Beyoncé's Map of America on COWBOY CARTER
on cowboy carter and ‘new american’ cuisine
Can ‘eating at restaurants’ be considered a hobby? Or maybe a marketable skillset! Something I score as ‘proficient’ on my resume. Intermediate, at this point.
My palate is varied, oscillating between satisfying a weekly addiction for Jamaican oxtail, a consistent craving for Korean fried chicken to appreciating the reliable comfort of a simple carbonara. Despite this diversity, upon moving to America I have noticed that my favourite restaurants – regardless of their international dishes – are nested under the vague genre of ‘New American.’
I inspect these menus to cobble a unifying logic across the dishes. A place that serves Scotch eggs, a meal originating from Yorkshire, proudly lists ‘New American’ on its website. A Middle Eastern restaurant that serves lamb hummus is engulfed by the label as well. Squid ink risotto, beef tartare and foie gras all ladder up to ‘New American’ according to another restaurant’s menu. The culinary influences are so sprawling, diasporic even, that it mirrors the internal migration of the country, all collapsed into one plate. I guess America is called a ‘melting pot’ for a reason.
The exploration of genre and what it means to be American is visited on Beyoncé’s latest project, COWBOY CARTER. An album so grand in its sonic ambition that, like a thick gumbo, it requires more than a few tastes to metabolize. As the second act of Beyoncé’s expected trilogy, COWBOY CARTER is surprisingly her most experimental album to date. Rather than exploring one genre – ‘country music’ as hinted through visuals and promotional singles – it provides a time capsule of American music. It stretches to find an alternate definition for ‘country music.’ By platforming ‘country music’ as music of a country rather than country music as specific genre, it nests the collective hums of America ranging from folk to rap to rock. It’s a map as much as an album and through it, Beyoncé takes you on a roadtrip of melodies that America has been cooking up over the past century. It eclipses its predecessor in length and scope and, like a watchful mother, fills up your plate with a new serving the moment you scrape the plate clean. It’s chewy. It’s satiating. It’s sticky. It’s sweet.
The term ‘amuse bouche’ is what the French call a mouth amuser. It welcomes you into the textures of a cuisine while pampering you with something special. A preview for your palate. The opening song, AMERICAN REQUIEM, does just that although it’s no small bite. Instead, it’s a provocation on who owns genre. On it, Beyoncé references her experience at the 2016 Country Music Awards where she was met with hostility, guests hollering to “get that Black bitch of the stage” as she sang Daddy Lessons with The Chicks.
As if to respond to the confrontation, singing retroactively from an omniscient American eagle-eye view, she beckons:
“It's a lotta chatter in here… Can you hear me?”
She recenters herself, demanding attention from her detractors. The instrumentation flourishes across a spectrum of American influences. You hear southern Black gospel in the vocal arrangements walled against country guitar strums. The twang of the strings are not only rock and roll but psychedelic funk, too. Images of my father’s Ohio Players vinyls come to me which then summons the comparative line he always drew from Ohio Players to the vocals of Outkast’s Andre 3000. An American lineage now heard in the growls and squeals of Beyoncé’s haunting vocal performance. She stacks her vocals like Brandy on her Full Moon album who learned to stack from Michael. Beyoncé dashes all of this into her creole mixture. But she’s only getting the roux hot at this point. Remember, it’s only an amuse bouche. She continues:
“Used to say I spoke too country. And the rejection came, said I wasn't country 'nough!”
Her vocal tenor is animalistic, like a beast that has been backed into a corner and is now on its hind legs defending its territory. Taking up space.
And so, Beyoncé’s cross examination of America and who owns its sound begins. The crusade pulls us to BLACKBIIRD next. McCartney’s original was penned as an ode to Black women overcoming racial strife, in search of freedom. He said the following about the song:
“In England, a bird is a girl, so I was thinking of a Black girl going through [this], you know, now’s your time to arise, set yourself free, and take these broken wings.”
The song’s meaning becomes layered as Beyoncé searches for artistic freedom in a genre that seeks to alienate her. This becomes even more nuanced with the inclusion of contemporary Black country singers, Tanner Adell, Brittney Spencer, Tiera Kennedy and Reyna Roberts, as back up vocalists. The words “you were only waiting for this moment to arise” are heart-warming and tear-inducing, evoking imagery of a mother bird sheltering her chicks as they take flight “into the light of a dark night.”
When Beyoncé announced Act II at the Super Bowl earlier this year, Adell shared her desire to collaborate on the project on X/Twitter. Almost immediately, she was met with vitriol from users, many members of the Beyhive, telling her to “stop begging” and that the album was already complete so her “try hard” tweeting was useless. But Beyoncé’s hawk-eye sees everything and Adell, among others, found themselves on BLACKBIIRD a month after the announcement, seemingly in retaliation to the online hate. Hate that mirrored what Beyoncé experienced at the CMAs. Since the feature, Adell’s streams have tripled on Spotify. She’s no longer a lone blackbird singing in the dead of night. She’s no longer one of the few Black women in country. She’s now part of a pack.
The theme of grit and perseverance is further reified on 16 CARRIAGES, a song that teases antebellum vignettes to carcass the early sacrifices made in favour of Beyoncé’s career. The tenets of the American dream are woven into its lyrics. The belief that if you work hard, you too can have it all. But at what cost?
It’s a more singular, autobiographical successor to Dolly Parton’s 1980s work anthem, 9 to 5. Here is where you begin to see the limits of COWBOY CARTER. Despite being more expansive than RENAISSANCE, its viewpoint is constrained to Beyoncé’s lived experience. Although neither negative or positive, this only reveals that the sting from the CMAs and the copious AOTY snubs still linger. Whereas RENAISSANCE’s Break My Soul celebrated the everyday labourer with lyrics like “Damn, they work me so damn hard / Work by nine, then off past five,” 16 CARRIAGES isn’t for the everyday person. It’s for Beyoncé.
It is moments like this where the original launch cadence of COWBOY CARTER becomes obvious. Where you can tell that the album was made after Lemonade. Similar themes like motherhood, infidelity, love and redemption are present as she traverses across the timelines of popular American music. Beyoncé swaps the mixboards of RENAISSANCE for the wires of country radio to redesign America and its music. It’s a more expansive thesis than RENAISSANCE and, as a result, the impact is arguably larger.
Next, Beyoncé leaps from the beginnings of backwood, off-road country to popular country radio with a quick intro from Willie Nelson. A trio of songs – TEXAS HOLD ‘EM, BODYGUARD and JOLENE – appear in succession to illustrate the commercialization of the country sound to a mainstream audience, a turning point in American music. A highlight is BODYGUARD. This is COWBOY CARTER’s CUFF IT (also produced by Raphael Saadiq with similar themes of enforcement and security… lol sus) as it possess the same signature propulsive funk and provocative lyrics like “You know how people like to start shit, pop shit!” It’s a delight.
Like Whitney, Beyoncé picks up a song from Dolly Parton. Unlike than Whitney, Beyoncé doesn’t do much to change the vocal arrangement. Instead, on JOLENE, she alters the lyrics. Although Parton is listed as the sole songwriter on the song, it’s hard for me to imagine her writing the words “You don’t want no heat with me” and “I’m still a creole banjee bitch from Louisianne.” The message is muddled as the song lacks the vulnerablity of the original, the true intimacy of a woman to woman confessional. Instead, Beyoncé borrows the posture from her character Sharon in Obsessed, threatening rather than pleading, which could obfustacte a larger insecurity. Although the output veers close to an AI cover at times, with an odd ‘Jolene!!!’ audio watermark that reminds me of a Limewire ripped mixtape, the role of the song is justified on the project as a successor to the challenges of marriage revealed on Lemonade.
The next course, SPAGHETTII, is the first of many plot twists. It’s the moment the waiter brings you a dish you didn’t order but you keep it because it’s to0o0oo0 good to send back. Rapyoncé is summoned with maschimo taunts like “I ain’t in no gang but I got shooters and they bang!” Apologies to those I’ve assaulted with voice notes this week with this quip. Paired with a dissection of genre by Linda Martell, a Black country singer from the 70s, the song nose dives into a different palate altogether, pulling focus to yet another one of Beyoncé’s talents: tracking.
The album is remarkably sequenced, each song kick-butting into the other in a way the is chaotic yet tightly constructed. Beyoncé has mentioned her focus on albums over singles, the idea that a musical project should have a unified thesis and that the sum of songs can craft a mosaic that is greater than its individual parts. COWBOY CARTER is a perfect manifestation of that vision, its a road trip that opts to take the scenic route rather than arrive at the destination in a quick, straight line. We order the dish, not the individual ingredients, she reminds us. ROSALIA’s MOTOMAMI is a similar trip, opting for a motorcycle, instead of a horse, to sprint you through intentionally fractured vignettes that resemble a high speed chase.
SPAGHETTII is a play on ‘spaghetti westerns,’ movies made about America by Italians. In the US, these films were regarded as inauthentic because, well, what do Italians know about America? Perhaps as much as the American chef putting carbonara on their ‘New American’ menu. Perhaps as much as a Black woman singing country. This nuanced message morphs into a dreamy outro supported by Shaboozey – an excellent stand in for Kid Cudi (complimentary, I promise!) – as Beyoncé yells “Come get everything you came for!” like a mother setting down another plate before you can say you’re full.
Every cowboy needs a partner and the next set of duets with Miley Cyrus and Post Malone are as unexpected as they are effective. When I first heard II MOST WANTED, I grappled with the merging of Miley and Beyoncé’s voice. Not because it didn’t sound beautiful – it does. But because, at times, it sounds like Beyoncé is singing back up for Miley… on a Beyoncé album. On the track, Miley’s voice stays uniform while Beyoncé’s voice stretches up to achieve its waxy harmonies. The differences in vocal exertion makes the arrangement lopsided. Miley noticeably begins each verse, not Beyoncé. This, paired with Miley’s writing credit, suggests that the song was potentially a Miley song first with Beyoncé singing over a completed version after her but, for a song about partnership and riding shotgun, Beyoncé’s passiveness works. It sounds intentional.
What’s more American than blue jeans? Lana Del Rey, another artist that makes America her muse, knows that denim is synonymous with the American flag. LEVII’S JEANS goes down smooth and easy like a Corona and lime on a hot porch. Beyoncé is having so much fun with the auto tune and reminds us that that if you can sing, auto tune can sound pretty incredible. Post Malone slides in the backseat of the song effortlessly, matching her casual drawl with the right level of twang that cements the sound somewhere between Florida Georgia Line and Nelly. Damn, I miss those days! I’m telling you, it’s jean shorts and beers all summer to this one.
With all of the collaborators making an appearance at this point, it makes me wonder who else could have been on this album. I would have loved to hear Chris Stapleton on this. I think Carrie Underwood could have matched Beyoncé’s growl. And, of course, we were all holding out hope for Telephone Part II with Gaga. But I am satisfied. These refreshing choices show how comfortable Beyoncé is straying from conventional selections as she re-envisions the genre. Post and Miley are fascinating choices because they are two artists who have built their career (and received a fair amount of critique) on the backs of Black culture. Let us not forget White Iverson and the We Can’t Stop music video, which I will defend retroactively as cultural appreciation (lol) because they are bops. Jokes side, Beyoncé stationing these artists on COWBOY CARTER as she reclaims country is maybe her idea of atonement, a wink to those who are paying attention. She correctly positions them in whiteness and they flourish with some of the best songs of their career. You see, she won’t always give you what you ask for (ahem, visuals), but she’ll always give you what you need.
Which brings me to YA YA, another standout that plucks the aesthetic of the Blaxploitation era through a framework that is uniquely Beyoncé and squarely American. The ad libs are Betty Boop meets Looney Tunes. There is something minstrel about the call-and-response that’s aware of its absurdity, its cartoonishness. It’s Beach Boys. It’s James Brown. It’s something for everyone, unifying. On it, Beyoncé becomes a pin up caricature of herself, reminding us that she is the ultimate showgirl. “A clever girl.”
Culmination of the diva’s idols — other divas like Prince and Tina — are legible influences. YA YA makes it clear, as if we needed any convincing, that she is the all-American heir apparent.
A sultry palate cleanser unfolds itself in the shape of DESERT EAGLE. Sexy and short, with a Thundercat-like bass, all culminating into a horned up interlude. A mid-meal quickie that leads into the colossal four song home stretch that is Mount Rushmore of the album: RIIVERDANCE, II HANDS II HEAVEN, TYRANT and SWEET ★ HONEY ★ BUCKIIN’.
RIIVERDANCE fuses the fiddle with trap, extending for a bit too long (and borrowing time from the superior DESERT EAGLE) but amounts to heat nonetheless. The river has long been a fixation across Beyoncé’s albums, most prominent in the river deity imagery of Oshun she often mimics. Again, Beyoncé mixes cultures onto her plate, into your ears. “Bounce on that shit, dance” she commands and I do as I’m told.
II HANDS II HEAVEN is another favourite of mine and the last of four songs that has writing credits from the talented Ryan Beatty. Whiskey, Arizona heat. Wild horses, Marfa. Toxic roses, Las Vegas. So much Americana is packaged in the poetry of this song that when the swaying outro of “Baby, I’ve been waiting my whole life for you” comes in, you want to hold someone you love. The dive bar is clearing out but you’re not ready to go home. You need to be rocked, you need to be held. And then the sound of Dolly’s nails lure you into TYRANT, this album’s HEATED, a song that I’m sure will score many nights of me dancing on surfaces. With lines like “Ride it like hydraulics… I don’t like to sit up in the saddle, boy I guide it,” DON’T. TEST. ME!!!! This is the song your friend plays when you are trying to leave the club and then next thing you know, you out for another four hours. If you are a friend of mine and you see me when this song comes on, I am begging you: do not hit record on your lil’ camera phones.
But the more I listen to this song, the more I can’t escape the darkness of the lyrics. The introductory lines reference a ‘hangman’ and ‘hanging them high.’ This conjures imagery of the lynching of the Jim Crow era. At first, I try to ignore and continue to twerk but when Beyoncé sings “when the sun goes down, you can hear her body howl,” my suspicion is confirmed with the direct reference to sundown towns. Hiding in plain sight, Beyoncé embeds the song with America’s vicious history. It’s similar to a parent hiding vegetables in a child’s dinner. The way you may bite into a strange fruit only to realize it’s something else entirely. The after-effects of America's brutal past is around us if we care to pay attention. If we are conscious enough to observe. Sometimes, I have the energy to engage. But other times, I don’t. Most times, it's just easier to dance and vibe.
Before you know it, you’re off. In the back of an Uber or on horse and buggy, trotting home as SWEET ★ HONEY ★ BUCKIIN’ ignites. “Cadillac back on the road, we taking Route 44… I’m comin’ home.” Beyoncé covers Patsy Cline’s ‘I Fall To Pieces’ as Shaboozey lassos up country motifs with his sing-song rap. We swerve into the rap genre of American music as a Jersey house loop populates the song. When Beyoncé cuts “this for my, this for my” you know she has something else planned. She serves you a petite HONEY dessert wedged between the tryptic that quickly pushes into the trappy BUCKIIN’, shockingly addressing the Grammy snubs that still plague her thoughts. “Look at that horse, look at that horse, look at that horse,” she points out. Three horses, three acts. Will this lady give ever give us peace?
At last, mercy comes with AMEN. Restating the album’s thesis, the closing track serves as a revival of AMERICAN REQUIEM, nodding to the circular nature of the country’s history. Through it, Beyoncé reminds us that conventions are meant to be challenged and genre is meant to be toyed with:
“This house was built with blood and bones and it crumbled… The status they made were beautiful but they were lies of stone.”
These words signal to who built country music and who built America. If it is to be believed that this song zooms into the first track off of RENAISSANCE, I'M THAT GIRL, then its opening lyrics of “Cleanse me of my sins, my un-American life” have new meaning. It becomes a cry of mercy, a reconstruction of America. Or perhaps, it is a grace. A grace as we bow our heads to eat the meal mother has served us. New American tastes great.
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Impeccable. Delicious.
Loved getting such a close read of the album that’s been stuck in my head since its release!