COWBOY (CARTER) LIKE ME 🇺🇸
By country, do you mean The United States of Beyoncé Knowles-Carter and Taylor Swift? If so, I get why it’s divided…
Hi again! This is part three of a four-part series on Taylor Swift as a cultural topic. Today is all about Beyoncé — and maybe a little Kacey Musgraves, too — which means it’s *obviously* the most important one to date. You can read part one and part two of the series here. Paid subscribers can listen to this post, read by me, at the very bottom behind the paywall. Happy reading!
Cowgirl time.
The most important judicial opinion of our generation, according to The Last Great American Dynasty theory and me, is Knowles-Carter v. Swift. It is a decision between the Americas: American Requiiem v. Miss Americana and the Heartbreak Prince. It is a ruling between two top-tier yeehaws: Cowboy Carter v. Cowboy Like Me. It is a battle of two states as well as estates: Texas Hold ‘Em v. Florida!!!, yes, with all three exclamation marks.
Taylor Swift is a songwriting prodigy, a talented musician, and an endlessly fascinating purveyor of celebrity. Beyoncé Knowles-Carter is an unparalleled performer, an industry trailblazer (Taylor has taken many notes from her, respectfully), and a relatively private, typically comment-less, enigma. Both are selling out stadiums — globally — multiple nights in a row. Both are more talented than any man I can think of. Both are arguably the biggest stars of our time for very similar and very different reasons. And both love to mention America, a lot. That’s why we cannot talk about the current musical and cultural landscape without talking about the both of them in tandem.
The two women I care and think about the most— besides my mom, my nana, and God herself — are Beyoncé Giselle Knowles-Carter and Taylor Alison Swift. (My friends and family will not be offended by this. They understand.) I almost titled this installment in the series, “I’m going to be canceled because I am about to juxtapose my favorite two female artists in a public space and this is why Kanye got in trouble,” but then I didn’t. Because I am not.
I have no interest in being cruel or sensational when it comes to my two favorite artists, whom I hope to meet in heaven someday (read: after this, Tree Paine will never let that happen). I do have an interest, though, in talking about why we, as people, do the things we do — and who, in the same or different spaces, is allowed to do them. I do have an interest, as a Libra, *bats eyes*, in what is fair. And what is fair often goes unsaid.
To be extremely clear: My intent is not to casually compare two women. My intent — as my editor Rebecca so eloquently pointed out to me while I debated If I Should Go There or Not — is to examine two women’s varying abilities to have very different relationships with fame, with music, and with identity. Comparing female artists and women in general is lame. But I am a woman, so I’m exempt. I’m kidding. But truly. It’s time for this to be addressed.
Under oath, it is my duty to take the stand on the highest court in the land, which for these purposes, is
. I’m going to take my horse to the old town road. Are you coming or what?
The album.
For Beyoncé, and almost any musician, an album is a way to cope with and understand an event, person, or moment in one’s life. But to Beyoncé, an album isn’t just a diary, and it is more than a collection of smart lyrics and pleasing sounds. The album is a tool. The album — her albums since 2016’s Lemonade — are texts. They are history books. They are cultural transcripts meant to be cracked opened.
When it comes to Bey, there is nowhere else to start (sorry, Cater 2 U fans) for me than with this album, which was famously snubbed for the Album of the Year GRAMMY that went to Queen Adele instead. (We love a talented, self-aware Queen. I bow to you, Adele.)
In this album, Beyoncé used her personal experience with infidelity within her marriage (That elevator entanglement…) to draw parallels to the larger history of Black generational trauma, American slavery’s devastating and lasting psychological effects on marriage and family today (That’s for another day), motherhood, and womanhood. (I love that she incorporates other art forms, like poetry from Warshan Shire.) I cannot emphasize enough how badly you need to listen to this podcast, Dissect, which decodes the meaning of each song, each line, and each lyric on the album on your next road trip. Honestly, maybe stop reading this right now and just go listen.
Then, on the two-thousand and twenty-second year, God gave us her next studio album: RENAISSANCE. This summer marked two years of the awe-inducing, industry-shaping Beyoncé project. The first album in the three-act trilogy, Renaissance was a carefully curated, global reintroduction to the rich roots of the deeply historical genre borrowed by many types of music today: house music.
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The 16-song album speaks to her own personal relationship with the genre, while also paying deep homage to the Black queer culture that birthed it. The album was inspired by and dedicated to her late family member, Jonny, who passed away from an AIDS-related illness at the beginning of her career. She has spoken many times (and let’s note…she hardly speaks!) about how hard that loss was for her; how Jonny helped raise her and her sister, designed some of her first stage costumes, and was “the first person to expose [her] to a lot of the music and culture that serve as inspiration for [Renaissance].”
The music features a joyful lyrical ode to him (“Uncle Jonny made my dress” in “HEATED”), as well as numerous samples of both popular and lesser known underground drag voices like Big Freedia and Kevin Aviance in addition to 1970’s Harlem ballroom dance imagery, language, and callouts. On tour, trans and queer dancers from the incredible performance troupe, the Dolls, joined — and brought the house down — at each show. And then this year, one month before Taylor’s THE TORTURED POET’S DEPARTMENT was released, SHE DID IT AGAIN.
Saddle up.
If Renaissance, as Kyle Munzenrieder writes, is “a studied love letter that elevates unsung heroes of Black queer culture,” then COWBOY CARTER — act ii of her musical project — is a reclamation and celebration of both country music and Beyoncé’s country roots.
Beyoncé, who is a proud Houston, Texas native, was notoriously picked on as a young performer for her Southern accent. She was encouraged to hide this part of her identity in her early career. When she rebelliously embraced it in subsequent years — like wearing Destiny’s Child outfits that paid homage to her love for cowboy culture and horses, or later, performing her country song “Daddy Lessons” from Lemonade at the 50th Country Music Awards (the performance was infamously scrubbed from the Country Music Association YouTube channel after baseless backlash) — it was made clear to the biggest superstar in the world that she was not welcome in that space; that she was crossing a boundary by considering her work country music. So she made a whole album based on the experience.
In the Culture Study podcast episode “The Country Heart of Cowboy Carter,” writer Elamin Abdelmahmoud speaks about Beyoncé’s recent works as projects of repatriation. “It’s a project of musical ideas that have been divorced from their history and that is not going to sit well with Beyoncé.”
In the 2024 album, Beyoncé’ revisits the Black history behind country. She explores these ideas and provides subtle and not-so-subtle (don’t say it…don’t say it…DADDY!) lessons on the origin of the music, down to specific instruments that pull from ancestral techniques (the banjo — played by a famous Black banjo player Rhiannon Giddens in “TEXAS HOLD ‘EM” — is a key instrument in the genre that has African diasporic origins), as well as her own upbringing in the south.
The opening track, AMERICAN REQUIIEM — which elements of Buffalo Springfield’s protest song “For What It’s Worth (Stop, Hey What’s That Sound)” — wants you to know exactly where she’s coming from during a crescendo in the second half of the first song:
Looka there, liquor in my hand
The grandbaby of a moonshine man
Gadsden, Alabama
Got folk down Gavelston, rooted in Louisiana
They used to say I spoke too country
Then the rejection came, said I wasn't country 'nough
Said I wouldn't saddle up, but
If that ain't country, tell me, what is?
Plant my bare feet on solid ground for years
They don't, don't know how hard I had to fight for this
When I sing my song
“She’s just taking all these ideas back,” Abdelmahmoud continues. “She does it for house and techno music, which has become largely disembodied from its Black history. Then with a single album, she manages to recreate [this] history or sort of replace [it] up front.”
How can you be shut out of your own history and identity? Beyoncé will tell you how and then do it better than you.
Dead ass.
Each musical decision in this album — from how she says certain words (“We wanna welcome you to the Beyoncé Cowboy Carter: Act II, AH” in “YA YA”) to images and symbols in each song (“Two hands to Heaven, wild horses run wild” in “II HANDS II HEAVEN”) — points back to its thesis: this singular idea of country music (*cough* or just, I don’t know, our country *cough*) that certain listeners hold so preciously and defend so aggressively isn’t even its truest, most original form of the music that they claim it to be. The project, Abdelmahmoud points out, is saying, “You’ve been lied to your whole life if you think country music is a certain set of characteristics.”
How can you be shut out of your own history and identity? Beyoncé will tell you how and then do it better than you.
Country music was influenced by a variety of rich musical traditions, heavily including those of enslaved Black people. Early country music, Harvard’s Michael F. Bido writes, “was often rebranded or stolen from the hymns and field songs of Southern enslaved people, as well as from professional, Black musicians.” Yet, in the early 1900s, country songs performed by Black artists were deemed “race records” by a powerful white scout in the music industry named Ralph Peer once he “discovered” this type of music (Christopher Columbus Columbia Records lol), and white folks performing the same style of music was dubbed “hillbilly music.”
It was decided that “race records” would be strictly sold to Black audiences, and “hillbilly music” would be sold to white audiences. And that’s how genres (Beyoncé samples the first commercially successful black female artist in country music Linda Martell saying genres are a “funny little concept”) — similar to segregation — is in some ways a byproduct of racism.
Not country.
“Country music has been allowed to be expansive,” Abdelmahmoud says in the podcast. “It’s a matter of who’s not allowed to be included in that expansion.”
There is current, modern proof existing today. Abdelmahmoud brings up the widely beloved Kacey Musgraves 2018 album, Golden Hour (which I too love and adore). “Golden Hour is purely sort of genre bending, genre blending exercises,” he says of the country album. It is. And for its work, it was rewarded the Album of the Year GRAMMY in 2019. Interesting.
“When you listen to Morgan Wallen,” Abdelmahmoud says about the popular country artist who has made the news for shouting the n-word at his neighbor, “you’re listening to snap drums on a Morgan Wallen record and those are explicitly hip hop snap drums.”
Abdelmahmoud continues: “I think Beyoncé is trying to say, ‘If this genre will continue to sort of borrow from other genres in order to expand itself as a commercial enterprise, I think we need to get back to the artistic enterprise.’”
Alright, alright, so it’s a 27 song-long album — nearing Taylor’s 31 — which can be considered excessive. But the difference between this album and TTPD is that every single God-tier second serves a purpose. Every single line, word, sound, and mention has an intention.
This is the reason why I love Beyoncé so much, particularly her musical evolution since 2016. Beyoncé doesn’t make songs. She builds public libraries! She curates free museums! “She’s coming to you as a historian and an archivist,” says Abdelmahmoud, “who can say, ‘Here are all the tools you need to understand how we got to this musical moment.’” I love Taylor for a similar reason, except the library she maintains contains multitudes on one topic: herself.
Choices, choices.
I’ve been thinking a lot about choices. Public figures have privilege, in general. Yet, we the people have the privilege to largely say or do the wrong thing without a million people reading about it. We the people have the privilege to say something accidentally uninformed or unintentionally insensitive and hurt someone (sometimes, someone we love) with our behavior or language. Public figures can’t really afford to make mistakes. But what about choices?
Beyoncé has used her new pinnacle of success — and a certain creative freedom that comes with it — to utilize her music as a way to explore the greater world and how her story fits into a history that came before her. Her recent music speaks to communities locked out of their own genre. Her recent music says, “We’re here.” Her recent music pays homage to country greats (like Dolly Parton and Willie Nelson, who have both spoken to racial disparities and equal rights), featuring current Black country musicians (like Nigerian American artist Shaboozey and Louisiana-native musician Willie Jones, who are both known for “playing with genre, bridging hip-hop and country”), and spotlighting the next generation of rising Black female country artists (I love Brittney Spencer!) on a beautiful cover of “Black Bird” by Paul McCartney of The Beatles (which McCartney has spoken about being inspired by the civil rights movement in the Southern United States).
Taylor Swift is on a sold-out world tour where people are tailgating on hills and in parking lots just to hear her in person. She is, arguably, the most famous she’s ever been with the most power she’s ever had. And what did she choose to do? Release a 31 track-long album about everyone being mean to her for her choice in boyfriend, who did racist impressions on an audio show, let’s musicians in her immediate circle of friends open for her (she famously just started letting female artists actually duet with her instead of just doing her background vocals, lol), and allegedly (allegedly!) drops new remixes and versions of her albums to “chart block” younger artists like Chappell Roan from reaching #1. At a peak moment in her career, she had the opportunity to do anything. And she chooses to do all of this.
The core.
At the core of both of these musician’s work is the important and admirable act of saying, “What I feel matters, too” — especially when for so long, you’ve been directly and indirectly told as a woman or a woman of color that it doesn’t. Because you’re a starry-eyed teenage girl with curly hair and you know nothing about the world yet and your emotions are inconsequential and silly, or because you’re a young brown girl who is encouraged to shut up and sing urban music and be grateful, or because you’re making billions of dollars so what you’re going through can’t be that bad.
These artists and their albums are, ultimately, more alike than different when it comes to one of the most important things art or music can do. When the record stops spinning or the album ceases to play on both of these 2024 projects as well as many of their others, you think. You feel something.
The difference, though, is that Taylor Swift picks and chooses when she feels a responsibility or obligation to speak to an issue or include a greater human narrative beyond herself. Beyoncé is constantly looking at how she fits into a larger history that came before her. And I’m not talking about a $17 million dollar beach house that was previously owned by a white party-throwing oil money widow or silent film star Clara Bow dubbed “the It girl” of her generation or Greek mythology prophetess Cassandra who predicted the future but was never believed (The Kanye of it all makes sense here, but instead, Taylor Swift said about this song: “Read into this what you will based on our current social and cultural climate.” Girl…what?!). One, again, is a library of herself. One is a library to the context of all in which she lives and what came before her!
Both feel, and both feel badly about bad things that happen, but what happens after that feeling is of great contrast.
I think a lot about how Taylor and Beyoncé also identify with Christianity in various songs and speeches. What Dr. Rev. Jacqui Lewis said in her newsletter Fierce Love a few weeks back got me thinking: “Ubuntu theology—belief that I am because we are, that the individual cannot flourish in a culture that is not well—did not originate within Christianity. It has been an essential part of Black life from our ancestral roots in Africa; deep wisdom that exposes the simultaneous shortsightedness and selfishness of individualism and whiteness. But it’s also the reason why so many Black ancestors embraced Christianity—they saw what they knew to be true in Rabbi Jesus’ teachings.”
I can see this one truth — one I’ve felt my whole life as a Black individual — so clearly in both of their music. Beyoncé brings us back to the world. Taylor Swift brings us back to ourselves. Both of these are inherently valuable. Yet one has been more publicly rewarded and critically applauded while the other has been skipped over and discounted in the same arena over and over. It makes me think: What are we rewarding and recognizing in our own lives?
Taylor Swift makes really good music about her woes. Beyoncé makes really good music that drives attention to the bigger picture. Taylor tells us about what we know. Beyonce tells us about what we don’t. Taylor creates a language. Beyoncé creates a conversation. Taylor tends to cower at true complexity. Beyoncé rises and meets it. Taylor retreats from discomfort whenever it does not benefit her and calls it “softness” (her word, I guess, for white fragility) because she can. Beyoncé descends into discomfort in hopes of making the future less uncomfortable for others. Taylor Swift cares about what people think of her legacy. Beyoncé cares about legacy, period.
I guess what I’m really trying to say is this: At a new height in her career, Beyoncé decided to make music about “we.” At a new height in her career, Taylor decided to make music about “me.” Is that unreasonable? Is it wrong? No, not necessarily. It’s simply a choice. And it’s a privilege, for sure, to only have to think about your story alone.
Thanks for reading In Deep with Mia Brabham Nolan! Subscribe for free to receive new posts, or become a paid subscriber to help support my work (and pay my incredible editor, Rebecca). All silly little opinions are my own.
Next time, in the final installment, we’ll discuss Taylor Swift and the upcoming election. I’ll be on my honeymoon (!!!) in Greece for two weeks, so see you in your inbox for part four later next month!
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