Issue #107: Cowboy Carter Tour Report
Apologies for the slightly tardy newsletter delivery this week – but I have a good excuse. Yesterday, my daughter and I made the trip to Atlanta to see Beyoncé and the Cowboy Carter tour, and we just rolled back into town tired and invigorated and filled up with that good kind of fired-up joy. Longtime DRTI readers know I make a habit of going to concerts with my kids, and I also wasn’t going to let this tour pass me by – I loved Cowboy Carter, and I am a longtime lover of “Daddy Lessons” and think that Beyoncé’s performance of that song with the Chicks at the CMAs is one of those cultural moments we should always be talking more about. Going with my daughter meant that I got to talk to her about what exactly this concert and these moments mean for the genre and beyond…and I also got to get lost away from my brain and dance my ass off, too, because eight year olds only want to hear so much of your bullshit.
The concert was incredible – amazing production, outrageous vocal performance (my daughter kept asking me, “how is she not even out of breath?”), cultural commentary that is Beyoncé’s public political voice. But you don’t need me to tell you how good of a singer she is, or how many classic songs and boundary pushing moments are part of her set. This is a country music newsletter, so let’s talk about the country parts.
Here's the thing: that is almost difficult to do, to parse out the “country” parts of the tour from the non-country, and I think that’s entirely the point. Cowboy Carter songs are spread out across the concert, and you realize that none of this is that far out of step with anything else she's done - and the outfits worn by both her and the audience, rooted in Black cowboy traditions and the YeeHaw agenda, don’t look dissimilar from how Beyoncé (and Destiny’s Child) has always styled herself.
Beyoncé has said – projecting it on the side of the Guggenheim – that Cowboy Carter ain’t a country album, it’s a Beyoncé album. White men with opinions love to interpret this in bad faith to claim that she shouldn’t be wining country awards or taking up country space, because she clearly doesn’t think she’s part of the genre or that this is a country album (don’t get me started on the motherfucker that is Gavin Adock, because he knows exactly what he is doing, which is using racist controversy to sell records when talent fails). I’m not arrogant enough to know exactly what Beyoncé’s intentions are, but I understood what she means here far more clearly than ever after seeing the show: that trying to brand herself as a certain genre while she is in the process of reclaiming whitewashed histories would be odd and pointless. Why should Black musicians have to check boxes to appease white gatekeepers? Why don’t we let Beyoncé be above genre the way we let other white popstars exist…or even Dolly Parton?
Side note on Dolly Parton. I enjoyed the Cowboy Carter version of “Jolene,” but it wasn’t my favorite moment: until I heard it live, complete with line dancers, second-line horns, Black female instrumentalists at the musical forefront and capped with Beyoncé on a giant glowing horseshoe that spun her across the audience, flanked by a dynamite performance of “Daddy Lessons.” I thought about how songs become classics, and what it means to have a Black reclamation of what has now become near traditional. I thought about how Dolly exists above genre now, while venturing into any kind of business or musical journey she likes (including a rock record). When do we let Beyoncé exist in that space? Will we ever?
Anyway, why chase a genre that chased you out – or why even get stuck on the idea of “genre" to begin with, a marketing tool that, in country music, first siloed Black performers into “race records”? These albums are about reframing history, not shaping yourself back into white boxes to make people comfortable. This is not a tour to think about siloing music. It's a tour to think about freeing it.
