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Pop star Beyoncé: Every gesture is a pop cultural event
Photo: Parkwood Entertainment / Sony Pictures
When superstar Beyoncé Knowles releases a new album, it's not just a musical event, it's a cultural event. The 42-year-old American, called “Queen Bey” by fans, is the queen of contemporary pop, a leading figure of African-American empowerment gestures with 32 Grammys in her showcase, more than anyone before her.
Since her 2016 album “Lemonade,” it is no longer Beyoncé’s sole mission to release good R&B, dance or pop songs. Since then, everything she does has a socio-political superstructure. It's always about defending the space of black artists in pop culture - and showing how their influence has been marginalized and exploited in the past. Beyoncé's art is restitution pop, the reclaiming of what white pop has appropriated and sold as its own.
Like country music, for example. After bringing house and dance music into her home on “Renaissance,” Beyoncé is now swinging the lasso to capture her Americana roots. "Cowboy Carter" is the second part ("Act II", hence the double "i" in the song titles) of a planned trilogy that Beyoncé thought up and wrote during the corona pandemic. The album was released on Friday.
And it begins with a flirtatious provocation: »It's a lot of talking going on/ While I sing my song/ Can you hear me? I said: Do you hear me?" she sings in "American Requiem." Of course you listen to her. And of course there's been talk and whispers about her and her country album since she teased it with two commercials at the Super Bowl in February. On the cover, like on “Renaissance,” she poses again on horseback, but this time dressed in American colors, holding the reins of the galloping white horse in one hand and a US flag in the other. “Old ideas are buried here,” she sings in her requiem, which is a swansong for what country should look and sound like.
With her pre-released square dance single "Texas Hold 'Em," one of the album's few true country songs, Beyoncé made history as the first black woman to ever top the Billboard Hot Country Songs chart. When a radio station in Oklahoma refused to play the song because Beyoncé wasn't a country singer, the small station faced a shitstorm from its very large fan base, the "BeyHive" - and finally gave in.
The music of "American Requiem" sounds a little like the counterculture anthem "For What It's Worth" by Buffalo Springfield from 1966, which whispers of a revolution: "There's something happening here/ What It Is Ain't Exactly Clear." This appeal is probably intentional. But what's happening is already completely clear after listening to "Cowboy Carter" for the first time: Like her previous seven albums, the new Beyoncé album will conquer the charts straight away and keep the music world busy for weeks, while fans and critics try to decipher all the hidden details, so-called “Easter eggs”. It's already one of the most important pop releases of the year and a triumph of perfect staging.
But also the music? Beyoncé is clever enough to protect herself against criticism with two country greats who are beyond reproach. Old master Willie Nelson lights up a joint with relish and announces two of their songs like a radio host: "Sometimes you don't know what you like until someone you trust turns you on to some real good stuff," he encourages all traditionalists and skeptics, to get involved with Beyoncé.
Joining forces with mother Dolly Parton
Mother Dolly Parton, who has just conquered a new genre for herself as a "rock star", exercises solidarity with her black colleague in the intro to Beyoncé's cover version of her hit "Jolene". The rival named “Becky with the good hair,” about whom Beyoncé once sang on “Lemonade,” reminded her of the woman who once tried to steal her husband, the same hussy (“hussy”), says Parton: “Just a hair of different color«. Beyoncé's "Jolene" is snappier, more modern - and the lyrics are also a lot sharper than the original, a successful update that could also disarm purists. In the steel guitar-filled ballad "II Most Wanted," Beyoncé sings together with Miley Cyrus, a related genre stormer and pop desperada, daughter of country star Billy Ray Cyrus.
Beyoncé's marriage to Shawn Corey Carter, aka rap mogul Jay-Z, which was once threatened by cheating, is still the dominant theme in the album's songs - as befits country songs, which are primarily about heartbreak, but mostly that of men. Here everything is put into a female context, but a combative one:
Stand by your man
, sure - but not at any price, and especially not that of her own freedom, that's how Beyoncé's country spirit could be summed up: »I'm a stallion running/ Not a candle in the wind," she sings at one point in the direction of her husband: wild horse instead of princess.
Beyoncé is by no means the first black woman to try her hand at the country music genre. In recent years, many African American women have fought their way up the ranks of traditionally white Americana and cowboy music. A fact that Beyoncé takes into account in her smart cover version of Paul McCartney's "Blackbird," which she sings alongside young, black country stars Tanner Adell, Brittney Spencer, Tiera Kennedy and Reyna Roberts.
And the pioneer of the Black Country, Linda Martell, now 82, also receives a bow and is allowed to act as godmother. In the over-the-top style rodeo “Spaghetti,” she explains how trapped one can feel in genre conventions. As an announcer, she later moderates the style-breaking piece “Ya Ya,” in which Beyoncé samples Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Are Made For Walking” with “Good Vibrations” by the Beach Boys and the pithy “Nutbush” funk by Tina Turner forces together.
The trauma of Nashville
Linda Martell became the first black woman to have a top ten single on the country charts with her cover of "Colour Him Father" in 1969. A short time later, she became the first African-American woman to perform at the Grand Ole Opry, the hallowed country hall in Nashville. In the southern states at the time she was advertised as the “First Female Negro Country Artist”. Martell once recalled in an interview with Rolling Stone that she was harassed by white audience members who shouted racist insults during her twelve Opry performances. She “felt pretty terrible,” she said.
Beyoncé must have felt something similar in 2016 when she performed with the band The Chicks (formerly Dixie Chicks) at the County Music Awards in Nashville and performed her first and only country song to date, "Daddy Issues" from "Lemonade". -Album sang: Stony faces in the predominantly white audience, hatred on social media after and during the show. Tenor: She has no place in the hallowed halls of country music.
It's these experiences that Beyoncé probably meant when she explained the motivation behind "Cowboy Carter" on Instagram: "It was born from an experience I had years ago when I didn't feel welcome," she wrote in mid-March in a long post. "But because of this experience, I delved deeper into the history of country music." The criticism she faced forced her to "overcome the limitations that were placed on me."
Of course, country music cannot be imagined without black culture. The banjo, a key instrument of early American bluegrass, folk and country music, was once brought to the USA by African slaves and cultivated as a folk instrument. One could see it as later being white hillbilly musicians who appropriated the gospel sound of black church singing for their secular folk music. It's not for nothing that Beyoncé emphasizes her southern origins in many of her new songs. The singer comes from Houston, Texas, a heartland of cowboy culture, and her family roots go back to the Cajun country of Louisiana. In keeping with this, there is a fun interlude from Chuck Berry's classic "Oh Louisiana" warped into time-lapse.
Country – the pop sound of the moment
The interconnections between soul and country were made audible again and again in the 20th century by black artists like Berry, including singers like Candi Staton and Bettye Lavette. However, due to the strict separation between black and white in music genres and charts, there was rarely any mixing of R&B (black) and country (white). As the only black singer, Charley Pride achieved superstar status that was otherwise reserved for white cowboy crooners like Waylon Jennings, Hank Snow or Kenny Rogers. Beyoncé, with all the power of her own superstardom, is now setting out to finally break the vicious circle.
On the one hand, Beyoncé is a trendsetter, but on the other hand, country has long been considered the pop sound of the moment. Last year alone, the folk music genre, considered conservative and patriarchal, experienced a rare breakthrough into the mainstream charts: new country stars like Morgan Wallen and Zach Bryan celebrated success, as did the politically controversial song "Try That In A Small." Town” by Jason Aldean were hits that reached far beyond the scene.
It's all the more important that country today is no longer exclusively the bastion of bromance,
good old boys
and beer-laden pick-up trucks. Country fever has long since spread to pop. Pop superstar Taylor Swift is proud of her country beginnings, the queer, black rapper Lil Nas X had a crossover hit with “Old Town Road” in 2018 – an initial spark. Rapper Megan Thee Stallion, a Texan like Beyoncé, likes to wear cowboy hats and incorporate southern motifs into her tracks. Lana Del Rey recently announced that her new album will be called "Lasso." A hearty “Yeehaw!” can be heard from all corners.
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However, her album is not a pure country album, Beyoncé wrote on Instagram: "This is a Beyoncé album." Fortunately. Because “Cowboy Carter” is not a country album, as was common in earlier times, on which an artist from outside the genre changes their style with a series of cover versions. That would also be pretty boring. Instead, there are rap delusions like "Spaghetti", elegant funk references like "Desert Eagle", but also schmaltzy ballads like "Just For Fun" (with country singer Willie Jones) and "Levii's Jeans" (with cowboy rapper Post Malone).
"Bodyguard", a lively rock song, and "Flamenco" also integrate other, more Latin American roots styles into their experiment - which you have to endure vocally when Beyoncé tries her hand at yodeling or in the second half of "Daughter" as an operetta-like bel canto. Singer. At almost 80 minutes, "Cowboy Carter" is also too long and, like "Renaissance", is hopelessly overproduced in places with clacking beats and sound garlands that enliven the flow of the songs, but sometimes also disrupt it. Country, like Schlager, should be catchy and simple. Actually.
Sketchy gimmicks like “Riverdance” and the rodeo ringlet “Tyrant” seem more like filler material, and unfortunately they end up draining the otherwise carefully and thoughtfully composed album. But Beyoncé's continued and impressive effort to replace pop's "old ideas" with new ones is strenuous and laborious, and not every punch hits the spot. “Have mercy on me,” she says at the very end, in the gospel “Amen” – may one have mercy on her. Hell yeah!