Cowboy Carter and Country Music's Identity Crisis

 

Country music has an identity crisis. 

It isn’t just that country music—and much of southern music—has long appropriated styles from Black artists, co-opting, colonizing, then gatekeeping, it’s also that, in spite (or perhaps, because) of this, country music has never been able to find its center or come to a relational identity. The polished Nashville sound of the 50s had little room for the likes of Dolly Parton, Loretta Lynn, and, of course, the outlaws such as Waylon, Willie, Cash, and Kristofferson, all men who bucked the Nashville system in varying capacities but who somehow managed to become icons in their later years. Johnny Cash, whose golden years sundowned with his famed American albums, producing covers of songs made famous by heavy metal bands, including Nine Inch Nails’s “Hurt,” which is perhaps the Man in Black’s most defining piece.

One could argue that Cash’s later works were embraced because he “made them country,” but this begs a larger conversation. Country for whom? And country by what standards? In the early aughts, when he was producing this sound, country music was ablaze with the beginnings of its bro-country, rockstar, pop segue, with artists such as Rascal Flatts embodying boy-band vibes and Gary Allan espousing a rocker chic. Toby Keith blazed through stadium rock anthems (not to mention the almost single-handed obliteration of the working man in country music), as did Trace Adkins. And let’s not forget Jason Aldean’s crossover pop performances with Kelly Clarkson and his early hip-hop influenced rendering of Red Dirt’s “Dirt Road Anthem.” And don’t even get me started on the irony—or outright racism—that is John Rich’s rise to fame with Big ‘n’ Rich. 

And for everyone that bemoaned Christ Stapleton’s loss at the Grammys, well, I think his blues speak for themselves. 

Ultimately, the reality is that, with or without Black folks, country music still doesn’t know itself.

Which is part of why Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter presents an existential crisis: 1) they cannot articulate why Cowboy Carter isn’t country and 2) they can’t process the complexity of Beyoncé’s self-assured treatment of country music.

Cowboy Carter stands as an indictment of white America and a celebration of Black, southern America. But it hardly distinguished one from the other for they, though always placed at odds by those in power, cannot be separated. It’s an album that doesn’t equivocate on its values, firmly influenced by its southern, country roots, while also not leaving any room for the naysayers. It anticipates the chatter, the talking, the “bitchin’,” responding, ignoring, or dancing over in kind. But most powerfully, Cowboy Carter is a masterful vision: at once honoring country’s storied Black roots, manifesting its complicated present, lauding and laying the groundwork for its future, while also imagining a world of the country that could have been had Black country musicians, artists, thinkers, and consumers not have been excluded from the arena.

Cowboy Carter is somehow a manifestation, a joy, a hope, a candle in the wind; a testament of labor, of love, of liberation; a sassy, snarky call out of the haters, pretenders, players, plagiarizers; an album that doesn’t take itself too seriously but, each piece a stitch in a quilt that, in Beyonce’s artful hands, tells (“American Requiem”), unravels (the rest of the album), then retells again (“Amen”) an old new story. Because “nothing ever ends; for things to stay the same, they have to change again.”

This stitching, unstitching, raveling and unraveling might weave a flag, a tapestry, a wedding veil, a baby’s baptismal blanket, or a funeral shroud, but it tells a story of many lives, giving voice to legacies expansive as a Western sky that would otherwise have been lost to history, that have too long been dismissed.

All while playing the “traditional” country game, couched in familiar entertainment modes ala radio djs and variety shows, Cowboy Carter weaves tales of deceit, murder, fantasy revenge, Wild West rebels and witches, all while cloaked under the guise of denimed butts and not-so-subtle triple entendres on Girl Scout Cookies. 

Cowboy Carter is also a testament of woman: of woman’s work and labor, so often unseen, unrewarded. Beyoncé is vulnerable as an artist, intense as a mother, and dedicated (though hella watchful) as a wife and sexual being. Woman, specifically Black woman, is healer, community builder, raiser of children, husbands, and the community. 

Black artistry is community, hence the oft-berated amount of contributors on the album. And this is part of why country music has such a problem: that masculine, traditionally white rugged individuality that so often permeates American culture but doesn’t tell the fullest story. 

You cannot separate the album. While the songs can be enjoyable and meaningful standing alone, to truly receive the critical cultural message of Cowboy Carter, it must be consumed in total, in order. To attempt to dissect it without its context would be to read a novel with chapters missing or out of order. 

Much like attempting to understand American history without Black America.

Country music has an identity crisis. Beyoncé might’ve helped, but she was shunned. That shunning ultimately produced a dissertation in album form. 

Thank god for that.