Have you listened to Cowboy Carter yet? No, but I mean all of it? All 27 tracks? All 78 minutes and 21 seconds? Don’t be ashamed if you haven’t. Beyoncé’s sprawling paean to country music is a formidable piece of work, created by a boatload’s worth of talent (seriously, check out how long those album credits are), full of luscious layered textures and inventive production, and dabbling in everything from acoustic, finger-picked folk to zydeco. It’s probably not one to gobble up in a single sitting.
Beyoncé’s hardly an outlier in this regard – Drake’s albums regularly nudge past the 80-minute mark, and Morgan Wallen’s 2023 chart topper One Thing at a Time was a preposterous 111 minutes long. And excess is hardly specific to music. So much of popular culture tends towards the lengthy these days, from films (including the current Oscar best picture winner) that require at least one mid-screening loo break to get through, to TV episodes that regularly nudge past the hour mark (or two hours in the case of Stranger Things), to podcast episodes that take multiple commutes to get through.
