Cowboy Carter Isn’t Revenge. It’s A Reeducation.

In Beyoncé’s Homecoming film, a seminal text for any card-carrying member of the Beyhive, Nina Simone’s voice kicks in at around the 16-minute mark. It’s the first time we hear from someone who isn’t Beyoncé. Through Simone’s voiceover, while we watch Beyoncé and her dancers in rehearsal, we hear, “I think what you’re trying to ask is why I’m so insistent upon giving out to them that Blackness, that Black power — pushing them to identify with Black culture…  To me, we are the most beautiful creatures in the whole world: Black people.” It’s a quote from a TV interview Simone did in 1970, and it continues throughout the scene. “My job is to somehow make them curious enough, persuade them by hook or crook, to get more aware of themselves and where they came from and what they are into and what is already there, just to bring it out. This is what compels me to compel them, and I will do it by whatever means necessary.”

Simone is presumably talking about her Black audience, and pushing them to not just embrace their Blackness (her intended definition of this word is debatable), but also to explore their history and ancestry, to understand wholly who they are and why they are through culture. On Cowboy Carter, Beyoncé’s 27-track genre-bending, brilliant, sprawling opus, you could argue that she’s still using this quote as her musical guiding light. Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter is compelling us to be curious about the Black history of country music, she’s persuading us “by hook or crook” to become more aware of the Black contribution to a genre that has been co-opted, whitewashed, and gatekept. It’s not a reclamation, it’s a reeducation. If this was her intention, Cowboy Carter is a colossal success. Since the first two singles (“Texas Hold ‘Em” and “16 Carriages”) dropped in February to the full Chitlin’ Circuit-inspired tracklist, Beyoncé has been taking us to school. Linda Martell, the first Black female solo artist to play the Grand Ole Opry, may be a name some Beyoncé fans had never heard before the March 29 album release, but now that she’s featured throughout Cowboy Carter, a Rolling Stone piece on the pioneer has gone viral, there have been countless headlines about her legacy, and her granddaughter’s GoFundMe to finance a documentary about her life has raised over $36,000.

Track 2 of Cowboy Carter is an emotional cover of “Blackbird,” a Beatles song that Paul McCartney has explained was inspired by the U.S. civil rights movement, namely the Little Rock Nine, a group of Black students aged 15 to 17, who, after the Brown vs. Board of Education ruling in 1954, were the first to enrol in an all-white high school. I’ll come back to the significance of that piece of history in relation to Beyoncé, but first, it’s important to acknowledge the song’s impact. The four Black women country artists who appear on Cowboy Carter's “Blackbiird” are experiencing the kind of overnight attention they’ve long deserved, but wouldn’t have achieved at this level and this quickly, without the Beyoncé effect. In just 96 (ish) hours, emerging country stars Tanner Adell, Brittney Spencer, Tiera Kennedy, and Reyna Roberts have seen their followers quadruple and their streaming numbers skyrocket. For the first time in history, six Black country acts (including Martell and Shaboozey) are featured on Spotify’s US daily top artists chart. These stats will have a tangible and extraordinary impact on these artists and on mainstream country music.

“I’m in awe of Beyoncé. Her genius, creative mind, and thoughtful, generous approach represent so much more than we can probably even fathom and put into words right now,” Spencer shared, according to the Nashville Tennessean. “[It] validates the feelings, stories, and experiences often left in the shadows and outskirts of the mainstream country world and the music world at large.” Kennedy echoed that sentiment, saying that the collaboration “put us all on a platform we can only dream of.” 

The shadows and outskirts of the mainstream are not places you would expect to find Beyoncé. She is the biggest musical icon of her generation. She is a living legend. The world stops when she does, well, anything. I have loved Beyoncé to an obsessive degree for most of my life. My childhood memories are set to a soundtrack of her songs. My adolescent to adult years have been shaped by going to her concerts, adoring her music with my best friends, and analyzing her every move. I’m not special. Millions of women have a similar relationship to Beyoncé’s music. Her platform is massive, her reach monumental. Unlike some of her peers, her work is worthy of this level of adulation. She is constantly evolving, relentlessly reinventing her sound so that each project outdoes the next. The result has been global domination. You don’t get more mainstream than Beyoncé. She is an institution in and of herself, so it’s been fascinating to watch what has been interpreted as a desire from the artist to be accepted and embraced by outdated institutions who do not deserve her, namely the Grammys and the Country Music Awards. 

Ten days before Cowboy Carter’s release, Beyoncé wrote this on her Instagram: “This album has been over five years in the making. It was born out of an experience that I had years ago where I did not feel welcomed…and it was very clear that I wasn’t. But, because of that experience, I did a deeper dive into the history of Country music and studied our rich musical archive… The criticisms I faced when I first entered this genre forced me to propel past the limitations that were put on me. act ii is a result of challenging myself, and taking my time to bend and blend genres together to create this body of work.” 

It doesn’t take a Beyoncé scholar to deduce that the experience where she didn’t feel welcomed was the 2016 CMAs when she performed “Daddy Lessons,” her first foray into the genre (and a personal fave) from Lemonade, with The Chicks. The performance was met with a tepid response from the in-studio audience and racist backlash from fans watching, including a trending #BoycottCMA hashtag. The story now goes that Beyoncé went home from that night and immediately started plotting her revenge. In this narrative, Cowboy Carter is a reaction to racism, born out of anger and exclusion. On the album’s staggering opening track, “Ameriican Requiem,” Bey sings “If that ain't country, tell me what is?” The Grammys also rejected “Daddy Lessons” when it was submitted for consideration in the country categories, Lemonade went on to win Best Urban Contemporary Album. The Recording Academy has notoriously awarded Beyoncé the most trophies in the show’s history, but has exempted her from winning its highest honour, Album Of The Year. 

After Jay-Z called out the Academy in a speech at this year’s Grammys, I wrote that he and Beyoncé should have stayed home. I pointed out how fruitless it is to beg for scraps from these legacy white institutions that exist to uphold the status quo. “You've got to keep showing up. Keep showing up. Until they give you all those accolades you feel you deserve. Until they call you chairman. Until they call you a genius. Until they call you the greatest of all time,” Jay-Z said at the Grammys. As I asked then, how many times should we “show up” just to be disrespected or ignored? And the thing is, Beyoncé has already been called a genius and the greatest of all time — maybe not by the Grammys or by the CMAs, but by her fans, by Black folks, and by critics at large. So I understand the pushback to this narrative. I understand why NPR’s Sheldon Pierce wrote about Jay-Z and Beyoncé’s “blank space,” pointing out that “in the Carters' ongoing push for acceptance, most roads seem to lead to a white establishment”. The piece goes on to say, “... what is curious about the efforts of pop's royal couple is how they've triumphed by just about any other metric, and how doggedly they still pursue the approval of a few institutions as the definitive appraisal of their worth. It's no one's place to tell them not to fight, but it may be time to recognise that fight as something other than activism.”

Points were made. But I think the assumption that what Beyoncé is trying to do with her music is anything resembling activism is where the disconnect, and the disappointment, begins. If you are looking to Beyoncé for a radical political statement, she’s already proven that to be a futile expectation. She's never going to "burn down the barn." What if the most progressive thing about Bey’s public persona is her musical evolution, the archival spirit in which she pays tribute to her predecessors and paves the way for her successors? I think that’s OK. I understand wanting one of the most famous women on the planet to speak out more, or for your favourite artist to reflect your personal beliefs. And especially when Bey has evoked the words of Nina Simone, who famously said “An artist's duty, as far as I'm concerned, is to reflect the times,” I get it. It’s frustrating. But I think we’ve learned in recent years — from the ill-advised early pandemic “Imagine” video to how clumsily Hollywood has handled speaking out against multiple ongoing genocides — that looking to celebrities as moral compasses or social champions is unnecessary and foolish. 

Beyoncé The Celebrity — the person who barely does press and who seemingly is consumed with institutional acceptance — is easy to project upon (the irony of Bey singing “I will be your projector” on the unrelated and captivating Cowboy Carter track “Protector” is not lost on me). That Beyoncé is a billionaire capitalist who is an easy target for valid criticism and scepticism. When that Beyoncé puts out an album cover with an American flag on it, it’s understandable that people would question the intent. But Beyoncé The Artist — the “Creole banjee b*tch from Louisianne” who has consistently delivered the best music of the past decade and who challenges herself creatively over and over to stunning results — is a historian and a Black Texan. She’s writing love letters to her birthplace, her matriarch in Ms. Tina, and her foundation. She’s also taking on characters of country, and weaving a fictional web of history and identity. In this context, the album cover can be interpreted as a nod to Black rodeo culture. (She made a similar statement with Renaissance, highlighting the roots of the Black house movement, and paid tribute to the Black queer origins of the genre.) Cowboy Carter is a richly layered text, steeped in Black Southern history — from referencing the Carter family, noted as pioneers of the genre, to Levi’s jeans, to Martell and country western movie influences to the country collaborators she chose to sing alongside her. Beyoncé is a musical archivist who, going back to the Simone quote from Homecoming (an ode to HBCUs, another example of Bey, the historian), is committed to pushing her Black audience to “get more aware of themselves and where they came from and what they are into and what is already there”. 

There is a debate to be had about who Cowboy Carter’s intended audience is, but when Beyoncé is telling us explicitly on tracks like “Sweet Honey Buckin'” that she’s more concerned about the music than winning awards, I’m inclined to believe her (even if her referring to awards at all could signal her caring more than she should). “AOTY [Artist of the Year], I ain’t win/ I ain’t stuntin’ ’bout them/ Take that sh*t on the chin/ Come back and f*ck up the pen,” she raps. For The New Yorker, Doreen St. Felix wrote that this lyric signalled that Beyoncé "loves the glow of institutional recognition" and that "It’s a line written to age poorly". But music journalist Taylor Crumpton interpreted the same line in her review for The Daily Beast as Bey boldly stating that, “little Black girls from the South can do anything, and you can’t tell them what to do because you’re not their mama. In layman’s terms, the Recording Academy and any other governing institution of music cannot police Beyoncé Giselle Knowles Carter, because they are not Tina Knowles. And therein lies the album’s true sense of joy and release.” 

When Beyoncé shows us the work she did to dive deep into country music’s Black ass past through the references on references in each track, the symbolism of every song, and the efforts to propel rising Black country stars, I refuse to dismiss this album as just a product of petty revenge or just as an urge to be embraced by the white establishment. It’s probably a bit of both, but mostly, it’s a culmination of the creativity of one of pop’s biggest music nerds. As the LA Times notes, “[Cowboy Carter] is as sprawling and as rigorous as we’ve come to expect from the most intellectually ambitious artist in music; it also can make you wonder — and this of course is easy for me to say — whether Beyoncé should stop seeking the approval of those who’ve shown themselves unworthy of bestowing.” 

That is likely easier said than done for an artist whose competitive nature got her to the pedestal she’s currently perched on. How do you tell the greatest artist of a generation to stop fighting for the recognition of her greatness? How do you tell Matthew Knowles’ daughter that she can stop hustling for accolades? Old habits die hard, but I also think that Beyoncé’s explanation may be that she’s not just hustling for herself anymore. When she sings, “You were only waiting for this moment to arise” (a slight update from the original Beatles lyrics) on “Blackbiird” to the echoes of Black women in country music who have looked up to her and are now staring insurmountable success in the face thanks to her, it made me tear up. In that moment, Bey’s motivation is clear, and it has more to do with those women and their careers than the country music industry’s validation. Not only has she changed their lives, she’s unlocked our hunger for more from these artists, and selfishly, she’s given us a breadth of Black writers who are now diving deep into their work and the genre’s history. Like with every Beyoncé drop, I’ve read some of the best work from Black music journalists (like Felix and Crumpton) on her album and its references. The centre of these conversations is undoubtedly Black — that’s the world that Beyoncé has unlocked.

“There is power in centring Black experience to take back narrative control of an art form, and doing so can lower the barrier to entry for those who might follow in her footsteps,” Pierce writes for NPR. “But two things can be true at once: Beyoncé can be tapping into a history she has every right to, and she can also be doing so in deference to governing bodies that will never truly see her.” And therein lies the contradiction at the crux of the discourse surrounding Cowboy Carter. It is clear that Beyoncé has already lowered the barrier for country music artists who have struggled to be seen in the genre. It’s clear that genres as a concept are limiting and rooted in white supremacy. By “showing up” to the Grammys and showing up to the CMAs by delivering an undeniably brilliant work of art that is very much country music, she is also participating in the very system that continues to suppress Black country artists. And while Beyoncé is spotlighting those musicians, I haven’t figured out yet why she chose to include Post Malone (the weakest link on the album). Miley Cyrus gets a pass because she’s Dolly Parton’s goddaughter, the talent is insane, and listening to “II Most Wanted” is the closest I’ll probably ever come to snorting drugs. 

The contradictions shouldn’t negate the brilliance. We’re all dealing with hypocrisy every day we take part in capitalist systems that elevate some and oppress others. We’ve all been trapped by the limiting binaries and false promises of Black excellence. That’s not a defence, it’s an explanation. Here’s what we can be sure of: Beyoncé’s consistency lies in the calibre of the music. I know I’m probably incapable of being fully objective when it comes to Beyoncé or this album (I’ve had it on repeat nonstop for four days straight), but the scope of its creativity is astonishing. While contemporaries in her age bracket are perpetually stunted musically, Beyoncé is learning and growing. It’s inspiring and mystifying. She managed to take two of the most famous songs in history — “Blackbird” and “Jolene” — and make them her own, fresh, engaging and conversation-inducing. (I will fight anyone who doesn’t like Bey’s version of “Jolene.”) 

Cowboy Carter is undeniable and undefinable. Bey wasn’t lying when she said it isn’t “a country album, it’s a Beyoncé album.” As Crumpton writes, “Country, gospel, soul, blues, R&B, pop, psychedelic rock, and more all find themselves as key members of Beyoncé’s country. Her country is more dimensional and multifaceted than Nashville could ever dream of… Cowboy Carter is not a ‘country’ album and it doesn’t have to be, because Beyoncé is, in fact, country enough. There is no singular way to be possible, and despite what Nashville says or thinks or applauds, the Black country experience has never been that. Because for Black folks from the country, our validation comes from the Lord, and our mamas second, and Beyoncé is covered on both ends.” 

Bringing it back to “Blackbiird,” in 1957, when the Little Rock Nine became the first African American students to step foot in Little Rock’s all-white Central High School, they were met with harassment, ridicule, and threats. They were the symbols of desegregation in the South, but they were also just Black kids trying to go to school. When Paul McCartney wrote “Blackbird,” he was thinking of these nine teens, but more specifically, as he told GQ in 2018, “in England, a bird is a girl [or was in 1960s slang]. So I was thinking of a Black girl going through this — you know, now is your time to arise, set yourself free, and take these broken wings”.

There’s a line that could be drawn from the trauma of desegregation and its lasting effects to the racist exclusionary practices of the country music industry, but I also think that might be doing too much. Cowboy Carter isn’t comparable to the work of civil rights activists — and it shouldn’t be expected to be. It feels silly to even make the comparison. And when a song about bigotry from the ‘60s feels just as fresh today, that’s not something to celebrate. But Cowboy Carter is an album that is joyful, boisterous, and triumphant, designed to make us feel good and make Black country artists feel seen. For Tanner Adell, Brittney Spencer, Tiera Kennedy and Reyna Roberts, it has changed their lives. It has sparked curiosity for history in a generation plagued by book bans, widespread misinformation, and a crippling lack of reading comprehension. 

After the album dropped, on her Instagram, Tina Knowles shared a story from The Hollywood Reporter called “Beyoncé’s ‘Cowboy Carter’ Boosts Streams for Black Country Acts on Spotify”. In the caption, she wrote that Beyoncé reacted to the piece by saying, “That’s awesome!!! That’s the best reward”. Ms Tina revealed that the exchange happened in a text thread where Beyoncé said, “I want to create a conversation with my art, I want people to research and learn for themselves. I want to spark interest and shift the narratives and myths. Salute to Linda Martell, Charlie Pride, Ray Charles, Darius Rucker… and all today’s young artists that are still fighting to be let in… salute to your bravery and confidence. There is room for us all.”  

Beyoncé’s “best reward” is the strides she’s seeing these country artists make in an industry that has systematically shunned them. I think the real prize would be if these young artists bask in their newfound success and refuse to fight to be let into places that don’t deserve them. The greatest award would be that the Black folks researching and learning for themselves realise that, ultimately, the quest for validation will always lead you right back here, still fighting to be let in. That’s the biggest lesson Beyoncé and Cowboy Carter could teach us. I’ll leave you with lyrics from the album’s opening track that are vague enough to be left up to interpretation, but feel — purposely or not — like they are a part of Beyoncé’s syllabus. On “Ameriican Requiem,” she sings, “Nothin’ really ends/ For things to stay the same, they have to change again… Them big ideas are buried here.”