Ever since Beyoncé – to quote the lady herself – “changed the game with that digital drop” via her self-titled fifth album, released without warning in 2013, she’s become the fixed point around which popular culture oscillates. Bandwidth-swallowing think pieces, detailed decoding of every lyric, plus an increasingly vexed right-wing America have kept her name on everyone’s lips. She wasn’t exactly a cult concern before, but the last decade has seen her move beyond mere superstar status, aided by 2016’s internet sleuth-facilitating infidelity opus Lemonade and 2022’s liberated, post-lockdown dance party, Renaissance.
That last album was billed teasingly as Act I, and now arrives the second part of a mooted trilogy. While Renaissance, with its celebration of the oft-ignored influence of Black queer dance pioneers, facilitated a healthy amount of debate, you could cobble together a hefty book on the discourse that’s already swirling around Cowboy Carter. Inspired by a less than welcome reaction to the Texan’s performance of her country single Daddy Lessons at the 2016 Country Music Awards – where she was dismissed as a “pop artist”, seemingly code for “Black woman” – it’s an album that takes country music by its plaid shirt collar, holds up its (mainly) male, pale and stale status to the light and sets it on fire.
