A Bookish Guide to Beyoncé’s ★ Cowboy ★ Carter
If you’ve been anywhere on the internet the last few weeks, you’ve most likely seen some mention of Beyoncé’s latest…I would say album, but the entire rollout has been a bit of an event. And, as the self-appointed, unofficial Beyoncéologist of Book Riot, I thought it fitting that I look at it all through a bookish lens.
It all seems to have started with the Grammys a month ago, when she wore a head-to-toe cowgirl get-up that was reminiscent of a certain business owner from the show Fairly Odd Parents. It added fuel to the idea that she was going to make her act II — the next piece in her three-part music series — country-based, thereby reclaiming the genre for Black Americans.
And she did. Kind of.
She released a couple songs that were obviously rooted in country music, and they did well, but they had another effect: they brought out the racists.
And they were Big Mad. All of their complaints were obviously thinly veiled attempts at gatekeeping country music, despite the genre having largely come from Black Americans and the West African instrumental designs and rhythmic leanings they brought with them across the Middle Passage.
But it seems like Beyoncé was expecting all this. In fact, part of the inspiration for the latest album was her experience going to the CMA Awards, where she performed with the Dixie Chicks and where, she said, she felt very unwelcome.
Then she did something interesting. She waited, poured over American musical history for the next eight years, and created what I — as someone who’s been listening to her for the past 20 years — think is the best album she’s ever made. I would even go so far as to say it’s the best album made by a major pop star within the last few years.
At times, it feels both like a descent into the dirty past of the U.S. and other times like an ascension — up into a look at what country music (and all American pop music) could have been if racial barriers didn’t bar certain people from certain genres.
In it, Beyoncé dips in and out of gospel, opera, soul, ‘70s funk and rock, and into ‘60s pop leanings, and of course, country. It’s basically like an odyssey through a sort of musical memoir of hers — or, an odyssey through American music. It has this inherent cinematic quality to it that gets made more complex with certain moments of eeriness and well-placed Black woman realness. And then there are the seamless transitions from song to song that she perfected in her last album, Renaissance.
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