Beyoncé - Cowboy Carter

It's been interesting to watch the reaction to this beyond the normal people-who-care-about-Beyonce-or-country-music realms. I'm not that excited by the album but I don't want to underestimate its odd cultural moment and impact. It's pretty specific to 2024 in a lot of ways, very much including its incoherences.

(even tho yes I know the songs were recorded years ago. they're arriving now.)

Swamp Dogg’s country album from 2020 Sorry You Couldn’t Make It is great, coincidentally also inspired by a CMA-related slight

How do you define "vulnerability" in a pop context, Moka? Beyonce's openness to erotic pleasure is by my lights an example of vulnerability. She's not a femmebot.

Also, many of my favorite bands and rappers project an attractive indomitability. I don't need vulnerability from every act I listen to.

― poppers fueled buttsex crescendo (Alfred, Lord Sotosyn)

Shoot. Didn’t expect to be challenged and don’t know how to explain it properly lol.

I’ll instead direct to this Spectrum Pulse review:
( https://www.spectrum-pulse.ca/blog/album-review-cowboy-carter-by-beyonce ) that pretty much nails where I am with her and why albums like Renaissance and this one don’t work for me as a whole while albums like Lemonade and 4 feel more like my gear.

That's cool, I wasn't challenging you

I’m not asking something from her that doesn’t exist. Even in this record there’s moments and songs that are exactly what I want from her… then there’s things like the Jolene “cover” which is a huge miss for me.

There are, as explained in the review, two sides of Beyonce the “perfect queen diva” and the “deeply flawed humanity” side to her, I have almost no interest in the former.

Then there’s bops like Bodyguard and I’m always game for those.

y'all bummed me out and i'm going to listen to this later. hmph.

Sorry. Even if it’s very spotty it’s still one of the most interesting “event” pop albums I’ve heard in ages.

Most of the complaints in this thread is about Jolene tbh.

I like a lot: Daughter, Bodyguard, Ya Ya, Alligator Tears, II Hands II Heaven and 16 Carriages…

I’ll probably end up trimming and resequencing half of this album for subsequent listens thru the year and forget about the rest of it.

Ok, Alfred, so… Spotify artist shuffle just played me “all night” from Lemonade. So, I can’t define what vulnerability in pop context is for me but I’d say that this song sounds vulnerable to me.

I don’t really care about Beyonce and Jay Z’s private life… this is a song about forgiving those you love and it works for me even when removed from any personal context. It has a more universal and relatable thing going on. This is the sort of Beyonce song I do connect with and I guess I just wanted more of that side of her in here because it would’ve been a great match with the country angle.

I love "All Night"!

i gotta say i think the song w/ miley is amazing. even as someone who has loved a lot of miley music i rolled my eyes a bit at her being on this album but no this is the absolutely ideal use of her. that leathery, weathered quality to her vocals really pairs perfectly w/ this song about everlasting, expansive, speeding down the highway in a convertible kinda love. it's also the gayest song beyonce has ever recorded, like on a literal level? on first listen i just read it as a thelma & louise kinda thing but i can't hear it as anything other than a love song between two women, and i think prob one of her best love songs and ballads. i typically find her pretty saccharine in that mode (something like "1+1" being an exception) but i think she nailed this one

it reminds me a lot of "shallow" actually which is another piece of would be schlock balladry that is so expertly done that it ends up as just purely great

texas holdem is the worst song on this album by some margin, and primarily because of the millenial whoop hey bvox and handclaps which make it sound like the Lumineers or some shit.

As a poker player, based on what I see on Instagram stories I think there will be a lot of new players/rubes from that hit song.

Besides 16 carriages and texas hold em that were released previously the most streamed songs so far are the Miley collab (which isn’t surprising) and the Jolene cover. Miley collab and Bodyguard should be singles.

I get why Texas Hold Em is popular since it’s really catchy but yeah I think it’s one of the worst things in here and it does sounds like the fucking Lumineers.

it's also the gayest song beyonce has ever recorded, like on a literal level?

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=AWpsOqh8q0M

(agree the miley song is a highlight)

texas hold em is catchy, but apart from it being only a mild improvement on the lumineers the lyrics are inane

can i tell you guys a secret?

beyonce being compared to the lumineers is incredibly congruent to how i've felt about her since the beginning. the way you guys cringe at the intentionally overbearing nature of everything about the stupid fucking corny ass lumineers perfectly articulates how i've always felt about beyonce. no malice, it's just music for a different audience.

xpost Also the first line negates the title. It's like "I ain't single. I ain't a lady."

the difference is that beyonce is usually good to listen to

Lumineers only have like one corny type of song tho, Beyonce knows how to be corny in different styles.

CRTL-F "New Jersey" not found

My daddy Alabama, Momma Louisiana
My album New Jersey

Sorry need to catch up on the posts in this thread but don't want to bias my thoughts. Will report back once I've read thru but...

I've listened to this album twice, and while I need more time to absorb it -- especially the second half -- my initial listens suggest this is the worst Beyonce album since B'Day, which is when I started really listening to her albums. Maybe my expectations were all wrong? I agree with a lot of what Yasmin Williams tweeted the day after the release and put in her Guardian essay, but mainly just wish the songs were a whole lot stronger! I wonder what this would have sounded like if she'd worked with actual country songwriters like Liz Rose, Luke Laird, Natalie Hemby, Brandy Clark, Chris Stapleton, Shane McAnally, etc. I see Cam got a songwriting credit on the opener but otherwise the vast majority of the personnel has little experience with the genre, and it just seems very at odds with the approach she took with Renaissance? I'm listening to Lemonade right now and every song and hook is so much stronger than the vast majority of Cowboy Carter. "Daddy Lessons" would be a highlight here!

Lemonade is her best album tho

Daddy Issues would have easily been a top 3 song in here. Hell maybe the best one.

The Miley song sounds like it's underwritten? idk it feels like it's missing a piece. A near triumph.

so is this her Young Americans

I don't know. Not one damn song made me break down and cry.

^^ such a wonderful person but ya got problems

i think one of the reasons why "II hands II heaven" really hits for me is that there is not a lot of subtext to beyoncé's music these days, very little mystery. each of the last two albums has been accompanied by mission statements laying out their inspirations and contexts both personally and culturally; downstream of this, whatever subtext may exist is excavated by critics, academics, twitter posters etc. the reviews of these albums are stuffed w/ references to the work of other artists, as are the albums themselves of course. this isn't a criticism necessarily, i think her revealing more of her personal history in reference to renaissance only deepened my appreciation of the album, and her ability to connect cultural/historical/sociological dots thru her music is pretty much bar none in pop music currently. i think it's all less successful on this album but whatever

all to say that to me the gay subtext of "II hands" gives it a certain frisson that is not really present on much of either album. very little is happening offscreen on these records, so to speak, but here it's all gestures and nods to hidden layers of a relationship, something understood only between the two characters in the song. doreen st felix's review calls the song "wholesome" which... idk! i don't get that personally, yet i can see reading the lyrics and feeling a lot is being left unsaid before it gets to... unwholesomeness. but to me that's what makes it stand out. i think it's a pretty steamy song bcuz of what the tone & texture of their vocals and interplay between them is suggesting but the lyrics aren't quite spelling out.

I'm not seeing what the big deal is about the changed lyrics to Jolene, though I've seen plenty of people shitting themselves in anger them (granted it was on the hoffman forums)

I don't mind that she rewrote the words, but I do mind that she made them worse and not in an interesting way.

here's someone explaining Blackbird to the guy who wrote it: https://imgur.com/gallery/1Gp5xia

lmao

Sorry Macca but Ebony and Ivory is about a piano

Regardless of Jolene lyrics being switched for the worse, I think both the Blackbird and Jolene covers are super boring choices to cover and the execution doesn’t do anything interesting either. Blackbird is pretty much a karaoke version… with a fucking great singer, yes.

I think Blackbird's lovely. It is weird as the second track though, it needs to be tucked in the middle somewhere.

I don't care about the lyrics in Jolene but the singing feels boring and rigid - there's no swing in it. I'm not that familiar with 2010s and 20s Beyonce but does she usually sound so over-formal?

Sonically I prefer "Blackbird" to "Jolene" -- it's an all-time beautiful song; personally I love that she used the original master recording and sang it straight. It sounds lovely.

But agree it doesn't "fit" sonically as the second track, and that's because I interpret its position on the record as an egregiously obvious and literal statement of intent, not one that was decided because it made sense in the sequencing as a listening experience. Here's a song called "Blackbird" where the lyrics literally say "Blackbird singing in the dead of night" and we'll feature a bunch of under-appreciated black female country singers! The whole album plays to me as a jumbled mess that's connected by a few very literal skits and ideas.

so a concept album basically

« Ya Ya » is such a joyful storm. It’s like a distant cousin of « Get Me Bodied »