Cowboy Carter Review

Beyoncé’s long anticipated part 2 of her trilogy project, Cowboy Carter, purports to be a Black country album. It falls flat in many ways, managing despite good starts and one or two great sounds to be a malformed production. Contemporary Black country music, once heralded by Lil Nas X and “Old Town Road,” has come a long way, surpassing the capabilities of the Queen of Pop, in the skilled hands of such young artists as Tanner Adell and Gary Clark Jr. I’d contend that calling Cowboy Carter a country album is sort of wrong, as it far moreso falls under the more nebulous term of Americana. There are some country tracks on the album, I guess, but inclusions from the great American songbook such as “Blackbird,” and the reliance on four-on-the-floor beats alongside looping tracks keeps it very distant from the blue collar genre. It’s for the best that this album stand a genre or two away from country, which has become something like pop music for people too bigoted to hear diverse voices on the radio. As someone who grew up with country, particularly Black country voices like Charley Pride and later Darius Rucker, there’s a diverse lexicon of songmaking tools and sonic references that Beyoncé more or less ignored in favour of carving this album out of influences as varied as Nancy Sinatra, the Beatles, and Dolly Parton. 

This is an album that is about as long as albums ought to be, something I really enjoyed about it. I think it has a profound disconnection from the world; I spent the week waiting on the release of Cowboy Carter finally listening to Renaissance and it seems as though they both exist in a sonic discontinuity with the broader musical world, almost like Beyoncé is crafting an ecosystem of noise for her fans. I think the highwater mark for this album is “II MOST WANTED,” but I am profoundly biased. I found the “Jolene” cover, entitled “JOLENE,” to be lacking. “Jolene” is a standard; it’s on the Rolling Stones top 500 songs of all time list at a respectable 217th place. Everyone has covered it, yet this cover avoids the careful instrumentation that made the song prolific in the first place, instead focusing on an interpolation of the lyrics and a reimagining of the placement of the narrator. There’s nothing wrong with that, and as an imaginative perspective it certainly modernises the sound. I just suspect that better instrumentals and a careful encounter with the broader reworkings of “Jolene,” for example the White Stripes cover, would’ve been profoundly more engaging than the Nashville claptrack that dominates “JOLENE.” I find the sampling on this album and the sonic references across it and predecessor Renaissance to be far more consumptive than they are evocative, thought provoking, or creative. Put another way, I suspect that this project stands much closer to Paul Simon’s Graceland than to something like Ray Charles’ Modern Sounds in Country & Western Music. All of this is to say, that’s fine. It’s important to reimagine sounds from a diverse range of musical influences, and unlike Paul Simon, Beyoncé seems to be crediting and paying her collaborators. But one has to wonder what Cowboy Carter would be if it had interacted more handsomely with the long legacy of Black country music, instead of bringing a wide array of country-adjacent sounds to contemporary, predominantly white and male, ears.  I rate this album a 10.1. The 10 categorises it as full of party anthems and/or great music to share with a crowd or in a car, and the one is from a possible nine for my enjoyment listening. It’s presumably perfect for a lot of group listening situations; don’t play it at any function I am invited to. But I’m sure lots of people, particularly Reedies, will get a kick from the hits on it. I don’t imagine, a decade from now, we will find the residue of Cowboy Carter radically shifting the sound of country in the way “Old Town Road'' has fundamentally shifted the genre, or Tanner Adell’s “FU-150” will reverberate through the next century of American country music. This Americana album is at it’s very best when it’s encountering the American songbook and showing off a range of samples that, charitably, someone somewhere has somehow not yet sat with. And that’s always a good thing.