{"id":5484,"date":"2024-04-28T14:09:10","date_gmt":"2024-04-28T19:09:10","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/?p=5484"},"modified":"2024-05-19T17:23:54","modified_gmt":"2024-05-19T22:23:54","slug":"beyonce-who-else-could-make-a-crash-course-in-american-music-history-feel-like-a-party","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/?p=5484","title":{"rendered":"Beyonc\u00e9 \u2014 Who Else Could Make A Crash Course In American Music History Feel Like A Party?"},"content":{"rendered":"

\u201cGenres are a funny little concept, aren\u2019t they?\u201d Linda Martell cackles at the beginning of \u201cSPAGHETTII.\u201d Perhaps the name Linda Martell isn\u2019t a household one, which only proves her point. She was the first Black woman to perform at the Grand Ole Opry, but her attempt to move from soul and R&B into the realm of country in the 1960s was met with racist resistance\u2014everything from heckling to outright blackballing.<\/p>\n

Beyonc\u00e9 knows the feeling, as she explained in an uncharacteristically vulnerable Instagram post revealing that her eighth studio album was inspired by a deep dive into the history of Black country music following an experience where she felt similarly unwelcome.<\/p>\n

COWBOY CARTER is a sprawling 80-minute tribute not only to those pioneering artists and their outlaw spirit, but to the very futility of reducing music to a single identifying word. Another key quote from that post: \u201cThis ain\u2019t a country album. This is a Beyonc\u00e9 album.\u201d<\/p>\n

It\u2019s more than a catchy slogan; anyone looking for mere honky-tonk cosplay is missing a much richer and more complex point. Listening in full to Act II of the presumed trilogy Bey began with 2022\u2019s RENAISSANCE, it\u2019s clear that the perennial overachiever hasn\u2019t merely \u201cgone country,\u201d she\u2019s interrogating what the word even means\u2014and who merits the designation.<\/p>\n

On \u201cAMERIICAN REQUIEM,\u201d in a voice deep and earthy as Texas red dirt, the Houston native sings, \u201cUsed to say I spoke too country\/And then the rejection came, said I wasn\u2019t country enough.\u201d She nods again, as she\u2019s done before on songs like \u201cFormation,\u201d to her family ties to Alabama moonshiners and Louisiana Creoles. \u201cIf that ain\u2019t country,\u201d she wonders, \u201ctell me what is.\u201d With subtlety and swagger, she contextualizes country as an offshoot of the Black American musical canon, a storytelling mode springing from and evolving alongside gospel and blues.<\/p>\n

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Stream Cowboy Carter<\/strong><\/span><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Over the wistful pedal steel and gospel organ of \u201c16 CARRIAGES,\u201d she tells you what it\u2019s like to be a teenage workhorse who grows into an adult perfectionist obsessed with ideas of legacy, with a bit of family trauma buried among the riffs.<\/p>\n

On \u201cYA YA,\u201d Beyonc\u00e9 expands the scope to rock \u2019n\u2019 roll at its most red-blooded and fundamental, playing the parts of both Ike and Tina as she interpolates The Beach Boys and slips in a slick Playboi Carti reference, yowling: \u201cMy family lived and died in America\/Good ol\u2019 USA\/Whole lotta red in that white and blue\/History can\u2019t be erased.\u201d<\/p>\n

A Patsy Cline standard goes Jersey club mode on \u201cSWEET \u2605 HONEY \u2605 BUCKIIN\u2019,\u201d with a verse from the similarly genre-flouting Shaboozey and a quick note regarding RENAISSANCE\u2018s Grammy fortunes: \u201cAOTY I ain\u2019t win\/I ain\u2019t stuntin\u2019 \u2019bout them\/Take that shit on the chin\/Come back and fuck up the pen.\u201d Who but Beyonc\u00e9 could make a crash course in American music history feel like the party of the year?<\/p>\n

There\u2019s the one-two punch of sorely needed summer slow-dance numbers: the Miley Cyrus duet \u201cII MOST WANTED,\u201d with its whispers of Fleetwood Mac, followed by \u201cLEVII\u2019S JEANS\u201d with Post Malone, the \u201cin those jeans\u201d anthem filling the radio\u2019s Ginuwine-shaped hole. RENAISSANCE\u2019s euphorically nasty house bounce returns, albeit with more banjo, on \u201cRIIVERDANCE,\u201d where \u201cII HANDS II HEAVEN\u201d floats on clouds of \u201990s electronica for an ode to alternately riding wild horses and 24-inch spinners on candy paint. (Houston, Texas, baby!) There are do-si-do ditties, murder ballads, daddy issues, whiskey kisses, hungover happy hours, cornbread and grits, Beatles covers, smoke breaks, and, on \u201cDAUGHTER,\u201d what may or may not be a wink in the direction of the artist who won AOTY instead.<\/p>\n

There\u2019s also a Dolly-approved Beyoncification of \u201cJolene,\u201d to whom the protagonist is neither saying please nor begging on the matter of taking her man. (\u201cYour peace depends on how you move, Jolene,\u201d Bey purrs, ice in her veins.) Is this a genre-bucking hoedown? A chess move? A reckoning? A requiem? If anyone can pull it off, it\u2019s COWBOY CARTER, as country as it gets.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

\u201cGenres are a funny little concept, aren\u2019t they?\u201d Linda Martell cackles at the beginning of \u201cSPAGHETTII.\u201d Perhaps the name Linda Martell isn\u2019t a household one, which only proves her point. She was the first Black woman to perform at the Grand Ole Opry, but her attempt to move from soul and R&B into the realm […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":5486,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[921],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-5484","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-streamapse-highlights"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5484","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=5484"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5484\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":5487,"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/5484\/revisions\/5487"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/5486"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=5484"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=5484"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/streamapse.com\/Magazine\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=5484"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}