What act ii: COWBOY CARTER means to a country, Black boy like me…
March 2024
“Genres are a funny little concept, aren’t they? Yes, they are. In theory, they have a simple definition that’s easy to understand. But in practice, well, some may feel confined…” — Linda Martell, SPAGHETTI, COWBOY CARTER
Let me start by clearing the air…
I’m no Beyoncé stan. Don’t get me wrong, I really like her. We are basically Virgo twins, after all — she’s September 4th, I’m the 6th, and correct, the birth years don’t matter lol — but I’m not a card carrying member of the Beyhive or anything like that. So I don’t think I’m riding the wave of Bey hype when I say this album truly did something for me. I don’t really listen to music from a technical perspective, mostly because I don’t know how. I only know a few things about sound production, instrumentation, and apparently there is this thing called syncopation that’s very important, but that’s about all I know. So my principal interest whenever I listen to music is soaking up how artists play with words and sounds to tell stories or evoke emotions.
When I listened to act ii: COWBOY CARTER, I immediately keyed into the way Beyoncé and her collaborators used sound, especially, as a means of simultaneously bending and blending genres, but also as a tool for weaving a sort of rhythmic thread throughout the entire album. Even in cases where there is very little genre blending, but rather a hard break into a different genre altogether, somehow the album never sounds discordant, or at least not to me. And I think that’s because, despite the fact that this isn’t a country music album (more on that later), if you’re Black and grew up in the rural South like me (i.e. the actual country), this album feels like an evolved expression of Black country culture. When I think about the sounds of my childhood in my grandparents house in rural, Black Arkansas, I’m struck by how much the album features all the beautiful sounds gifted to the world from some of the folks I admire most— without a thank you, of course, because, well…racism.
You can hear gospel in AMERIICAN REQUIEM and AMEN…
And in the case of songs like YA YA, you hear funk or rock, very Tina Turner-coded, if you ask me. In other cases — like PROTECTOR and ALLIIGATOR TEARS — I think she broaches a more “traditional” country music sound. The brilliance in seamlessly weaving together genres that are uniquely American — if only because they emanate from Black American culture — is that it’s like Bey is saying, or at least I want her to be saying, “all of these [expletive] genres are ours, so of course we integrate them melodiously in ways others can not”.
When Beyoncé said that she was releasing a “Beyoncé album”, not a “country album”, I knew she meant something specific by that, but I didn’t know what to expect exactly. But after listening a few times, I get it. As someone who actually likes many forms of country music, I agree with folks that COWBOY CARTER is not quite a traditional country album, but that’s because “traditional country” isn’t even traditional. It’s the version of country that largely evolved, without credit, from Black, southern folk music. So what I take Beyoncé to mean when she says it’s a “Beyoncé album” is that the Black southern musical tradition, to which she belongs, produced all these damn genres, so if any group of artists, musicians, creatives, etc. have a claim to draw boundaries around what does or doesn’t fit into said genres — country included — it should be Black folks.
She’s not going to the “gatekeepers of country” and trying to fit in, she’s saying that HER country music is whatever she says it is, and she — and especially early Black country artists, like Linda Martell and Charley Pride — have every right to make their own unique contributions to the country music canon just as much as, if not more than, Dolly Parton, Willie Nelson, and other white country luminaries.
But further to the point…
What I find most compelling about the album — beyond it’s sonic brilliance and genre bending — is that in it’s personification of Black country culture through sound, the album actually is less “genre bending” than it might appear. The genre bending label almost feels like looking at the project through the lens of a white listener who’s waiting for the “traditional country music” and it’s attending sonic aesthetics to pop up in a Beyoncé R&B or pop song. Which, in my opinion, misses the entire point of the project.
I think Bey and the album challenge us not only to question who gets to decide what constitutes a genre, like country, but also why there is a need for such rigid labels, particularly when the genres didn’t emerge that way in the first place. And that notion, that Black Americans, by virtue of our experience in this country, see possibilities where others don’t…well that’s exactly what we are best at. Since this country came into existence, Black American musicians, among other groups, but especially Black Americans, have created music with an ease, freedom, and expansiveness that always knitted together multiple genres, and not because they lacked the facility to excel in one specific genre, but rather because they never were inclined to think about them with such rigid parameters to begin with. Because we all know the same soprano who sings down when she leads Glenn Edward Burleigh’s Order My Steps In Your Word, can also eat the operatic notes in DAUGHTER and Schubert’s Ave Maria.
That’s the power of what Beyoncé is saying here…
Black artists, according to the Head Houston Heifer (a variation of a new, very funny nickname I saw on Twitter lol), should be able to sing their own rendition of country music and still get to call it country — not least of which because if any group of people should gate-keep the genre, it should be Black Americans — but for reasons infinitely more profound. In highlighting the oppressiveness of the dominant lens by which genres and their boundaries are interpreted, Bey is bringing into focus a purposely blurred reality: the underlying rationales for genre distinctions are often buttressed by a capriciousness that honestly would be laughable, if not for the material consequences they have on Black Americans’ freedom, creative or otherwise. And this is what makes all the handwringing about the genre to which the album belongs maddening. It is precisely because of Beyoncé’s unique positionality — a Black artist, from the south, connected to the geography of “country-ness” — that she, and other similarly situated Black artists, can see beyond the confines of white institutions’ imaginations. Black southerners have always had to conjure possibilities unseen, whether in the case of music, education, law, policy, etc. We had, and still have, no other option.
And this dynamic is such a raw deal for Black folks, because trust me, I’d forgo the immense blessings that are Blues and Jazz, if the only means by which Black folks could produce those genres was by chronicling our survival of unspeakable violence and cruelty. But it’s also not that great for most white artists either (or teachers, or lawyers, or unionized labor, or working class white people, or, or or…). Because I’m sure there are a reasonable number of white country artists that would like to push the edges of “conventional country” too, but the limits of genre bending designed to confine Black artists, confine them too, albeit not to the same degree, but it’s stifling nonetheless. Reminds me of that old adage: ain’t nobody free, until we all free.
So in maintaining such arbitrary and rigid barriers, the country music industry has, more or less, lowered the bar for successful genre bending to very surface-level, performative attempts at individual collaborations — think Tim McGraw and Nelly, or a slightly better attempt in Old Town Road with Lil Nas X and Billy Ray Cyrus. In the case of McGraw and Nelly, they barely attempted to genre bend. They slapped two distinct styles of country and rap together, and we accepted it as a blended piece because a very famous and unlikely pair — one white and country, and another Black and a rapper — made a quaint song. Great. And Old Town Road, though it was actually genre bending to some extent, was still a one-time collaboration that didn’t get much in the way of love from white country music fans until Billy Ray Cyrus, another white and decidedly country music artist, lended his achey breaky bona fides.
Which is why II MOST WANTED is an incredible, and maybe even a deliberate, irony…
On this track, Beyoncé partners with Cyrus’ daughter, no less , to produce a true blend of genre and vocals that is miles ahead of the aforementioned collaborations (sorry, papa Cyrus lol). But again, Beyoncé didn’t do this in just one song, she managed to achieve this sort of collapsing of sounds into sound, vocals into voice, across the entire album. That’s bars.
And not only it is bars, it’s further evidence of the deep hypocrisy Beyoncé exposes. Far too often, white artists in country, or other white-dominant genres, produce frail attempts at genre bending, and they are both lauded for their crossover appeal, while still being given the freedom to name the genre, or genres, to which their songs belong. In the case of country music, a song seems to pass the bar for country — whether it’s aligned with the themes of a good country song or creatively bends the genre to produce something fresh or unique — merely because the person or people singing the song are white and maybe sing with a twang. And as a real live Black person from the country, be so ffr! If that’s enough to be evocative of “country”, then the quiet part is being said out loud. By virtue of their whiteness, and having been known as a country artist, this somehow makes any song a white country music artist produces a country song, AND whatever other genre they want to claim? Again not because they offered an interpretation of the country genre that created space for something more novel or innovative — or expanded the notion of what country music might mean — but simply because they were white. Ok, girl…that most certainly ain’t Texas, and I ain’t even gon’ hold you lol.
And that brings me back to the power of Beyoncé’s practice of, and invitation to, exist outside of and in between genres. It makes an artist’s cultural contributions richer, more enduring, and frankly plain better. Black Americans don’t eschew the role of genre gatekeepers simply because we are magnanimous, but more presciently because we know all the sounds that exist in and across genres actually tell the most powerful stories about our complicated, yet wondrous lives. When sounds are mixed and mashed like different forms of laughter, they can produce an almost holy resonance, a sacred sort of cacophony.
And as I come to the metaphorical end of my track list…
I offer this: I don’t know if Beyoncé actually achieved that; that is to say, IDK if she truly managed to produce an entire album that resonates, or is cacophonous, in a divine way. But I do know this: Bey managed to produce an album that is at once sprawling and coherent. And I posit it’s exactly because of her experience in this land that she, and her Black country interlocutors, are prone to and expertly skilled to attempt such a musical feat. Because Black folks understand many truths about freedom in a way few other Americans do— sadly because we often experience its absence in our lives — and one truth is that freedom is never found in places where music, art, literature…people…have rigid, artificial categories thrust upon them. In fact, that often is a precursor to more nefarious forms of control and repression. Black folks know freedom is found in the process of blowing up the barriers, or at least doing your part to make the barriers porous enough that you and others might loose yourselves to become whoever you’ve been called to be. Because as the evangelist, Fannie Lou Hammer, once shared with the nation, baby, “we ain’t come here for no two seats ”. Freedom is a birthright that belongs to all of us.
So, in COWBOY CARTER, Beyoncé delivers a powerful invocation not through words, per se — though the lyrics were good too — but primarily in the way she plays with sound. She not only bends genre, but she asks us a question that could only come out of the gift that is being Black American and connected to the country south. We live in a vast, heterogeneous country that often rejects Black folks as individuals, but will dine on our cultural desserts without so much as a mumbling word of gratitude. And yet, it is Beyoncé — the Black woman shunned at the CMAs a few years back — with the wisdom of Black country culture, who’s attempting to not only fashion a coherence in song and sound that is both new and old, but also ask us: If these genres, and their supposed boundaries, are not in service of producing music that helps us revel in the truth that we each contain multitudes and ought to be free to dream up unforeseen futures, then why keep them? Why replicate something that smacks of being unfree?
AND PS:
Don’t get it twisted, Bey gave y’all a pretty good foreshadowing of the type of time she’s on in JOLENE. Keep it up with this “what genre is it?” non-sense, and this Creole banjee bitch from Louisiana — along with the rest of we country Black folks — will reclaim ALL the genres that we “lended” to this nation, and the Council of Musical Negroes will let Billboard know what genre shit belongs to going forward. And that’s if we even want to engage with the musical apparatus that’s taken so much from us in the first place…and honestly…if that ain’t country, then tell me what is?
Check out my last piece: Why I’m taking a stab at creative writing and blogging.
