dwarfs any purist movements that seek to exclude her.
My rating: 8.5 out of 10