Beyoncé’s Act II more than country
The first song on “Cowboy Carter,” Beyoncé’s not-exactly-country album, makes a preemptive strike. “It’s a lot of talking going on while I sing my song,” she observes in “Ameriican Requiem.” That’s an acknowledgment that a pop superstar’s job now extends beyond the music. Beyoncé knows her every public appearance and utterance will be scrutinized, circulated as clickbait and talked about in both good faith and bad.
It’s a challenge she has engaged head-on since she released her visual album “Beyoncé” in 2013. For the past decade, even as her tours have filled stadiums, she has set herself goals outside of generating bops. Beyoncé has made each of her recent albums not only a performance but also an argument: about power, style, history, family, ambition, sexuality. They’re albums meant to be discussed and footnoted, not just listened to.
“Cowboy Carter” is stuffed with 27 tracks stretching across two
LPs. It flaunts spokenword co-signs from Willie Nelson and Dolly Parton, and includes some fragmentary, minute-long songs. The sprawl is its own statement of confidence: That even halffinished experiments are worth attention.
The album cover brandishes western and American symbols: The artist holds an American flag while riding a white horse sidesaddle. In highheeled boots and a pageant sash that reads “Cowboy Carter,” she’s a beauty queen and a heroine claiming her nation — her country, in both senses. The politics of her new songs are vague, but the music declares that every style is her American birthright. As a pop star, it is: Pop has always crossed stylistic boundaries.
The Texas-raised star was met with racial backlash when she performed “Daddy Lessons,” a country song from her 2016 album “Lemonade” about gun-toting self-defense, with the Chicks at the 2016 Country Music Association Awards. Presumably, that’s what Beyoncé alluded to when she wrote on Instagram that there was “an experience that I had years ago where I did not feel welcomed.”
She wasn’t daunted. Instead, she went further. The mere prospect of Beyoncé doing a country album shook things up. Even before its release, “Cowboy Carter” prompted reminders of the genre’s obscured Black roots and pointed at its historical exclusion of nonwhite performers, with a handful of exceptions.
What Beyoncé drew from country is productions that feature guitars, keyboards, drums and the banjo, rather than the glittering electronics that propelled 2022’s “Renaissance,” which also had Beyoncé on horseback on the cover and was subtitled “Act I.” That album was Beyoncé’s homage to the house music that emerged from Black gay subcultures. “Cowboy Carter,” subtitled “Act II,” also scrambles eras and styles, with samples, electronics and multitracked vocal harmonies unapologetically joining the guitars.
The singles from “Cowboy Carter” paired “16 Carriages,” a booming arena-country song about Beyoncé’s career and artistic drive, with “Texas Hold ’Em,” about Lone Starstyle
good times. The latter seized No. 1 on Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart, making Beyoncé the first Black woman to do so.
The recording leans into its anticipated discourse, openly interrogating categories and stereotypes and pointedly ignoring formulas. Beyoncé enlisted Linda Martell — the Black country singer whose
1970 album, “Color Me Country,” included the first charting country hit by a Black woman, “Color Him Father” — to provide spoken words. For the intro of “Spaghettii” — which features Beyoncé rapping — Martell says, “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.”
The album includes some understated, largely acoustic contenders for country or adult-contemporary radio play — notably “II Most Wanted,” a duet with Miley Cyrus that harks back to Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide,” and “Levii’s Jeans,” a boast about being a “sexy little thing” that she shares with Post Malone. And in the Motown-tinged “Bodyguard,” Beyoncé plays an jealous but selfless partner in an uncertain romance.
Beyoncé has been a stalwart of the full-length album, synergistically sequencing and juxtaposing tracks. But “Cowboy Carter” is not the triumphant ride that “Renaissance” or “Lemonade” are. It suggests that Beyoncé wanted to pack all she could into one side trip before moving on elsewhere — perhaps Act III.