To understand Beyoncé’s importance in the contemporary music scene, two simple numbers are enough: 200 million records sold overall in her career and 32 Grammy Awards won, an all-time record for a singer. Each Queen Bey album is an event, just think of the success of the award-winning artist Lemonade of 2016, his most personal and at the same time political work, by Everything Is Love of 2018 together with her husband Jay-Z and of Renaissance of 2022, an effervescent homage to black dance music, to which Beyoncé was introduced as a child by her uncle Jonny.
Also for Cowboy Carter, available from today on streaming, CD and vinyl, the hype was very high, also because the album marks Queen Bey’s debut in the country arena, the most traditional and loved genre in the deepest United States, very different from the skyscrapers of New York and the long beaches of Los Angeles.
In the first single released in February Texas Hold’em, which rose to the top of the Hot Country Songs, the queen of urban makes a clear reference to the conservative roots present in the history of country music, especially regarding skin color. “I feel honored to be the first black woman with a number one single on the Hot Country Songs chart,” Beyoncé wrote on her social media pages. «This would not have happened without the support of each and every one of you. My hope is that in a few years, the mention of an artist’s race, in relation to the publication of musical genres, will be irrelevant.”
Despite the first listen Cowboy Carter, with the acoustic guitar always at the center of the songs, it sounds very different compared to the electronic bass drum and hypertrophic keyboards of Renaissance, for Beyoncé the two albums are in perfect continuity: «I think of this album as the continuation of the previous one. I hope that this music is lived as an experience, that it creates another journey on which to embark by closing your eyes, starting from the beginning to don’t stop anymore. This is not a country album. This is a Beyoncé album. This is Act II Cowboy Carter, and I’m proud to share it with all of you.”
The motto of the ambitious former leader of Destiny’s Child has always been “make it big” and even for her latest effort Beyoncé has done things big, starting from the extra-large duration of the album, with 27 songs and 80 minutes of duration . A little too many to be listened to from start to finish, but we know that, in the age of streaming, the more songs are published, the more there is the possibility for the big names to monopolize the singles charts with numerous songs among the top 30 positions, followed by enthusiastic press releases like “Tizio has 16 songs in the top 20” or “Caio has 24 songs in the top 30 of the Billboard Hot 100”. In today’s music biz, where there is a tendency to publish albums capable of intercepting multiple types of audiences at the same time, the genre is used by users above all to search for playlists more suited to a certain sonic mood or a specific moment of the day. In this sense, Beyoncé’s country album is a brilliant marketing gimmick, starting from the cover with the singer dressed as a cowgirl on a white horse, waving the US flag: considering how closed and self-referential the world of country music is, it’s obvious that such an album will be seen as smoke and mirrors by the custodians of Nashville’s musical tradition. As a Houston Texan, country music has always been a part of Beyoncé’s life. In an Instagram post last week, the singer wrote that her new album was “born out of an experience I had years ago where I didn’t feel welcomed,” referring to her appearance at the 2016 Country Music Awards, where performed his song Daddy Lessons with The Chicks (then known as the Dixie Chicks).
Actually about country, in Cowboy Carterthere is little, just a few acoustic guitars, a few banjos (as in the lucky single Texas Hold’em) and guests like Willie Nelson and Dolly Parton, two absolute champions of the genre, who here, however, appear lost and out of context, like two who accidentally find themselves at a party to which they were not invited. The album is musically divided into two parts: the first (from American Requiem to Jolene) more acoustic and country in a broad sense; the second, starting from Spaghetti (!), more urban, soft-rock, even rap. The choice to place it as the second song is surprising, after the suggestive intro of American Requiema cover of Blackbird of the Beatles. In reality Paul McCartney wrote that splendid song inspired by the discrimination that nine black students suffered in 1957 after enrolling in Little Rock high school (attended almost exclusively by whites): an anti-racist message that makes perfect sense in an album that wants to combine black cultures with country. It is no coincidence that the overwhelming T was chosen as the first singleex. Hold’em, the most cheerful, immediate and line-dance-ready song, while the ambitious 16 Carriages it is a lilting, powerful and evocative song, in which Beyonce uses an almost rap-like singing over an epic melody. The collaborations with Willie Jones work well in Just for FunPost Malone in Levii’s Jeans and Miley Cyrus in II Most Wanted, which brilliantly captures the spirit of young love and the idea of living in the present moment. The cover of the song deserves a separate mention Jolene together with Dolly Parton, which the queen of country has publicly asked Beyoncé to record for years, made more contemporary by a new middle Eight, a new coda and lyrics that are more threatening than the desperate plea of the original. The serene and bucolic Protector opens with a tender request from daughter Rumi, who asks her mother to listen to a lullaby. Beyoncé brings out all the grit in her Daughterwith a tense narrative that touches on themes of revenge, self-image and legacy. Riverdance is a surprising dance-country song, with excellent radio potential, Ya Ya it is a modern soul that touches on the themes of identity, struggle and American survival, while the oblique Sweet ★ Honey ★ Buckin, in which Pharrell Williams’ magic touch works less than in the past. The production effort behind a blockbuster album like Cowboy Carter, was titanic, with over 50 authors and producers involved, even if, as often happens, the number of people involved is inversely proportional to the freshness and spontaneity of the songs, which has always been the heart of country music, perhaps not very refined in its productions, but profoundly “real” and raw.
Listening to the album you get the feeling that every sound, every instrument, every lyric has been analyzed, weighed and finally approved by Beyoncé’s large creative team, which, on the one hand gives us a magnificently produced album, on the other there is a certain lack of soul and spontaneity. Cowboy Carter offers us a new and surprising chapter in the rich discography of Beyoncé, whose vocal skills are beyond question, but who, by changing genre with each album, risks diluting her artistic identity as a talented R&B singer, who is remembered and loved by the public especially for the songs (Halo, Crazy In Love, Single Ladies, Irreplaceable) which he published in the 1910s.
