Beyoncé and the Cowboy Carter "Controversy"
How one of the greatest artists of all time tried to convince the world she was an underdog and catapulted to even wilder success.
The brilliance of Beyoncé is not in question. You don’t have to like her or her music, but the fact is that her millions and millions of fans can’t all be wrong. She’s minted. She’s “GOATED” or whatever cooler people than I might be able to say about her. Beyoncé is Beyoncé and nobody else is her. Maybe she is HER? I don’t know. I’m out of my depth here, but the point remains.
Which is why I couldn’t stop laughing when her husband, Jay-Z, slammed the Grammys for snubbing his wife over the years. And by snubbing, he meant that Beyoncé lost Album of the Year to Taylor Swift in 2010, Beck in 2015, Adele in 2017, and Harry Styles in 2023. Granted, she hasn’t won the big one yet, but the fact is that with 32 GRAMMY awards, Queen Bey has the most statues in the history of the awards. Which is why I couldn’t stop laughing at Jay-Z.
How do you make one of the most talented, successful, and powerful artists in the history of music seem like an underdog? Jay-Z and Beyoncé did it on Grammy night, which leads us to all the “controversy” and chatter surrounding her new record, Cowboy Carter. Let’s explore all the ways that this record has found itself in mainstream conversation.
Is Cowboy Carter a country record?
The short answer is no, but that’s not some protectionist take in order to keep Beyoncé out of some club. I’m not a country fan, so I couldn’t care less about keeping country country or anything like that.
I know that this record was informed by Beyoncé’s research into country. It features country performers and many country-typical instruments. The song, “Texas Hold ‘Em” is currently in its seventh week atop the Hot Country Songs Billboard chart, but whatever. This is a Beyonce record.
She defies genre and has for quite some time. Like only the biggest artists in the history of the world, like Michael Jackson, Prince, and Taylor Swift, Beyoncé is her own genre. This is not a country record. It’s a Beyonce record. It doesn’t sound like any other country record and no other country record could sound like it. If you want to call it a country record, you’re making a statement, and that’s fine, but you’re probably trying too hard.
These songs sound like Beyoncé normally sounds, with powerful vocals, huge production that recall the biggest moments in pop, hip-hop, R&B, and rock. “AMERIICAN REQUIEM” leads the record off with an interpolation of Buffalo Springfield before going into a beautiful almost note-for-note cover of The Beatles’ “Blackbird.” She covers “JOLENE” as well, but if anything, she’s dragging that country song out of that genre and into her own. Beyoncé also does a very pretty duet with Miley Cyrus, who began her career as a country star, but has essentially been trying to defy genre in her own way ever since. Yes, the song does sound the most country of anything else on the record, and it’s a phenomenal duet, but for my money, this is still a Beyonce record, not a country record.
And that should be better.
Just look at Taylor Swift. If there’s anyone bigger in music than Beyoncé, Taylor Swift is it. She’s spent her entire career defining her name as its own genre after beginning in country music. You can nitpick about Taylor Swift being the bigger star, but it’s unnecessary to look at Microsoft, Apple, NVIDIA, Amazon and Alphabet and constantly bicker about who is the biggest and best. They’re all the biggest companies in the world and it’s a fluid situation. They’re both on the proverbial Mount Rushmore.
Which once again makes all the surrounding bickering and sides-taking over Beyoncé and her new record and makes it hysterical to me. Beyoncé doesn’t need anyone’s defense. She doesn’t need anyone to prop her up. She’s not an underdog. And yet the brilliance of Beyoncé and the machine that she’s built up around her has created the loudest wave of chatter in recent pop culture history as she’s propelled Cowboy Carter into the record books. It’s Spotifys most-streamed album in a single day in 2024 (so far.) It’s also the first “country” album to hold that title so far this year.
And will it be enough to finally get Beyoncé her coveted Album of the Year GRAMMY? Will all this chatter help push it beyond Taylor Swift’s forthcoming “The Tortured Poets Department?” Will they consider that a country record? lol
Who cares? None of this matters.
In a world where my favorite radio host of all time Ron Bennington frequently maps the world as just a collection of carnies and rubes, I feel like anyone falling into the trap of this Beyoncé “culture war” is a rube with Beyoncé and Jay-Z and the rest being the carnies. Hell, I’m feeling more and more like one of the rubes saying even this much about any of this.
In the end, we’ll give Beyoncé the last word. In her Instagram post, Beyoncé specifically stated, “this ain’t a Country album…”
“This is a Beyoncé album.”