For decades, Beyoncé has made genre hopping a hallmark of her career; the Houston-born singer’s music has embraced everything from reggaeton (“Standing on the Sun”) to EDM (“Sweet Dreams”) to rock (“Don’t Hurt Yourself”). A single album, or even song, can crisscross sounds with reckless abandon. Yet with her latest album, Cowboy Carter, Beyoncé breaks from her usual pattern—slightly—and homes in on a pretty specific theme: making the genre of country music, in particular, fit her, not the other way around.
Such a project from a multihyphenate pop star was always going to ruffle a few feathers. The Oklahoma country radio station KYKC sparked outrage when it turned down a fan’s request to play one of the album’s lead singles, “Texas Hold ’Em.” “We do not play Beyoncé on KYKC as we are a country-music station,” the station responded in a statement, before eventually bowing to pressures and reversing its stance. As a result, Cowboy Carter becomes as much of a listening experience as a query into who does and doesn’t get to participate in a genre. (Rapper Lil Nas X inspired a similar reckoning with his viral hit “Old Town Road” a few years ago.) Indeed, its spirit of inclusivity is one of the album’s greatest strengths: Plenty of names, both established and up-and-coming, Black and white, are invited to Queen Bey’s hoedown. Post Malone, Miley Cyrus, country singer Willie Jones, Nigerian American artist Shaboozey, and others feature.
The yeehaw agenda has, of course, seen a spike in popularity in recent years, with everyone from Lady Gaga to Dua Lipa to Troye Sivan issuing country-leaning tracks. And Western sartorial codes have reigned supreme both on the streets and the runways; just consider Pharrell Williams’s fall 2024 collection for Louis Vuitton men’s. Cowboy Carter is positioned as a follow-up (or second act) to 2022’s Renaissance, a widely popular album that featured inventive and bold explorations of house and dance music. Now, however, the world-building centers on more easily identifiable tropes and motifs. This is apparent from one of the album’s earliest tracks: “Blackbiird,” a Beatles cover, pulsates with a boot-tapping beat, twangy acoustic guitar, and accompaniment from a throng of contemporary Black female country singers (Brittney Spencer, Tiera Kennedy, and Reyna Roberts). That song, like the album more broadly, is both an homage to the past (elsewhere on Cowboy Carter, there are appearances from country greats such as Willie Nelson and Dolly Parton) and a bold celebration of the oft underappreciated contributions of Black artists to the genre; “The Linda Martell Show,” for example, spotlights a Black trailblazer who navigated country during Jim Crow. But Beyoncé’s more familiar hip-hop- and pop-leaning sensibilities are in evidence, too, making for a sprawling and ambitious album that touches on everything from adultery to familial roots to outlaw lovebirds. (Made up of 27 tracks, it runs for a commanding 78 minutes.) And yet, amazingly, it all fits together.
Among the record’s most poignant through lines is a searching interiority—particularly on tracks such as “Just for Fun,” “16 Carriages,” and “Oh Louisiana.” Here, Beyoncé leans into the art of storytelling that is so central to country music, reflecting on authenticity, roots, legacy, and purpose—and offering a sharp contrast to the unassailable pop-star veneer we typically see from the singer. The battle wounds of a lone star life—in this case, pop stardom—are presented in full view: “Don’t have time to waste, I have art to make,” she sings on “16 Carriages.” The theme of ephemerality returns in the chorus for “Just for Fun”: “’Cause time heals everything / I don’t need anything / Hallelujah / I pray to her.” And Beyoncé’s youngest daughter, Rumi Carter, is a credited artist on the ballad “Protector,” an iridescent song about uplifting and empowering someone else, even if only briefly.
At other moments on the album, it sounds as if we are receiving Texas by way of underground clubs in London or Berlin. “Riverdance” takes a banjo and, mesmerizingly, pairs it with an ambient EDM beat, flowing seamlessly into the trance-infused “II Hands II Heaven,” which, over the course of four minutes, crescendos into a rapturous, gospel-tinged vocal. From there, the singer mixes trap rap and a mean fiddle on “Tyrant,” singing, “I don’t like to sit up in the saddle, boy, I like to ride it.” On “II Most Wanted,” Miley Cyrus, with her distinctive lower register, provides an appealing contrast to Beyoncé’s incisive falsetto, anchoring the song almost like a male singer would in a more traditional country duet. Much like Renaissance, Cowboy Carter soars when freewheeling melodies and arrangements are allowed to spool out to delightful and unpredictable ends.
The album slots neatly into Beyoncé’s artistic canon, one that has often seen her buck against convention. Here, as at other points in her career, she resists being pigeonholed as a Black female artist by not only trying, well, everything but also excelling at it. Before its release, Beyoncé insisted that Cowboy Carter “ain’t a Country album. This is a ‘Beyoncé’ album.” But, in fact, it manages to be satisfyingly both.