Cowboy Carter starts on the wrong foot with “AMERIICAN REQUIEM”. I have never come across a music trend I dislike as much as pop music’s current fascination with mining out old hits. It made the last Ariana album unlistenable. There’s nothing clever about recognizing some of the most famous music of the past few decades and I’m insulted by pop musicians who think so little of me.
It’s further weakened by how thoughtless the samples are. If Beyoncé wanted to make an arena rock album, I would have found that exciting but the best thing I can say about adding Who samples to an ostensibly country album is that they just don’t fit.
This is the first question I run into when I try to be charitable to this album and I really want to be charitable to this album. I think Southern Beyoncé is her best version. I love “FORMATION”, I love her leaning into this identity, I love a lot of those pieces that come through in this album, even as I struggle with my dislike of the album as a whole.
This question is whether to approach the album as a country album or a Beyoncé album. I was really hoping for the former. I wanted her to further the shake-up of a moving but reactionary genre. I’m not going to fault her for choosing the latter though, especially when some of her Beyoncé music here is very good.
She sings well in “BODYGUARD” and the languorousness is so skillful. There’s no country in the track but good music is good music. “TYRANT” also doesn’t really fit in but is great pop. The beat is propulsive and giddy-up is a great call. it reminds me of “Savage” and I’d love to see her do more of this.
But even in her comfort zone, we start to see how overstuffed this album is. “II HANDS II HEAVEN” is too standard a ballad. “SPAGHETII” tries for a grit and menace that I know that Beyoncé has but cannot seem to bring to bear here. “LEVIIS JEANS” has just a touch of country but it’s too light to be interesting and the Post Malone feature is subpar and doesn’t fit with the album at all.
Too much of the country doesn’t hold up as well. “DESERT EAGLE” starts with a fantastic muddy blues guitar but it’s not allowed to grow over the course of the song and Beyoncé puts nothing interesting or fitting over it. The two parts don’t work together at all. It transitions very well into “RIIVERDANCE” though, which in turn takes an interesting concept but then doesn’t really do anything much with it. I needed less repetition from it. It’s fun guitar work but then the pop overwhelms it. Even ”16 CARRIAGES” is weak. It could have been interesting with Beyoncé’s voice over some simple instrumentation, it could have been what this album promised but there’s no evolution and so it runs out. She gets a lot of emotion into the ballad though
I really appreciate bringing Willie Jones in for “JUST FOR FUN”, but I would have liked him to have more space. It’s a good country track but his fragment stands out for being normal. I would have liked Beyoncé to try a bit of country singing herself. She was excellent in “Savage” for really leaning into triple-time and the album would have done better for a bit of the same here. This results in Miley outsinging her a bit on “II MOST WANTED”. Country always does well for some roughness in the vocals and Beyoncé is too smooth. I would like this track but the two voices jar against each other. I would have preferred just Miley on this.
There’s some solid music in the country turn though. “PROTECTOR” is what the album should have been, country elevated by Beyoncé many skills and a personal track to boot. It’s a great track and you feel the South in it. The rhyme of protector and projector is too flat but that’s a minor burr in a great song.
“DAUGHTER” is also quite good I really like the folk strings in the background and the personal story. Her flow is great and when she accelerates a minute in, that works very well. I see the opera turn as a poorly integrated swerve but the song does a lot of things well.
I also like the country twanging in “ALLIGATOR TEARS”. This is more of the sound that I was hoping for. She brings herself into it. The result is less modern than I expected, it feels like something off a Prince album more than anything, but that’s interesting in itself.
“TEXAS HOLD EM” is a standout and a great choice for a single. It’s a fun, modern take on country. It uses her voice very well. It’s not very complicated but it’s fun enough to forgive that and that fun is most of what is missing from this album. Early Beyoncé used to be fun and I really miss that. This album is largely far too serious and doesn’t justify it.
I’m glad then that she highlights “YA YA.” It rocks a lot more than the majority of the filler in this album. It’s unfortunate then that it’s music that Janelle Monáe did a decade earlier and did better. It’s a good song but overlong and overstuffed and the “Good Vibrations” interlude is unnecessary garbage.
This mining of music is at its worst in the two covers. “BLACKBIIRD” might have been something interesting when you take the civil rights history of the song and the collective singing but honestly the Beatles’ politics were always shallow and Beyoncé’s branded politics are not much deeper. More fatally though, she’s overproduced and overworked it. It’s a gentle song, it needs to be handled with delicacy and Beyoncé is clearly not in the mood for that with this album. Also, I still have no idea why there’s so much British rock in this album.
It’s “JOLENE” that’s unforgivable though. I hate “JOLENE” enough to ruin the whole album. To reframe the song in this manner is incredibly disrespectful and just incredibly dumb. The original was startling in its sincerity and its vulnerability. To convert it in the most trite girl-power framing possible is to miss the point. It would be unbelievable from the maker of the “Run the World (Girls)”, the pinnacle of the girl-power statement, were it not for the cynicism of the rest of this album.
Beyoncé’s goal with this album is not to push herself sonically or tune into her Southern roots or even to make great music. It is to consume country music with a look both to her legacy and to her bottom line. That’s why there’s a discourse-feeder like “JOLENE,” that’s why the Willie Nelson and Dolly Parton interludes are here, that’s why the album is overstuffed enough to game the charts and most damningly that’s why the album isn’t fun.
It largely succeeded at the goal too. It made a splash, it charted well and it might define an era for her. There’s even some solid music scattered here and there. I’d just like it if the music were the goal next time instead of merely the means to such an empty end.
Top Five Records 