After much chatter, finally the music. It came out tonight Cowboy CarterThe second one actas Beyoncé calls it, by Renaissance. If the first was a tribute to the black and queer roots of club culture, the second is an operation of cultural reappropriation of country music, but also a speech on the state of the nation by a queen.
It is monstrously long (one hour and 20 minutes) and full of music, stimuli, references, there are a few too many off-topic songs, many notable moments. We will understand it fully by listening to it several times, but it is clear that it is a great album, the result, among other things, of a work of selection and refinement of almost 100 pieces that lasted five years. Here are five key aspects that emerge from the first listen.
Reappropriation
“It’s not a country album,” Beyoncé wrote. It is true. In Cowboy Carter the pop star reclaims country music, reclaiming the partly black and progressive roots of a genre that is presided over by a conservative establishment, but he certainly doesn’t do it as a purist. She affirms first of all her personal adherence, due to her history, to the recurring motifs in country music, from the connection with the land to the theme of distance from home. Beyoncé is a Southern girl at heart. “If this isn’t country, tell me, then what is?” she sings. There is also the very right idea that cataloging music into rigid genres, which is typical of the American record market, is limiting. Azealia Banks is wrong when she says that Beyoncé is cosplaying a white girl. She does something else: she takes the typical narrative from country music and overlays it on her own history, proving that cultural segregation is always wrong. And Madonna’s fans are wrong to say that this is something their favorite star has already done: in Cowboy Carter there is a completely different musical and conceptual richness, starting from the title. If it’s not Cowgirl Carteras you would expect, is also because former slaves were once called belittling things boy.
Unlike Renaissance, the record has the feeling of music being played: you can hear the reverberation around the voices, the strings vibrating, the hands clapping. It is also a re-appropriation of an old way of making music, with the feeling of people singing and playing here-and-now. Without being a traditionalist record, and it isn’t at all, Cowboy Carter it evokes a lost ideal of purity. “The more the world evolves, the more I feel a deep connection to what is pure,” Beyoncé said. «In times of artificial intelligence, digital filters and programming, I wanted to go back to real tools, and I used very old ones. I didn’t want layers of perfectly tuned instruments. I deliberately kept the songs raw, I oriented myself towards folk. All the sounds are natural and human, everyday things like the wind, clicks, even the sound of birds and chickens, of nature.” And yes, it’s also a bit of cinema for the ears.
Cinema
If you could imagine the first Renaissance set in a club, Cowboy Carter has a different conceptual framework. It’s not something particularly evident, but the album seems organized like a cinematographic, theatrical or radio representation in which there are those who transmit (she and her guests, and therefore her community) and those who receive (us). The initial and powerful American Requiem (the double i due to the reference is toact ii) seems like the introduction to the first act of a musical or the first scene of a blockbuster film. In some passages there is the great old man of country Willie Nelson busy not singing, but being the speaker of a radio called KNTRY Radio Texas where the boundaries between genres are cancelled. And so, barrel in mouth, Nelson passes black artists such as Son House, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Chuck Berry, Roy Hamilton and of course Beyoncé, who descends from them.
There’s also Linda Martell, the first black woman to play at the Grand Ole Opry, Nashville’s country institution par excellence. She pretends to be on stage introducing a piece to the applause of the audience. It’s about the hilarious Ya Yaa pastiche of psychedelic soul that goes from the reference to the Chitlin’ Circuit, the tour of the venues where black artists performed during the period of racial segregation, to that of Good Vibrations by the Beach Boys. There is the idea of the rodeo as an inclusive and intercultural place, there are remnants of the 70s in which people sang on guitars and strings, there are echoes of old western films. Indeed, it almost seems as if each song is a small film, with certain percussions inspired by the soundtrack of Brother, where are you?. Beyoncé said she worked on the album with inspiration from Urban Cowboy, The Hateful Eight, The Harder They Fall, Killers of the Flower Moon, Space Cowboys, Five Fingers for Marseilles. If it were a film, Cowboy Carter it would be a mix of blaxploitation and western.
Syncretism
One of the traditions it harks back to Cowboy Carter it’s the country-soul one. It is not a particularly popular trend here, but it includes a long series of artists who in their records, continuously or sporadically, have tried to overcome the boundaries between country, soul, R&B, funk, gospel, rock, pop, erasing made the original sin of the American record market, namely the distinction between hillbilly music and race music. It’s a formidable tradition that goes back to Ray Charles (present Modern Sounds In Country and Western Music?) to the more recent Allison Russell (the exceptional Outside Child). Musically, Cowboy Carter it surpasses every genre distinction – which is why it is not a country album in the strict sense – and often combines with notable taste country and gospel, songwriting and rap, zydeco and folk, all music that in some way is inscribed in Beyoncé’s cultural and geographical roots . “The joy of creating music,” she said, “is that there are no rules.”
Helping her in this work are great musicians including Rhiannon Giddens, the Pulitzer Prize winner who has always been at the forefront of reclaiming the black roots of traditional American music. And it’s an operation that works, so much so that in the United States, where the charts are (ahem) segregated, the single Texas Hold ‘Em it entered nine charts, from pop to country to urban, which is both exhilarating and ridiculous at the same time. By forcing her way into it, Beyoncé demonstrated the artificial nature of these divisions. In this work of musical syncretism an eighteenth-century Italian aria also appears, Dear my Ben by Tommaso Giordani which is sung in Daughter and which in the past has been heard sung by Mina as well as by Sting (speaking of daughters, little Rumi’s voice appears in Protector). Here too, as in RenaissanceBeyoncé is a student of American history, not just music.
Voices
Voices are one of the strong things about Cowboy Carter. Starting with Beyoncé’s, she demonstrates that she can interpret anything, offering a masterclass on how to sing without overdoing it, if you have talent. She presents herself, here, as the voice of someone who declaims a truth and is credible and authoritative, always. Then there are the choirs that punctuate many songs, they are not embellishments, but an integral part of the album, community moments, liberating passages, references to the soul-gospel roots. And there are the voices of the many guests. If Post Malone plays a sexy role in the light and uninhibited Levii’s JeansMiley Cyrus co-stars in the notable duet II Most Wanted where the traditional imagery of outlaw couples becomes feminine, passing through Thelma and Louise and the video of Telephoneand contemporary, evoking the typical boasts of hip hop.
And in short, there are many and different, black and white, singers who contribute to making theact ii the voice of a community perhaps imaginary, but aligned against prejudice, conservatism, bigotry. This is another point that is perhaps not obvious, but fundamental: in 80 minutes Beyoncé and her community try to redefine the priorities of American culture. And so it is fitting that in the cover photo the singer on horseback waves the Red, White and Blue: she presents herself as the emotionally charged and at the same time rational voice of a nation in search of itself, she is both the outcast daughter of Americana and the mother of all mothers. In this sense, Cowboy Carter it is not only very personal, because it is the result of the artist’s biography, but it is also political in its own way and this can be understood from the introduction in which Beyoncé asks herself: “Can we stand for something?”. He would come to her replies: yes, we can. And this can be understood from the reprise of the American Requiem which is placed at the end and which is entitled Amen. “This house was built with blood and bone and it crumbled, yes it crumbled, the statues they erected were beautiful, but they were lies of stone.” Here is the ultimate meaning of the album: the desire to atone for the sins of the fathers and bury old ideas, forgive the old America to build a new one.
Cover
Beyoncé manages to transform two covers into equally strong moments. The first comes immediately after the introduction of American Requiem and it’s Blackbird of the Beatles, which becomes Blackbird always because ofact ii. The song is not chosen randomly. Paul McCartney wrote the piece in 1968 after the assassination of Martin Luther King in a dramatic period for the fight for civil rights, the battlement of the title hid the history of black men and women. Self Blackbird it was an Englishman’s dialogue with black America, Blackbird it is its appropriation, revision and perfect arrangement in another cultural context. To underline the concept, Beyoncé invited Tanner Adell, Brittney Spencer, Tiera Kennedy and Reyna Roberts, all not well-known black singers close to country music, to sing it with her (see under: building a community).
The cover of is even stronger Jolene by Dolly Parton. A bit like Willie Nelson, the great country star is also asked not to sing, but to introduce the piece. And she does it by quoting another Beyoncé song, Sorry of 2016. At the time the pop star took it out on an unidentified “Becky with the good hair” lover of her husband: “She only wants me when I’m not around”, she sang, starting the search for the culprit, “and then what call Becky with the beautiful hair.” In the intro, Parton says that the hussy (which I would translate as slut) “with the good hair” reminds her of “someone I once knew”, that is Jolene from the 1974 song. Fifty years ago the singer literally begged her beautiful rival Jolene not to take her man away from her. Beyoncé is not one to beg a rival and so she changes the lyrics from a plea to an intimidation: “Jolene, I’m warning you, don’t come looking for my man”.
It all comes back: black and white, analogue tradition and digital gossip, history and present, love and star power, country and soul. Beckys of this world, step aside: Beyoncé is still number one.
