These Boots Were Made for Beyoncé, Were They Not?

Some years ago, I wrote a piece on this blog on my secretly harbored love for country music in general, and Dolly Parton in particular. 

After the release of Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter last Friday, I revisited what I had written so that I wouldn’t repeat myself any more than is my signature repetitive streak. 

Beyoncé hails herself the Queen, and why not? For she is the most, the wildest while also the most controlled, and the most extravagant popular singer in the world today. When she releases new music, the world stops. As it did this time, too. She is the most important artist right now to voice her opinions on any given topic, because she is widely revered and extensively heard. You cannot ignore Beyoncé if you tried. She doesn’t have powerful friends in high places; she is the place of power incarnate, and what she has already done, her body of work, will not be equaled or ignored, ever. No one can erase her or take her place. She has mythologized her persona and her family, and will continue to make a huge difference in how music is consumed, how it is perceived and how people are talking about it and relating to albums in general. Like P.J. Harvey and some other peers, she has been making the conceptual album for many years now, and for listeners like myself, it is all pure honey. 

Is she country, though? Of course, cross-checking and eliminating all possible criticisms beforehand, the singer herself already stated pre-drop that no, Cowboy Carter isn’t a country album. Some years back, a rejection came in a crude and boorish way and she didn’t like that, quite rightly so especially if there were racial slurs involved – I mean are we going backwards or forwards here? - so she has made sure the naysayers are going to eat their backhanded slip, for there is no avenue Beyoncé does not belong. Genre schmenre and so forth. So what is the big deal here? 

Maybe nothing. Maybe lots of things.

Perhaps it has to do with not being born an American, since it does not relate to me why this is so important to Beyoncé, so important, to be included in the hall of fame of Southern Rock and Country and Western that she has Willie Nelson of all people spell out on the album that he considers her the bee’s knees, because why wouldn’t he? Also, having him tell the listener they should recheck their prejudices – I don’t know. “Sometimes you don’t know what you like, until someone you trust turns you on some really good shit.”

Well, duh.

This is the first time Beyoncé doesn’t trust her listeners to think for themselves. The first time since her outstandingly smart and gorgeous 2013´s eponymous album that upped her game so hard that I for one turned my ears towards the pink lettering on the cover and have not been able to take my eyes off her since - that she misses the mark. Just a little bit, the bullet grazes the middle, but it isn’t bullseye.

Cowboy Carter is fine, so fine, educated, lustrous, opulent at times and weary at others, meticulously researched and sprawling with Easter eggs, fitting for an Easter drop. 

Except when she invites Country Grandaddy Nelson to tell us what to think.

Let’s elaborate.

First, let’s make it clear: the album is all kinds of superlative. If one doesn’t already know Beyoncé is not, nor has she ever been, one to take her undertakings lightly, then you not a real fan and what are you even doing here? Making her albums into conceptual theses on given topics, learning the ropes, studying with a clear and precise eye, for instance, the roots and background of the history of country music and doing her homework and then turning everything she has learned into a sonic revelation of how notes can sound when you know what the hell you are doing, is how the best and most noteworthy artists make their mark in the annals of music. Also, Beyoncé’s songwriting keeps getting both freer and more unconstrained, her associations more complex and surprising, her vocalization deeper and more pronounced – I for one felt the subtle change in her voice since she gave birth for the first time, I don’t know if there is hard evidence whether this can affect one’s singing but I insist it is to be found, very distinctly, there, on Beyoncé - her politics more evocative, and her songs pure popular music gold. This album is no exception. 

The Country Purebred Encyclopedia of Cowboy Carter? The 9 to 5 nail-clicking, the Patsy Cline reference, the Mickey and Sylvia reference that connects a lot of dots, the hand-clapping and mentions of hoedowns, the banjo and other historically accurate instruments typical of country music, the finger picking and thumping and real instruments in general in lots of the songs instead of elaborate programming, the horses and rodeos, the cajoling into participating and the out-of-control, bordering on hysterical, hootenanny some of the songs morph into, the outlaw themes, the gravitas of the several cameos and guests, the y’alls and you-heard-mes and the classic cowboy attire, Levi’s, while making out and maybe more in the haystack in the barn, the whiskey and – since it’s legal now in Beyoncé’s current home state, the marijuana smell in her hair - it is all there and more. It is like checking off things from a list, listening to her recite her chops all through the album.

Only here’s the catch, and it is most clearly visible and palpable on her treatment of Dolly Parton’s Jolene: she misses one crucial point about Country and Western, and no matter how country she claims to be, she gets this wrong, and that is why Cowboy Carter is not a country album, and Beyoncé, no matter how much it may pain her, is no country artist on this particular record.

The self-imposing bravado, the R´n´B swagger, the GET OFF MY GRILL, BITCH ´tude, the sarcasm, the intensive self-referential interpolation, the hyperbole of quotes and the who’s who on country music, so much so that it starts to feel like she is delivering a doctorate on classic country – which of course she delivers with flying colors – is not really what country music is all about. 

Why being accepted in the Nashville history-rewritten grand ole white country ethos is so important to her, when she has already shown the world how little she cares about what the given norms are in music, and she has the talent, the wherewithal, the motivation, the personal and professional oomph, not to re-mention the power to make any kind of music she wants with anybody at all? She is good at it. People are lining up to collaborate with her. She sings better than anyone I have ever heard. Everything she does really does turn into multi-platinum.

Of course, Beyoncé, the most powerful and influential living musical artist in the world right now, can do anything, perhaps even pull off this kind of elemental switch inside the genre she is wooing in this aggressive love letter to country music and her own country roots – but why is it so crucial to her that the reactionist, narrow-minded gatekeepers who guard the white-washed entrance to Nashville let her in? Is it the age-old fact that if one is not allowed in somewhere, this becomes an entire raison d’être for all their future endeavors? I certainly do not care under which genre we will find Beyoncé’s work, and I am almost positive her entire fanbase shares my feelings. So why is it so very important to her?

And this kind of pleading, bringing in two Grand Olds of Country and Western to state their support and iterate aloud on her album that yes, it is a great one with some great music, feels a bit, well, un-Beyoncé. Being bitter does not suit anyone; being over it suits everyone. Beefing may feel powerful, but it isn’t who she is or what Beyoncé the enterprise, in my opinion, is about. It feels like a gimmick, like something a lesser artist would do. 

As does the fact that Jolene’s aggravated assault -style rage and menacing execution actually turns it into something different altogether, and I for one feel like sure, this is your take on it, but Dolly Parton is still, and will remain, the Queen of this song.

The punctuated and underlined terrorizing of Jolene the love rival, the aggressive possessiveness with which the narrator refers to her man (“I’m so possessive so I rock his Roc necklaces” is correct) that feels both razor sharp in its hinted violence just under the surface and, to be honest, a bit too defensive, as in why you bothering with that Jolene still, if you are confident and truly happy and secure in your bond with your man?, the grandiose declarations elsewhere on the album how much she will make Jolene pay should she even glance at the narrator’s man – and this is actually the song, along with Daughter, that links Cowboy Carter most obviously to Lemonade, and if we are to assume that these two are linked, and of course we are, Dolly says (and being able to read the subtext, or, in this case, text, of Beyoncé-verse has very much become a part of loving her work), one can conclude Jolene is Becky with the hair is the unnamed someone who caused the scar on Beyoncé the real-life person’s marriage.

Country music needs the tactile heartache inside its storyline to sound like country and it has historically moved in the realms of the little people with money problems or downright poverty - without making the song into a political protest but a brooding letter of lost love and broken hearts and things being shitty all around but at least I’ve got two more bottles of wine handy. Beyoncé’s claim for country was the very real sense of horror when the break in her marriage sent her into her own demonic downward spiral.

Drawing on an almost ten-years-back heartache, though, is not enough to evoke any real feelings of sympathy in the listener. It was strong and it was true once, but it was also a long time ago, and since then she has celebrated the births of two more children and has stated that she is living her best years yet in her forties. And everyone knows Beyoncé has more money than god, so her only woe here really is that she feels she is being kept out from somewhere she feels like she rightfully belongs. Why should anyone else but Beyoncé care about this? In our book, she does already belong.

Hailing from the Deep South and carrying an accent and being a grandbaby of a moonshine man and everything else she lists as her credentials, of course she is as country as she herself feels like. She always was. 

So here, finally, are my two cents: in its brutal honesty and heart-wrenching lyrics, its raw emotion and total lack of sarcasm, Lemonade is Beyoncé’s de facto country album, while Cowboy Carter serves the country twang shaken and distilled through a wide variety of influences and variations, remaining a sprawling, adventurous, courageous, pensive, all—American, crazy, immersive, strongly reverberating monolithic boulder of an album about her flipping the script and the ownership of her own narrative, and raising evermore awareness on Black History and its systematic cloaking in American storytelling in its chronicles. In my book, the true Country and Western record of her catalogue, conceptually and, let’s be clear, sonically, is not Cowboy Carter, but her 2016 masterpiece. 

I love Cowboy Carter, and for Beyoncé’s sake, I hope she will find solace in knowing in her heart that magnificent though as this new album of hers may be, this I so am country so grant me access was totally unnecessary. She has free range to move nimbly between genres, and I guess in a way I feel like it’s a good thing, and a sign that she hasn’t gone completely beyond self-absorbed and myopic about her own importance in music, that she felt this kind of grandiose, exclamative statement on her country bona fides was necessary.

Beyoncé wears any shoes she wants, and why she doesn’t already know this is anybody´s guess.

And perhaps the whole discussion on whether Cowboy Carter is or isn’t a country album means everyone is missing Beyoncé’s point entirely and is, as a question, moot. But whether Cowboy Carter is a masterpiece or not is not irrelevant. 

It is outstanding, an intellectual joy to listen to, and Beyoncé sounds like she is at the top of her game. But does it sound like she is having fun, is listening to Cowboy Carter joyful on a carnal level the way Renaissance was, or is she busy proving a point and actually casting a shadow on herself while doing it? 

A masterpiece Cowboy Carter is not.

Favorite album track, one week into listening: Spaghettii.

Read more on Dolly Parton and the genius of country music: 

http://mrsdallowayscoffeebreak.blogspot.com/2018/04/the-backwoods-barbie-bitch.html