Deep dive: COWBOY CARTER's AMERICAN REQUIIEM (OBSESSED #18)

A close analysis of the track that's rocking my damn world.

Mommy!

Let me first start out by saying that, good GOD, these represent abooout 8% of my thoughts on COWBOY CARTER. I could talk about this album, and Beyoncé, until I dropped dead from dehydration. There’s so much about her I love, like, relate to, and find personally inspiring about her as a creator: the artistry; the deep commitment to excellence; the fact that, clearly, this woman is an obsessive overthinker. (I’m convinced we have three things in common: being from Houston, being Virgos, and having OCD. Parkwood’s PR team has yet to divulge her private medical information to me, though…) Anyways! I just wanted to provide that context up top. This isn’t, like, an unbiased critical examination, but a critical examination from somebody who’d follow Beyoncé into a burning building. (I’m the one carrying the beet.)

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After seven days spent on a steady IV drip of COWBOY CARTER and not much else, the album has crystallized as a lush, sprawling opus that journeys across the galaxy of American musical traditions: country, yes, but also rock, funk, trap, Irish step, zydeco, Black bluegrass and, literally, dozens of other genres. Structured as a Western, COWBOY CARTER casts Beyoncé as a hero, as a protector of her family, as somebody who’s weathered far more than the self-appointed gatekeepers of country music who have historically excluded her, and other Black artists, from the genre. It’s an album that allows itself to be epic, and is wholly unapologetic in its lofty ambitions.

All the artists featured on COWBOY CARTER? They’re all Black country artists outside the Nashville machine. And that’s huge, knowing that COWBOY CARTER, by faaaar, is the biggest country album that’ll be released this year. It feels like a power switch, a correction to the historical ledgers, because COWBOY CARTER has already secured its spot in the American songbook. And, hmm. Is Morgan Wallen on the album? Kenny Chesney? Alan Jackson? Any of the white, massively successful stadium acts that, by excluding her from the genre, inadvertently spurred its creation? No, they’re not here. But Willie Jones is, and his mesh tank top just made Toby Keith’s groin twitch in his grave.

Throughout the album, Beyoncé’s lens is squarely set on country music as the entry point into a conversation about creative boundaries and gatekeeping, for reasons most people here are already familiar with: chiefly, her performance of “Daddy Lessons” at the 2016 Country Music Awards, and the deeply racist backlash from conservative country fans and artists alike that followed. (That reaction, of course, was just a blunt microcosm of how exclusionary country has been, has always been, was literally created to be!)

When popular recorded music was first able to be distributed and marketed in the 1920s, a decision had to be made. This is the South– do we keep all of the blues-based music together? That would mean white and black in one category. It was an easy answer at the time: no. This created two, in Hubbs’ words, “racially distinct marketing categories:” hillbilly and race. (No Depression)

Country music, as we fast-forward in time, it has grown out of that, and … whether they're at country radio stations, at the CMA, at the labels, at the publishers, they are upholding that system. (PBS)

I heard a woman in the row ahead of me yell, “Get that Black b---- off the stage!” (good LORD, a woman who was at the 2016 CMAs in an op-ed for MSNBC.com) 

After experiencing that rejection firsthand, on an extremely public stage, and in a way I imagine was deeply affecting and humiliating despite her confidence, Beyoncé did what the most indulgent Virgo girlies do: gave herself an intellectual challenge nobody asked for.

There is, truly, so much I want to say about this album. But in the interest of brevity (also, I must make time to feed and bathe myself), I wanna do a deep dive on “AMERICAN REQUIIEM,” which is A) maybe my favorite track on the album and B) functions as the thesis of the project. 

Looka there, looka there!

COWBOY CARTER opens with “AMERICAN REQUIIEM,” a lush, psychedelic rock track that glitters with hard-earned grit and an optimistic vision for the future. It’s gorgeous and expansive, with swelling sitar and glistening acoustic guitars, and begs for transcendence beyond the pervasive racism that long ago poisoned the soil of two forms of country — the genre, and America — and cursed anything that sprouts from it to be infected.

A requiem is “a musical service or composition in honor of the dead.” And in a way, “AMERICAN REQUIIEM” is structured as a sort of sermon. It opens with a personal story, moves into what it means, and ends with a way forward. (It’s worth noting that the album’s last track is “AMEN” — the closing of a requiem or prayer.)

We open at the moment that started it all: that fateful night in Nashville’s cursed Bridgestone Arena, eight long years ago. “Nothin' really ends / For things to stay the same, they have to change again / Hello, my old friend / You change your name, but not the ways you play pretend.” Globally, across time and in the pantheon of every instance of racism endured by Black people, and specifically Black Americans, that night was sadly just another form of a familiar monster. “Oh, a lot of takin' up space / Salty tears beyond my gaze.”

From there, Beyoncé places that moment in the broader context of her life. “The grandbaby of a moonshine man / Gadsden, Alabama / Got folk down in Galveston, rooted in Louisiana / Used to say I spoke too country / And 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?” Translation: Sorry, but who the hell do you think I am? And who do you think you are?

Bitch, this is a cowboy.

Later, she asks, then commands, then demands that we — country music, the industry, white America — see her, see her people. She starts singing this cool-as-shit run of “Looka there, looka there,” her voice swelling and bubbling up and building building building with indignant conviction. Then — THEN! — she starts straight-up growling, still singing “Looka there” with this frantic, soaring urgency, building to this grand “L-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-looka there!” that sends little ol’ me quakin’ in my boots!! It’s fucking magnificent, and one of my favorite moments in her entire catalog, easy.

She closes with a look toward the future, reflecting on how Black Americans have never been made to feel any semblance of “at home” in America: “Goodbye to what has been / A pretty house that we never settled in / A funeral for fair-weather friends / I am the one to cleanse me of my Father's sins.” And folks? It’ll bring you to tears.

The Beatles of it all

“AMERICAN REQUIIEM” functions also the thesis of the album, and it feels (boldly, brazenly) fitting to start that conversation with psych rock instrumentation that recalls The Beatles: the biggest, starkest example of white artists experiencing far more commercial success than the Black artists whose pioneered their work.

The Beatles are proof that industry gatekeeping is alive and hella racist: if it wasn’t, the Black artists that influenced The Beatles — Little Richard, Chuck Berry, James Jamerson, to name a few — would’ve been just as revered and embraced as The Beatles: an amalgamation of all those Black influences in a palatable white packaging.

If this album is a reckoning on American music’s institutional racism, I can’t think of a cooler way to kick things off than by invoking The Beatles. (To say nothing of so many people’s sycophantic obsession with them...) And then, as if that wasn’t enough, following that with a freakin’ cover of “Blackbird”? Unreal. Brilliant. Paul McCartney wrote “Blackbird” after watching news footage of Black girls being turned away by public schools. So this is a song written for and about the Black experience in America. And hearing Beyoncé claim, reimagine and bring strength to that song alongside four Black women in country — Tanner Adell, Brittney Spencer, Tiera Kennedy and Reyna Roberts — is, truly, stunning. (I have so far cried twice while listening!!)

“AMERICAN REQUIIEM” is technically the first track of the album, but it functions more like a foreword, laying out the thesis or spirit of the story. And “BLACKBIIRD” feels like a sort of prologue that provides historical context and stakes to the journey that our hero, Beyoncé, is about to embark on. The third track, “16 CARRIAGES,” feels like the start of the story explored across the rest of COWBOY CARTER: a young, 15-year-old Beyoncé (the age she was when Destiny’s Child was signed to Sony), riding off into an unknown, dangerous, limitless frontier. She’s got this.

Other stray thoughts…

• This woman’s voice is a goddamn instrument, and I’m so thankful for the new sounds that COWBOY CARTER gives us. Her damn growl on “AMERICAN REQUIIEM” (“Looka, look / Looka-looka-looka-looka-looka / Looka-looka there, looka there / L-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-l-looka there!”) propels me into the stratosphere everytime I hear it. On “YA YA,” she enters her Rick Ross (deep voice) era with “Got these slugs in my mouth, when I die, don't take 'em out / Baby, if you ain't got no grits, get the fuck up out the South.” And “RIIVERDANCE”? Honey, that gives us eight instances of Beyoncé giving us a single command: “Dance.” I imagine it’s the same tone of voice she uses to tell Jay (Shawn?) that she wants Fruit Loops. “Loops,” she says, over and over again until he stops scrolling and makes her cereal.

• Lmao @ Beyonce’s post-Lemonade lyrics about Jay-Z. All of Beyoncé’s post-Lemonade lyrics about Jay-Z are soooooo funny, so unbothered, and clearly coming from a woman who A) loves her man and B) knows this man would be dead without her. “I raised that man / I raised his kids / I know my man better than he knows himself” in “JOLENE” killed me. Drag your husband to absolute shreds, girlie. Also, from “Heated” off RENAISSANCE: “It's been a lot of years / Really think you're getting one past me?” I’m stunned too, B. 

• Hello, Shaboozey! One of my favorite things about this trilogy (with RENAISSANCE as Act I and COWBOY CARTER as Act II) is the treat of discovering so many artists that weren’t on my radar. So far, I’m especially digging Willie Jones, Shaboozey, Rhiannon Giddons and Brittney Spencer. 

• Take me to space. COWBOY CARTER is also something of an intergalactic radio dispatch, with Willie Nelson as the emcee, guiding us on our listening journey with “SMOKE HOUR” and “SMOKE HOUR II.” It reminded me of The Weeknd’s Dawn FM, which is also conceptualized as a space-y radio broadcast, and Jim Carrey voices a similar-ish role on the album. Jon Batiste’s 2023 album, World Music Radio, is another example of this framing. (On his album, Batiste is the emcee guiding us through the stars.)

• Feed me “SPAGHETTII” until my stomach explodes. To me, it doesn’t get much cooler than “SPAGHETTII.” It’s the ninth track, and it’s glorious. The eight preceding songs on COWBOY CARTER unmistakably country. But here, she resets the board. After a spoken word monologue from Linda Martell on the constrictive nature of genre, a trap beat comes in, and BAM! Beyoncé’s rapping, and it’s so fucking good. “All of this snitchin', and all of this bitchin' / Just a fishin' expedition, dumb admission / In the kitchen, cookin' up them chickens / Extra leg, but I ain't even tryna kick it / Cunty, country, petty, petty, petty.”
  
  It’s a blaaaast to hear Beyoncé flex a muscle her detractors could only imagine having, right after showing them that A) she can do country music and B) she can do it a hell of a lot better than they can. “Here’s me doing country, and here’s me doing it better than most. Can you do the same with trap, bitch? Would you know where to start?” Goddamn, I love this artist.

The irony of all ironies: y’all, she’s locked in Album of the Year

Calling it now, but I think Beyoncé’s locked in AOTY with COWBOY CARTER, which is SO funny, because … omg, it’s literally the album confronting institutional racism that’s gonna win over the racist Grammy’s!! HAHAHA. LMAO.

To close things out, I’m looking at this list of albums that have beat her and wanting to walk into a lake: 

• Harry Styles’ Harry’s House, which beat RENAISSANCE in 2023 (will never be over this)

• Adele’s 25, which beat Lemonade in 2017

• Beck’s Morning Phase, which beat Beyoncé in 2014 (what the hell is a Beck?)

And the first time Beyoncé was nominated for AOTY and didn’t win? It feels poetic. Icky. Emblematic.

• Taylor Swift’s Fearless, which beat I Am...Sasha Fierce in 2009. God moves in mysterious ways…

Maybe I shouldn’t speak too soon — is Jack Harlow planning a new record? We can’t trust these Grammy’s, y’all…

Dance.

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