What Critics Got Wrong About Beyoncé's New Album
...and other thoughts on Cowboy Carter
“This ain’t a country album. This is a Beyoncé album”, were the words that were projected onto the Guggenheim as part of the promotional campaign for Cowboy Carter, the second act of Beyonce’s Renaissance series.
If, at the time, that seemed like little more than a marketing slogan, now it very much feels like an accurate descriptor of an album that traverses genres and defies easy categorization.
In the third and fourth decades of her musical career, Beyoncé has transitioned from an artist who merely makes good music to one who makes music that you cannot imagine anyone else making. Nowadays, Beyoncé albums aren’t merely expected to be good, they’re expected to be ground-shifting, singularly ambitious, high-concept works of epochal significance.
Cowboy Carter is another album from Beyoncé designed in this vain; a sweeping interrogation of country music’s past and present, fit with features from Post Malone, Miley Cyrus, and Linda Martell, and over half a dozen interludes; clocking in at an exhaustive run time of 78 minutes.
Beyonce’s 8th solo album has its fair share of excellent moments - among them, the excellent mission statement opener “Ameriican Requiem”, the story-telling epic “16 Carriages”, the lightly melodic “Bodyguard”, the finger-picked meditation “Daughter”, and the sweet mother-daughter ode “Protector”.
But Cowboy Carter is the first Beyoncé album in a while that fairs better as a collection of some great songs than it does as a front-to-back statement. The LP’s eclecticism can read as placelessness and the reliably pristine production can border on sterile in places. Meanwhile, the covers of “Blackbird” and “Jolene” are superfluous, if pleasing, and the lyrical changes on the latter undercut some of the emotive power of the original.
Nowadays, Beyoncé albums aren’t merely expected to be good, they’re expected to be ground-shifting, singularly ambitious, high-concept works of epochal significance.
Still, there’s a lot more to like about Cowboy Carter than there is to dislike, and what I admire most about the album is that it attempts to learn from country music’s past and offer a more inclusive and exciting blueprint for its future. This comes after a year where the genre felt frustratingly tethered to its most backward-looking, regressive tendencies.
What frustrates me far more than Cowboy Carter’s odd misfires is the fawning critical coverage it has received from some quarters.
To be clear, I have no problem with anyone awarding the album five stars. Given Beyonce’s irrefutable talents and the sheer ambition of her latest outing, I can see why someone would deem it a classic (indeed, Pitchfork’s Julianne Escobedo Shepherd wrote an excellent Best New Music review for it). But much of the coverage of Cowboy Carter has crossed the line from glowing to sycophantic.
Rolling Stone, while hosting a respectable and well-considered five-star review of the album, has been breathless and uncritical elsewhere in their coverage of the new LP - with quite literally every other post on their music page dedicated to the album. The site has managed to squeeze out nearly two dozen articles related to Cowboy Carter within the last week.
The worst offenders, however, have been Page Six, whose review of the new album suggested only a cursory knowledge and appreciation of the country genre’s past and present. “Beyoncé revives a dying genre” was the outlet’s verdict. I assume such a statement was designed as a rebuke of the Morgan Wallen’s and Jason Aldean’s of the world, but it instead feels like an insult to the many excellent, and often under-recognized, artists keeping the genre alive and well. Many of them, like Brittney Spencer and Willie Jones, are even featured on this very album.
Being a good critic does not require criticizing every album that comes your way, but it does require applying a critical eye to the sort of sycophancy that follows an A-list superstar like Beyoncé - or at least not actively participating in it. At a time when music criticism as an industry seems to be contracting on an almost daily basis, it is incumbent upon critics to demonstrate the vitality of their career via what they write - something which is lost when we become indistinguishable from the hoards of salivating stans on Twitter.