Issue # 52: How Beyoncé's 'Cowboy Carter' Bucked Expectation, With Taylor Crumpton

And what's next for the superstar.

We are officially one month removed from the Cowboy Carter excitement, a whole hoedown hullaballoo that resulted in a flood of takes and analysis — a flood to which we are contributing a little after the waters have calmed! Marissa and I chatted about it with Taylor Crumpton via Zoom alongside a number of our paying subscribers a few days after the album came out (if you want to get access to all our live events, become a paying subscriber today!). Taylor is a Dallas native, writer and critic who happens to be one of the foremost Beyoncé experts out there as well as a compelling music thinker when it comes to any number of genres including but not limited to country, rap and R&B.

Below is an edited excerpt from our talk, in which we discussed what we liked, what we wanted more of, how to manage expectations of massive pop stars and what it all Means anyway — if you’d like to listen to the conversation in its entirety, it’s available in full here in podcast form! - Natalie

NW: What did the Cowboy Carter rollout meant to you? Obviously you called it, and have been doing a ton of work around the release!

Outside of personal fulfillment, I think in terms of regionality and uplift and empowerment — in the Black community, we've yet to really reckon with what it means to be Black and to be proud to be from the South because of the Great Migration, and the plethora of anti-Black events that have happened in the past 10 to 15 years. So for her to exude that pride in something within our community, a community in which a lot of people aren't proud to be from the South unless it's Atlanta, is really interesting and intriguing to see. I hope that it creates more conversations within the Black community about us getting back in touch with the roots that we intentionally lost and forgot.

I think there is this love — but a secret love — that a lot of African-Americans have for country music, because of the ways in which it has been marketed and produced and heralded as a symbol of white nationalism and white pride and a lot of things that are anti-Black and harmful to us. In wrestling with my own identity — about what it means to be Black queer woman from Texas, how my grandparents found fulfillment and joy there, how this is an experience that so many of my family members living and dead have participated in — has allowed me to take this moment as a culmination of many parts that make me me and to be able to have my voice to be part of that conversation is really a blessing. 

NW: The shortest possible description of your career, I think, is that you are a very accomplished writer who's done a lot of work around music and especially hip-hop and R&B — including another Texan woman who's embraced cowboy culture, Megan Thee Stallion. 

Everybody keeps on forgetting it. I pointed it out on Pop Pantheon where I'm like, if we're going to talk about Thee Stallion, a Western woman and the Yeehaw Agenda, I don't understand how we haven't brought her up, especially when she posted a picture in a cowboy hat like mine with the spaghetti emoji, and was like, "Wow, 'Sweet Honey Buckin'' is gonna be a good song." I'm like, "Megan, if you're just telling us right now you're on the remix, let me know because I'm gonna need another inhaler."

NW: After all that anticipation, what was your initial impression of the album?

I had like 15 pages of notes. I have a big yellow legal pad that I keep next to me when I listen. I'm so intrigued, and I sound like a broken record, about Beyoncé and her relationship with masculinity and her relationship to fatherhood, and her relationship to men through the lens of her father. When she does the villain stereotype, the Outlaw, the man in black — she's been playing with the outlaw aesthetically in her fashions, right, and Willie Nelson being on there and his relationship to the outlaw movement...she's done her research about what it means to kind of be a radical or an outsider in a sense, and I think Dr. Francesco Royster does a good job of connecting that outlaw and outsiderhood to Blackness and the ways in which these white men in country were able to do that. But Beyoncé does it almost in a way of like flipping gender. I think she associates masculinity with violence, which is almost like a very feminist framework. But it's the violence that a girl can only experience from her dad, and that creates a tie to "16 Carriages" — like, "I see my mother crying/I see my dad lying." Lemonade: "You're just like my father." Like, is this just like something you're going to tease out into the end of time? 

Also, the duet with Miley really blew me away. I always love seeing a child star take ownership of their identity and really claim that. I was hurt by the lack of Zydeco because I really thought we were going to get some; I thought we were gonna get some Tejano as well. Maybe she'll give it to us visually. I still think she's toying with us because of the images that were on the tracklist, but I'm sad not to see those genres on there. Talking about the reviews, though maybe I'm glad we didn't have those two genres on there to be explained. The album was like half ballads, and then half dance music — which makes sense because this was supposed to be pre-Renaissance. So I think I also love how she's telling folks that country music is dance music depending on where you're at in the world. Her themes are so interesting, because it's the same theme — the Renaissance never ends, as she says, it keeps on going — but the ways in which she's using country to articulate it is very interesting.

MM: I was reading an article on "Jolene" today, which is a song I would love to talk about just in general. But that particular story ended with the theory that the narrator of Beyoncé’s Jolene is not in fact Beyoncé…it was her mother. 

She does possess a trickster spirit, right? The man of the crossroads is something that's said a lot in Hoodoo, but the man of the crossroads is also in the Western — that person who can shapeshift and transform. Beyoncé is so protective of Tina, because unfortunately they both have the experience of having their partner — the father of their children — disrespecting them. She has become so impacted by motherhood in a way where that is the person she will protect and champion, and the father is the face she puts on to be the aggressor or the assailant which is very interesting. She also plays with queer theory in a way that I don't think we really touched on: With all these songs, the majority of them really don't have gender pronouns too. She's just able to blend in and out of these power dynamics.

NW: Is it too overly simplistic to go all the way back to "If I Were A Boy"? And the Reba cover of it? 

MM: Someone asked that we bring up a piece by Yasmin Williams in The Guardian — the headline is, "Beyoncé’s country album drowns out the Black music history it claims to celebrate." I wanted to ask you what you thought about that argument that it's not elevating enough black voices in country music or educating enough on the history of black artists in country music. 

I think there is a way in which people expect her to do things that she has never said that she is going to do, in the way that you would like them to be done. That's like a genuine question I have about Beyoncé's autonomy and her agency, and will we allow her to make the country album she wants to make? There were a lot of expectations put on this album, and rightfully so — a lot of them are justified. However, she was never going to create the country album that I think a lot of people wanted of her, and that is okay. There may be someone who was inspired by this who does that. I think that she cracked the egg open, opened the door, to allow the next person to go and do that. But I never had an expectation that this was going to be a fully Black album. Because if this was a fully Black country album, there would still be something wrong with the artists she picked, or the track list, or the genres, or she included this artist when this artist needs more streams. Yes, she is Beyoncé. Yes, she's an institution. But she is human, and she does have agency and she does have autonomy. Maybe it's because I've just been like really in my misogynoir/misogyny bag but these critiques aren't made for anyone else. 

NW: I know we just talked about like, we don't want to project all our hopes and dreams for the album onto Beyoncé, and it's very easy to think about all the ways she might have gone, etc. But if she had chosen to feature any Texas artist — you're talking about Megan, so that's one person who maybe could be on a remix. But is there anybody else who you would have wanted to see?

I'm wanting Third Ward, Trill Yoncé. But at the same time, I would have loved to see her interpretation of honky tonk, of Western swing...Texas has given so much to country music in terms of subgenres. Still want Tejano, still want Zydeco. I think there's an argument that she could have just made a Texas country album.

I mean, there's too many counties in Texas, but she could have split it into a North and East, South and West — because as we know, every single region of Texas sounds completely different. What would have happened if she would have gotten to her Corpus Christi bag and done a Selena cover or what would have happened if she's doing more of that. El Paso mountain, I'm a cowhand thing. What if she did the trail ride from Fort Worth up? Cowboy Carter's about Amon Carter and about Cowtown and about Fort Worth and The Stockyards. I think there's a lot of possibilities she could have done with Texas mythology, but also we haven't seen the visuals so there's a chance she could dive into that there.

MM: Because you mentioned your ability to predict what Beyoncé will do, what do you think Act Three is gonna be? What's your prediction?

She recently brought up Rosetta Tharpe. Jack White posted a bouquet of flowers and a handwritten note from her. I think people forget she performed on the Chitlin' Circuit — so did Ike and Tina, so did Little Richard and a lot of the other Black pioneers of rock and roll. But there's also gospel. A lot of times, the rock and rollers got their musical footing in the church house. So I'm curious to see the church house turn into the juke joint and the juke joint turn into this next venue that I can't even imagine. But there's going to be a way she's going to visually tell us what's to come, and I'm betting on rock and roll and gospel. It is a revival, not a reclamation, because I think she's reviving a lot of lost things in American music and American history.

~Listen to the full conversation below!~