Beyonce returns with ‘Act II: Cowboy Carter’, a 27 track endeavour into the Wild West of Country
Straddling a white horse comes Beyoncé on the cover of Act II: Cowboy Carter.
Riding high off the back of the first part of a three-part project, Renaissance, one of the first pop albums by an artist on Beyoncé’s level to capture its LGBTQ ballroom roots of the 1990s, the queen of pop conquering country felt like an impossibility. With Cowboy Carter, scepticism abounded. The stark contrast between the glitz and glamour of pop and the rustic, traditional roots of country music seemed like an insurmountable barrier. As said, where Renaissance‘s vogue and ballroom scene are by nature celebratory of both sexual and ethnic minorities, country is anything but. where Act One was a celebration, Act Two is a bold reclamation.
But there we have it; what has been now described as a country album and instead a “Beyoncé album,” complete with enough finger clicks and dosey doe inducing tempo to hold you off until the Dolly Parton-endorsed and penned ‘Jolene’ retelling in the album’s second half.
What’s odd is the expectation for female pop stars to fail in attempting to hurdle an ever more right-wing-associated genre that is country. The growing American culture divide, often called a war by some, has recently blurred the lines between genre and political dissonance. The hyperpop-driven renaissance of LGBTQ+ icons and acts in music has both created cultural safe spaces and driven them further from their opposition, making cross-collaboration ever more impossible.
Cowboy Carter triumphs in reclaiming the Americana aesthetic into something that doesn’t feel uncomfortable in its prevalence; where nationalism has ever grown to be associated with right-wing extremism, this has become an obvious challenge.
But what is it that makes country so apparently unadaptable for queer icons? I think that there is truth in the fact that this album hardly presents us with a dozen club-ready anthems or the Subway Tracks Monday playlist we might have come to be familiar with, but if COVID taught us anything it’s that not everything needs to be club-ready for it to be culturally impactful. The acoustic, stereotypical somberness of country makes it a difficult one, but clearly not impossible to conquer.
This might be the most self-aware album in the singers’ discography – whilst of course a major departure from anything we have seen from the singer in the past. Carter is not a first in a subversive career switch up from pop to country. Lady Gaga’s 2016 album Joanne was anything but welcomed by a fanbase who feel sidelined by a switch to a genre which has grown into a vessel for soft right-wing ideology dominated by white artists; ignorant to its roots.
Cowboy Carter resonates like a once-in-a-lifetime live show that we’re hearing like a fly on the wall. Between Miley Cyrus’s raspiness and the ever-present voice of Dolly Parton sprinkled throughout, you could mistake this album for a greatest hits compilation already.
The singer has, in the past, been criticised for a reliance on other songwriters’ talents for the majority of her previous releases; the ongoing joke of famed singer-songwriter Sia being locked in the singer’s basement hardly helped.
In Beyoncé’s case, as a curator with an invaluable voice allowing herself to dive into any genre, this outing feels like a rebirth of the fearlessness in the industry that we have been missing for some time. To have a platform is to have a voice, and Beyoncé knows how to have hers heard.
“Cowboy Carter – Beyoncé” by Brett Jordan is licensed under CC BY 2.0.