What genre is Beyonce’s ‘Cowboy Carter’ anyway? She said, ‘This ain’t a country album, this is a Beyonce album’

Daniel Montgomery
·3 min read
7

Like many I’m sure, I listened to Beyonce’s “Cowboy Carter” the weekend of its release. But as an awards watcher, I’m left to ponder, where exactly is this thing supposed to go at the Grammys? Is it country? Americana? Pop? Progressive R&B? Vote in our poll at the bottom of this post.

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The album is called “Cowboy Carter,” and its cover art features her atop a horse sporting a cowboy hat, but those signifiers may be slightly misleading. They make it seem like Beyonce is just aping country music, and the lead single “Texas Hold ‘Em” might also lead you to that conclusion because it’s as straight-up country as this album gets. But apart from that and a reimagining of “Jolene,” plus a couple of Willie Nelson interludes, this isn’t so much a “country album” as it is an album in conversation with country music. I’m not sure I’d slot this album into any one genre in particular, unless “Beyonce” has become a genre unto herself at this point, which would be a fair argument to make. It feels very much like a Beyonce album. It’s cohesive, and it’s incredibly ambitious — 27 tracks, 79 minutes long, but it’s all killer no filler.

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As pop culture phenoms go, Beyonce strikes me as the opposite of a Taylor Swift, not in the sense that I’m pitting them against each other, but in the sense that Swift seems to have honed her music and persona with laser precision (though we’ll see what she does with “The Tortured Poets Department“), while Beyonce has used her clout to veer in different directions and pull pop culture along with her through sheer force of will. She popularized the surprise album drop with “Beyonce,” that album and “Lemonade” popularized the visual album. The EDM swerve “Renaissance” took her to a different genre (and produced zero music videos), and “Cowboy Carter” takes her to another new genre, but she maintains her identity. She’s not a chameleon, hiding in her surroundings. She’s a chimera, genuinely composed of those different elements.

But the Grammys have got to slot her somewhere. Where do you think “Cowboy Carter” should go?

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