Beyoncé has been a showbiz fixture for nearly three decades, but for all the caps she's worn, the Houston-bred megastar's cowboy hat has stayed within reach.
And now with Cowboy Carter, the 42-year-old has created a full-throated ode to her southern roots, a 27-track blowout of an album flavoured with strings, pedal steel guitar and twang.
The second act of her Renaissance trilogy will continue its global drop as the clock strikes midnight across time zones.
Prior to the new album's release, Beyoncé had already topped the charts with the first two singles off the album — Texas Hold 'Em and 16 Carriages, dropped during February's Super Bowl.
Nevertheless, her popularity and influence — she has more Grammy wins than any other artist in the business — have brushed up against the overwhelmingly white, male gatekeepers of country music, who have long dictated the genre's perceived boundaries.
She notably received racist comments after performing what was then her most country song to date, Daddy Lessons, at the 2016 Country Music Association Awards alongside The Chicks.
But Beyoncé, a Texan raised by a mother from Louisiana and father from Alabama, pushed forward with her country project, the announcement of which magnified a wider conversation on the long history of black artists in country music spaces, and persistent racist backlash.
Beyoncé tackled the perceived "controversy" over her full country turn on the track Ameriican Requiem.
"They used to say I spoke, 'Too country' / Then the rejection came, said I wasn't, 'Country enough' / Said I wouldn't saddle up, but if that ain't country, tell me, what is?"
Beyoncé sings on the song that mashes gospel and classical rock influences, with musical allusions to the Buffalo Springfield classic For What It's Worth.
"Tread my bare feet on solid ground for years / They don't, don't know how hard I had to fight for this."
True to Bey
The album is rife with references both in lyric and style, a honkified celebration of country-western's musicography and influences that's also steeped in dance, soul and funk.
And Cowboy Carter features sign-offs from genre elders, including confirmation of a long-rumoured cover of Dolly Parton's beloved Jolene and appearances from Willie Nelson.
Beyoncé also covers Paul McCartney's White Album classic Blackbiird, which she stylises with a double-i spelling.
McCartney wrote the 1968 song about the Little Rock Nine, nine black teenagers who became Civil Rights Movement icons when they were the first to enter a formally white-only high school in Arkansas, ushering in desegregation in the US south.
Beyoncé deftly displays country's own twists over the decades, including on a psychedelic soul mashup that samples Nancy Sinatra's classic These Boots Are Made For Walking.
And Sweet Honey Buckiin' incorporates hip hop and house with strums on loop, among her songs that hat-tip to the first act of Renaissance, which celebrated electronica's black origins and evolution.
Tanner Adell and Willie Jones, both acclaimed black country artists, feature on Cowboy Carter, as do Miley Cyrus — Parton's goddaughter — and Post Malone, a pop-rap star who has also vowed his own country album.
Texas Hold 'Em, the album's lead single, includes Rhiannon Giddens — who often uses her platform to emphasise the African American roots of country — on the banjo and viola.
"Whenever a black artist puts out a country song, the judgement, comments, and opinions come thick and fast," the Grammy-winning Giddens, wrote in a recent column in The Guardian.
According to Giddens, backlash over Beyoncé's latest work is not "about anything other than people trying to protect their nostalgia for a pure ethnically white tradition that never was".
Holly G, who founded the Black Opry to showcase black artists in country three years ago, told AFP prior to the album's release that "country music fans typically like to think of themselves as traditionalists, which is a bit ironic because black people invented country music".
"There's always that pushback when there's something new or something different coming into the space," she said. "Unfortunately for them, she's much more powerful than they are."
And no matter how Nashville reacts to Cowboy Carter, Beyoncé has made it clear she'll have the last word.
"This ain't a country album," she posted recently.
"This is a 'Beyoncé' album."
AFP
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2024-03-29 01:29:43Z
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