Happy Beyoncé or Easter week, whichever you may celebrate
I gather my 'Cowboy Carter'-meets-country coverage, with commentary, and other links and hijinks. Capped off with an irreverent Jesus playlist
I was at a friend’s place for dinner on Good Friday evening. One of the other guests was a church minister. She was amazed she’d managed to come, she said, on “pretty much the busiest week of the year.”
“I know,” I replied. “Beyoncé album-release week—I’ve hardly slept!”
I was joshing, but the not-sleeping part was true. I’d been up all hours to review Act II: Cowboy Carter for Slate after the album came out at midnight.
Cowboy Carter is nearly feature-film-length (80 minutes) and packed with internal musical and cultural references (“Easter eggs”) that underlie its thesis about the fraught relationship between race and genre in American music. In an initial three or four listens, as I say in the piece, a historically minded critic couldn’t help getting caught up in processing that density of information. Making it even more impossible than usual to render a fair assessment of the music right away. On balance, though it’s definitely too long, I’m pretty sure I liked it.
This is a stark drawback of the system that’s been standing for years in which, to prevent “major” releases from leaking, advance streams for review aren’t available to critics, or sometimes only to the very biggest venues. Of course, all publications still want to have reviews out as soon as possible after the release. It degrades the process, inevitably making reviews less well-considered and conclusive. I’ll give it up to Chris Richards of The Washington Post for daring to make the negative case that same day. I think there’s more to many of these songs than he allows, but at least he was pushing discussion forward.
Making things harder in this case was that the record company did not release the album credits. That meant spending a lot of that overnight review period on detective work, tracking down interpolated material and speculating on other elements. At deadline, I thought I’d been the first to identify the yodeler on the Willie Nelson “Smoke Hour” skit as Charles Anderson in 1924 (also a renowned drag performer, Elijah Wald pointed out to me). Later I discovered that (although many misidentified it), some Beyhivers on Twitter worked it out from a teaser weeks ago. Sigh.
In a section I cut for space from my review, I wondered if the credit blackout might be due to a mandate from Beyoncé for the listeners to put in the labour of recognizing sources ourselves—or else the label trying not to let the long lists of writing credits due to interpolations become a whole distracting story. Those bulky rosters of names reflect today’s litigious music business, but arguably they also are more fair and realistic than in the past. It’s almost always taken a slew of folks to bring a hit song to realization. Now they all demand name recognition, and frankly, some still get left out, or deliberately concealed.
Then, even when the credits were put out today (Sunday, as I write), some composers and producers were still marked as “pending.” So one really can’t help wondering what her team is trying to hold back. (Is it the Taylor Swift rumours? Or April Fools?) Matched with the latest controversy about songs that are missing from the physical copies of the album, it does suggest a surprising lot of late adjustments to a project said to have been in the works for five years. People have their theories. I’ll refrain, but at minimum it seems disrespectful to her collaborators, and, again, to critics.
Look at them boots
Much better than that review: The advance piece I burnt the late-night oil for a couple of days before Cowboy Carter, on the remarkable past year in country music. By some (somewhat dubious) measures, 2023 was country’s most successful ever on the mainstream charts, with a bunch of rising new voices also changing the genre’s sound. And then in 2024 comes a wave of pop artists alongside Beyoncé dropping hints that they’re putting out country albums.
I’d pitched Slate this idea after Beyoncé’s announcement in February, but they wanted to hold off until now. Most of the smart coverage meanwhile, quite rightly, has centered on Beyoncé’s possible effect on the country industry’s decades-long mistreatment of Black, or female, and especially Black female artists. (See my friends David Cantwell’s and Charles Hughes’ “The Black Country Bookshelf” at No Fences Review.)
For this piece, though, I wanted to step back and analyze just why country has broken so big in 2023-24. I looked back to other cultural moments such as the “Urban Cowboy” fad of the early 1980s or the Garth Brooks invasion of the 1990s. Factors this time around may range from polarized politics, to streaming finally weakening country radio’s stranglehold, to fallow times in other genres, to the energies stirred up by the race and gender controversies themselves. And perhaps to a post-pandemic, Zoom-bound, A.I.-haunted public’s yearning for something like the place-based, nostalgic, less digitally dependent song style that’s long been country’s signature appeal.
If you read it, I’d love to hear what you think.
Got you covered
Also this week, I made my first guest appearance on my colleague Chris Molanphy’s Hit Parade podcast, talking about the theory and practice of cover songs, drawing on his previous episode as well as a long feature I wrote for Slate in 2018. Unfortunately we recorded before Cowboy Carter came out, so we didn’t get to talk about Beyoncé’s covers of the Beatles’ “Blackbird” (my vote: yea) and Dolly Parton’s “Jolene” (nay, as I explain in my review).
But I did get to shout out some formative 1980s influences on my sense of what a cover song can be: first and foremost, the late producer Hal Willner’s ingeniously eclectic reinventions of the tribute album, like Lost in the Stars: The Music of Kurt Weill and Stay Awake: Various Interpretations of Music from Vintage Disney Films; also Joe Jackson’s Jumpin’ Jive, my intro to the pre-rock titan Louis Jordan, which startlingly successfully melded Jackson’s persona and style with an artist from 40 years earlier; and even the Residents’ bizarro-world Composers’ Series, the albums George and James, Gershwin and Brown, and Stars and Hank Forever, deconstructing John Philip Sousa and Hank Williams. (I don’t love listening to my own voice, so I’m not sure how much of this made it into the edit.)
Good gracious! Dig me out!
The best non-country-related criticism I read last week:
Katie Moulton on Nelly’s “Hot in Herre,” the soul of St. Louis, and millennial dance pop. This is part of some complicated March Madness-brackets-style essay competition I haven’t worked through. Just scroll down till you find the Nelly piece down one side of the screen. Katie’s work was a new discovery for me at PopCon 2023, and this is a terrific example. If you like it, please look up Dead Dad Club, her bildungs-audio-memoir for Audible about family, grief, and Tom Petty. There needs to be a print version.
The always sensational Keith Harris outdoes himself as he turns a Sleater-Kinney live review into a meditation both on concert reviewing itself, and on accepting change in one’s favourite artists and in oneself.
Pickin’ on PMBiP: Bluegrass now
This afternoon, April 1, at 5 pm ET, in the Popular Music Books in Process series, I will be introducing Lee Bidgood and Greg Reish, editors of the upcoming collection, New Dimensions in Bluegrass Scholarship, and some of their contributing authors. Contact Francesca Royster at froyster@depaul.edu to get the Zoom link and join our mailing list.
‘Hypothetical Jesus’
This newsletter edition has been a bit me-me-me, especially if you care for neither Beyoncé nor country. So here is a reward for you-you-you. This is a playlist I made a couple of years ago that’s prime chocolate-bunny-time listening—Easter Monday still counts. “Hypothetical Jesus” is not just a collection of secular songs from all kinds of genres about the Xtian saviour; it’s centered on songs that propose non-scriptural counterfactuals about the sacred son, such as “Jesus Was a Trans Girl” or “Jesus Built My Hotrod.” Or sometimes things arguably true but seldom proclaimed from the pulpit, such as “Jesus Was a Communist,” “Jesus Was Way Cool,” or “Jesus Was a Black Man.” Artists range from John Prine to Kim Petras to Cypress Hill to Jello Biafra. So yeah, NSFW.
My favourite track here has to be “Stand Up for Judas” by the great working-class Scottish folksinger Dick Gaughan. It advocates for Judas the Zealot as the real champion of the Holy Land proletariat, and Jesus as the true betrayer: “Jesus preached the other world, but Judas wanted this.” What it may lack in historical accuracy (?) it makes up as a fiery singalong for your next infidels’ prayer meeting. It’s track 13 on the playlist, which wasn’t by accident.
“Hypothetical Jesus” on Spotify.
“Hypothetical Jesus” on Tidal.
“Hypothetical Jesus” on Apple Music.
“Hypothetical Jesus” on YouTube.
Thanks, and bless y’all’s hearts.
jesus was a capricorn kris kristofferson is pretty great!