This Is What an Album Needs to Do Right Now

Like many of us, Beyoncé is thinking about the end of the United States. Her new album, Cowboy Carter, opens with an extraordinary track called “Ameriican Requiem,” on which she sings of burying “big ideas,” ditching “fair-weather friends,” and leaving “a pretty house that we never settled in.” Is this a requiem for the nation itself? For her own Americanness? Or is she telling the most American story of all—about survival through reinvention?

The music itself suggests an answer. Ever since the banjo-laden single “Texas Hold ’Em” debuted at the top of Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart in February, listeners have speculated that Beyoncé’s eighth album would sound like an inclusive hoedown. But “Ameriican Requiem” is something else: a solar storm of psychedelic funk bubbling with sitar, guitar, growls, and screams. Working with archivists of American music including Jon Batiste (one of the song’s producers) and Raphael Saadiq (a co-writer), Beyoncé channels Sly Stone, Prince, and Erykah Badu—futurists whose music voyages across the cosmos, seeking liberation that can’t be found in their own country.

Country—there’s that darn word. Few subjects are more tedious to argue about than genre, which can interchangeably refer to musicology, marketing, or demographics, and mostly in a know-it-when-you-see-it way. Treating country as a scientific label misses the meaning of Cowboy Carter. Beyoncé isn’t trying to stake her claim to contested territory—she’s showing us what’s possible within the borders we all share.

Sure, country is a major influence. The album briefly—perhaps too briefly—highlights a rural Black creative lineage by featuring snippets of pioneers such as Sister Rosetta Tharpe, and vocal contributions from up-and-comers such as Tanner Adell. Beyoncé vows, in tones of escalating fervor, to defend her family: first in a porch-front ode to motherhood (“Protector”), then in a smooth-rockin’ road anthem (“Bodyguard”), then in a gonzo take on Appalachian murder ballads (“Daughter”). But only one track, “Levii’s Jeans,” sounds like the product of the modern Nashville music machine—because it, like a lot of Morgan Wallen songs, slaps a denim costume on the sort of warm, sexy R&B that Beyoncé has long specialized in. She even enlists the white rapper Post Malone to sing a Wallen-like verse. If “Levii’s Jeans” becomes the radio smash it should be, Beyoncé will have made her point—I can do that too—in deliciously ironic fashion.

Her greater desire is to riff on country as wordplay, much in the way she did for the term house on 2022’s dance-music masterpiece Renaissance. A country, like a house, is just a place where people live. A country does have its traditions, and lately, in America, traditionalism—and territoriality about who gets to access which traditions—is reasserting itself politically and culturally. Beyoncé is replying with other national myths: the U.S. as a cultural melting pot, a hotbed of innovation, a place whose future is more interesting than its past.

I mean, go listen to “Riiverdance.” The title hints at what she’s doing: inserting herself into a stereotypically white folk style. It opens with a clean, plucked riff. She adds syncopation with a command, “Dance,” that develops into a hip-house groove. Were this simply a sound-clashing experiment, it would be a killer one, but the song is also a beautiful love ballad. Eight verses, sung in syrupy low notes and flighty harmonies, paint scenes of cyclical conflict and resolution. The story, and the dancing it inspires, could go on forever. But then again, there’s so much more Cowboy Carter to hear.

Read: Beyoncé stands her ground

Now, should any album be 27 songs and 78 minutes long? Debatable—but there’s a point to this sprawl. With Renaissance, Beyoncé announced that she wanted to shed “perfectionism and overthinking” and chase the thrill of excess and experimentation. In doing so, she offered an answer to the difficult question of what role the album format plays in the streaming age. On Spotify and TikTok, songs and snippets of songs now travel disconnected from their context, for an audience whose attention span seems to be ever dwindling. In response, many artists have started dumping out more and more content, like so many coins dropped into the slot machines of an algorithmic casino. Songs are getting shorter, but albums are getting longer and less coherent.

Cowboy Carter argues that you can do scale and substance at once. The album really does flow, carefully developing themes and moods amid interludes that are charming and brief. Collisions of tone and tempo tease the ear without being so harsh as to ruin the album’s utility as a playlist. Put on the heartfelt opening suite of songs when making dinner, and blast the brilliant closing run—an instinctually crafted whirl of dance music—later in the night. Throughout, the production has the bone-shaking force of an IMAX spectacle, and the songwriting nestles hooks within hooks. Beyoncé and Barbie and Dune: Part Two and the Taylor Swift multimedia universe all convey the same lesson: Breaking through cultural oversaturation means going very big while also sweating the small stuff.

At such a length, indulgences and missteps do grate. Some Cowboy Carter lines are clunkers (“I am colder than Titanic water,” she threatens on “Daughter”). Some songs, such as the cover of the Beatles’ “Blackbird,” seem to exist mostly for conceptual reasons. Many of the lyrics on the album just update Beyoncé’s old tropes—celebrating her success as being intrinsically important and righteous—with new metaphors about whiskey or horses. I appreciate that in our present era of hyper-literal and hyper-personal songwriting, Beyoncé is still most interested in music as a visceral art form. But it’s too bad that her foray into country—music known for storytelling—doesn’t contain a ton of intrigue or revelation.

Nor is it the radical protest album that some listeners have wanted her to make since she showed up to the Super Bowl in 2016 in Black Panthers–inspired garb. If she’s critiquing the nation whose flag she is waving on the album’s cover, she’s mostly doing so vaguely. But Beyoncé is great precisely for her faith in the notion that sound alone can make a statement and maybe even bring about change. On the closer, “Amen,” she returns to the theme of “Ameriican Requiem,” singing of edifices built on blood and lies crumbling. Her voice is full of pride—perhaps because we’re still, for now, a nation in which people take swings as big as this album.