2024-04-07 23:31:38
Good Friday was chosen by the American pop star Beyoncé to release the expected album called Cowboy Carter, which in places approaches country. The winner of 32 Grammy Awards focused on the genre after drawing criticism with her first attempt to break into it. “I didn’t feel welcome in country music,” she says. “But this isn’t a country album. It’s just a Beyoncé album,” he adds.
The record features respected personalities of the genre, led by 90-year-old Willie Nelson, and there is also a text-edited cover version of Jolene, a classic country song by Dolly Parton. In addition to them, Beyoncé sings here with current pop superstars Miley Cyrus or rapper Post Malone.
The project has an important symbolic level. Fans and experts perceive it as an attempt by a black singer to recall the marginalized African-American footprint in a genre that is mostly perceived as white in the US. It wasn’t until Beyoncé became the first black woman to top the country charts with the single Texas Hold ‘Em the month before last. “I hope that in the years to come, the mention of an artist’s skin color will become irrelevant,” she wrote on the Instagram social network.
She decided on country after experimenting in this genre years ago and, according to her, did not feel welcome. “I really wasn’t,” emphasizes the artist. She’s apparently referring to her 2016 Lemonade cover of Daddy Lessons, which she later performed live at the Country Music Awards alongside The Chicks, formerly known as The Dixie Chicks.
For this performance, the singer was criticized by some listeners in the USA, saying that she has no business in the world of country music. The level of negative responses was surprising even considering that pop stars like Justin Timberlake or Chris Stapleton perform regularly at the same ceremony and do not arouse comparable emotions.
Beyoncé then tried to enter the same song in the genre category in the Grammy nominations, but the judges rejected it there, saying that it was not country music.
Beyoncé is one of the most commercially successful female musicians in the world. | Photo: Blair Caldwell
In both cases, the fact that the singer performed at the country gala a few days before the election of Donald Trump as the US president, i.e. in a heated social situation, may have played a role. At that time, for example, the artist signed up to the anti-racist movement Black Lives Matter, and at the Super Bowl final in 2016, she performed after the god of black dancers dressed in a reference to the Black Panther Party, a far-left political organization from the turn of the 60s and 70s of the last century. In the election campaign, Americans discussed, among other things, whether some form of racism still persists in the US.
All this may have contributed to the fact that part of the listeners rejected the country singer. Beyoncé subsequently, in response to this, according to her words, began to study the history of the genre more deeply.
“The criticism I faced on my first attempt at country music forced me to push my limits. The new album is the result of me taking rejection as a challenge and deciding to merge or bend genres,” she explains.
The 42-year-old artist comes from Houston, Texas, who has always been close to blues or country music. After all, this culture did not escape Beyoncé, who, according to her mother, attended rodeos as a child.
Now, according to experts, the new album is helping to highlight some of the marginalized voices in country music. One of the 27 tracks on the record is called The Linda Martell Show and commemorates the now 82-year-old singer, who in 1969 became the first black performer in the history of the Grand Ole Opry, the longest-running radio show in the US devoted to this type of music.
Linda Martell performed in it twelve times, especially in the American South, but she faced racism because of her skin color. “You knew you were going to run into loudmouths. And you did. It was pretty scary,” the artist, who now features in two of Beyoncé’s compositions, recalled for Rolling Stone magazine in 2021.
On Beyoncé’s new record, Linda Martell also speaks at the beginning of the rap track Spaghettii. Photo: Blair Caldwell | Video: Parkwood Entertainment
The Cowboy Carter album is interspersed in several places with the words of the host of a fictitious country radio station that does not only play white music. The character is voiced by genre classic Willie Nelson, and his voice includes snippets of Sister Rosetta Tharpe’s Down by the Riverside, Chuck Berry’s Maybellene and Roy Hamilton’s Don’t Let Go. All three were recorded by black artists in the 1940s and 1950s, when country music took over the radio and helped codify the then-relatively mixed genre as white and more conservative for decades, the AP explains.
This perception persists in the US. According to a recent study, between 2002 and 2023, 96.5 percent of American country radio played music by white people.
Another agency, AFP, however, reminds us that segregation also goes deeper in the music industry and that the term “race records” in the US has been categorizing music not by genre, but by race since the 20s of the last century. Although the term is long since unacceptable today, prejudices persist, says violinist and banjo player Rhiannon Giddens, who performs on Beyoncé’s record and has had a similar experience herself.
“Whenever a black person makes a country song in America, they’re immediately faced with judgments that it’s not real country and what’s wrong with it,” Rhiannon Giddens wrote in an article for the British newspaper Guardian after a similar uproar was sparked by a single by Beyoncé and one station, for example in the state of Oklahoma, she refused to play it even at the listener’s express request.
“Let’s stop lying. The heated reactions to Beyoncé’s single are coming from people who want to preserve a nostalgic memory of a pure white tradition that was never really white,” declares Rhiannon Giddens, who is also an ethnomusicologist and academic on the role of black musicians in the American musical tradition.
In a similar context, Beyoncé’s new album starts with every song. It includes, for example, a cover version of Blackbird by the British The Beatles, here renamed Blackbiird. Here, Beyoncé is assisted by rising black stars, young singers Tanner Adell, Brittney Spencer, Reyna Roberts, and Tiera Kennedy, with chorus vocals.
This choice also has a context. The song was composed by Paul McCartney, with multiple versions of its creation over the years. According to one, Blackbird responds to racial tensions in the American South, specifically to the incident of the Little Rock Nine, referring to nine black students who were admitted to a high school in the American state of Arkansas in 1957 as part of a school desegregation plan. However, the supporters of segregation decided to thwart integration, so they started a blockade of the school, which led to the calling of the National Guard and the case had to be solved by the then US president.
Beyoncé also included a cover version of The Beatles’ Blackbird on the record. Spells it with two ii, Blackbiird. Photo: Mason Poole | Video: Parkwood Entertainment
According to the New York Times, Beyoncé refers to similar milestones knowingly, because she knows that her every word and decision will be shaken on social networks, so in this way she tries to recall lesser-known facts or chapters in the history of the United States. “In her case, every word, every picture can become a meme and an Internet link,” writes the newspaper, according to which the former singer of the R&B girl group Destiny’s Child has been accompanied by this reputation since the album simply called Beyoncé in 2013 at the latest.
“In the last decade, she always fills stadiums on tour, but her goal is no longer just to record another hit. Every Beyoncé album is more than music, it is also a contribution to the debate about power, style, history, family, ambition, sexuality or breaking the rules ,” the New York Times lists, according to which Beyoncé’s albums should not only be listened to, but also analyzed in context.
The month before last, Beyoncé became the first black woman to top the US country charts. | Photo: Mason Poole
He sees nothing controversial about the new paper. “Pop music has always transcended genres, it has always appropriated elements from various subcultures and taken whatever made the songs more attractive,” reminds the critic.
According to him, the record doesn’t sound typical or modern country, which Beyoncé could have easily achieved if she had hired a producer from Nashville. In her performance, on the other hand, the songs cross the lines towards pop, R&B, hip hop and, for example, in the case of Ya Ya’s composition, even garage rock.
Some were more successful, for example the acoustic lullaby Protector or the duet Just for Fun with Louisiana singer-songwriter Willie Jones, others less so. For example, instead of a Blackbird cover, Beyoncé could have written her own song, concludes the New York Times critic, who finds the new record somewhat weaker than the previous recordings Lemonade and Renaissance from 2016 and 2022.
The singer worked on the novel for five years. She indirectly hinted that she would release it in early February when she arrived at the Grammy Awards dressed in a distinctive variation on a cowgirl. A week later, she indirectly mentioned the album in a commercial that was seen by about 123 million Americans during the break of the Super Bowl, the final of the American football league. Immediately afterwards, the artist released the first singles 16 Carriages and Texas Hold ‘Em.
The new release loosely follows on from the award-winning Renaissance record from 2022, which for a change shed light on the context of the creation of dance music.
Video: Single Texas Hold ‘Em by Beyoncé
The first single from Beyoncé’s new album is called Texas Hold ‘Em, after the poker game of the same name. | Video: Parkwood Entertainment