031/ First reaction to Beyoncé's Cowboy Carter
I’m only on my third listen so far. But it’s a busy day so…
There’s a lot of talkin’ goin’ on
While I sing my song
Cowboy Carter introduces itself with ‘Ameriican Requiem’, a long, minimal, acoustic/soulful ballad, huge on the choral, about fighting to be heard over the chatter. The national, cultural and personal are all wrapped up, straight away, together. Here we go. Then a cover of The Beatles’ ‘Blackbird’ (here spelled ‘Blackbiird’, into the first of the songs we already know, ‘16 Carriages’, which Beyoncé released as she announced the album, over Super Bowl weekend. Then ‘Protector’, a gorgeous meditation on parental responsibility.
In resolution and articulation at least, this is almost too perfect. Songs are bolted onto a thunking, groovy, foot-stomp, acoustic guitar and live bass scaffold, line-dance swagger, bucket-loads of harmony. It’s vocally stunning throughout. We get Bey’s older, deeper voice to the fore earlier and more often, without compromising the other vocal areas she accesses. Razorwire taut declamation, her diva soar, all firmly in place.
It’s also long. Twenty-seven songs, almost eighty minutes. Not far off a movie-length experience (fingers crossed for some kind of full-length film). It’s like the late 1990s when everyone famous made records for CD length, tipping well over the hour mark. It’s too much really, yet there’s remarkably little filler. Those iconic 1990s CDs always had six or seven too many songs on. Also — as per — Beyonce’s going to take us on a fully plotted journey: the smooth palette and content of this first third of the record will get wrested open and strewn out of its packaging by the end.
Throughout Cowboy Carter, in her upper-case song titling, Beyoncé has replaced ‘to’ and the number two and ‘too’ indiscriminately with the symbol ‘II’. It’s aesthetically pleasing but annoying to think about.
Willie Nelson shows up as a stoned radio DJ, happily playing an archetype of himself. His show is called Smoke Hour, which is fabulous branding for a radio programme, especially one anchored by Willie Nelson.
The other Super Bowl smash, ‘Texas Hold ‘Em’ remains a total belter of proclaimed familiarity with a location. Somehow, racism is so tangibly treacle-thick in the air it can make someone as unquestionable as Queen Bey feel a need to prove familiarity to the location where she — in real life — grew up. This is so dark, like she has to explain to fanboys the subtext of a video game or they won’t let her play.
The uncomfortable moment, where for me the house of cards almost comes crashing down, is Dolly Parton’s trite pat-on-the-head spoken introduction to the fiery, staccato, clever reworking of ‘Jolene’. I’m yanked back out of the universe Beyoncé is building. This is when I realise that Team Bey might be — whisper it — trying too hard. Parton’s cutesy little fireside chat (“hey Miss Honey B, it’s Dolly P,” as if she ever needs to identify herself, with that voice) draws the connection (built from their hair of course) between ‘Jolene’ and Bey’s infamous ‘Becky’. It’s a coy gifting of permission, yet it gives the game away that Team Beyoncé feel a need for that seal of approval: they’re not quite confident enough about what they’ve done with ‘Jolene’ to just launch into it. That’s uncharacteristic — and suddenly my thoughts are of process and commerce and confidence and goals, rather than lost in the heft and meaning of these songs.
There’s an episode of West Wing where, in the cold open, President Bartlet (liberal, northwestern, professorial) is taping a series of back-to-back local TV interviews, during his election campaign against challenger Governor Richie (southern, conservative, down-home, a George W Bush avatar). After a number of these interviews, between broadcasts, chatting informally with a presenter, Bartlet personally insults his opponent, calling him dumb, and it turns out the microphone was still live. Of course it gets leaked. So the episode comprises White House staff trying to clean up the faux pas, while at the same time Press Secretary CJ Cregg gradually realises that Bartlet may have done it on purpose. Clue is, he uses weaponry as a metaphor. I don’t know Leslie, I think we may be talking about a .22 calibre mind in a .357 Magnum world.
That’s the same trek I go on, walking around Preston Park this morning with Beyoncé rattling deafening loud through my cheap earplugs, as ‘Jolene’ bops its way into a trio of highlights that acknowledge actual, vengeful violence (out of suppressed, wholly justifiable rage), leaning Bey into recent SZA territory. So I almost miss how profoundly ‘Jolene’ has shifted: where Dolly was begging and eulogised her nemesis, Beyoncé threatens hers. This may be the strongest chunk of the album, ‘Jolene’ then ‘Daughter’ then the interlude-ish hip hop genre lecture of ‘Spaghettii’.
‘Daughter’ especially, curtains up on a beaten body on a club toilet floor…
Your bloodstains on my custom couture
Bathroom attendant let me right in… she was a big fan
— yup, a bloodsoaked SZA-ish fantasy narrative, with its brief but noticeable tongue-in-cheek Taylor Swift lyric nod (not spoiling that bit) and its operatic bridge counterpoint, it vibrates in a southern heat haze of ‘don’t fuck with me’ storytelling.
I sachéd my dress
Did my best impression of a damsel in distress
‘Daughter’ could almost be a punch-in-the-neck sequel to ‘Daddy Lessons’, Bey’s country-rocking Chicks collaboration from Lemonade, which first got Nashville all snotty and reactive back in the late teens. This is heavy fuel. This album sees an entire (appropriated, don’t forget) music industry muralised as metaphor of a toxic white man. Which of course, it basically is.
From ‘Alliigator Tears’ —
You say ‘move a mountain’
And I’ll throw on my boots
You say ‘stop the river from running’
I’ll build a damn or two
You say ‘change religions’
Now I spend Sundays with you
— and thank the gods, despite that shakey requirement for Dolly P’s approval, the backbone of Cowboy Carter — this nuanced, potent, unflinching thesis — is simply remarkable.
Perhaps the most generously present famous guest is Miley Cyrus, who does a lush job duetting on ‘II Most Wanted’ (in this case Bey is using ‘II’ to denote ‘two’). I’ll be your shotgun rider ‘til the day I die, smoke out the window flying down the 405. I wonder if Miley brought Dolly onboard, or the other way round (Parton is Cyrus’s godmother), or if that’s overthinking. I love how Miley stands undefeated, by the way, in her super sexy Grammy-winner divorcée phase. She smashes it, trading lines with the Queen.
Put on a show and make it nasty. I’ve got to stop going line by line.
There’s a tribute to honour the first mainstream successful Black woman in country music, Linda Martell. Perhaps she’s like the Uncle Johnny of this record. Beyoncé makes connections. Yet another total banger that will bring the house down live, ‘Ya Ya’ opens the final act with direct sonic and lyrical nods to ‘These Boots Are Made For Walkin’’ and ‘Good Vibrations’ and its feet firmly enconsced in upbeat 1970s country-funk. Ladies… fuck it. Towards the end we get the tracks, ‘II Hands II Heaven’ and ‘Tyrant’, that could most easily fit on Lemonade or Renaissance. ‘Tyrant’ even has something of a Caroline Polachek jag, with the ‘tyrant’ being Bey herself, as she demands the return of what has been taken. The album leaves us with Ozymandias-level denouement of effort, rise, fall, into hoped-for redemption. In ‘Amen’ Beyoncé sings her spiritual plea for mercy, referencing right back to the opener an hour ago. Must even such Queens go unheard?
Cowboy Carter feels to me like a masterpiece, Bey’s third in a row. Exemplary, peerless project management. It’s a brutal, beautiful, near constant reminder of the vast chasm between today’s 21st century disposable plastic MAGA-djacent Nashville Industrial Complex, and the actual musical genre mess that emerged from — that chaotic spin-cycle of everything from bluegrass to outlaw to twenty-first century Americana, where such wonderful music does still takes place, just… not on the radio. Despite, in theory, sailing very close, despite the endorsement of Willie Nelson’s loose-limbed DJ/curator, despite all the acoustic guitars, the occasional fiddle, there is scarcely a breath of Americana songwriting, or outlaw country, or Virginia folk music here. This is not the toil to be heard of, say, Rhiannon Giddens. Because this is Beyoncé’s ‘country album’ — yes, a righteous, defiant reclamation — but in an industrial, economic, geographic, geo-political sense, not so much in a deeply musical one. Its signifiers are just that, carefully placed signifiers. In exactly the same way as ‘country’ itself is not country-and-western music anymore, just another set of commercial signifiers.
Karl Marx took so long finishing Das Kapital because he kept getting distracted by needing to publish furious pamphlets rebutting daft opinions by relatively minor, peripheral figures of the revolution. He sweated the small stuff. They didn’t deserve his attention and it just cost him time and focus. I don’t think Beyoncé could ever fall down that hole, she’s sharper of eye and more driven than Marx (better voice too). But let’s face it: the Nashville Industrial Complex won’t produce any record this year that’s as great art, or as great craft, as Cowboy Carter. The Nashville Industrial Complex certainly won’t produce any record this year that’s as well sung as this one. It’s like, um, Beyoncé is Joelle in ‘Teenage Dirtbag’. Her boyfriend’s a dick, he brings a gun to school. If this wasn’t pre-announced as the second part of a trilogy that began with Renaissance, so we trust her gaze will turn elsewhere next, it might even be a problem. It’s not.
So I think this outstanding album’s key flaw is that it dedicates too much effort to something that doesn’t deserve it. At the same time, this album’s key strength is that it understands this and takes it on, clear-eyed, directly, as part of the complex story it tells. Trying too hard, being just too great, yet still getting profoundly undervalued, dismissed, perhaps even outright rejected, by some gross skinny schmuck in stupid trousers, it analyses and parallels precisely, well, the Southern Black American Woman experience under white male supremacy.