Mother, wife of rapper Jay-Z, businesswoman, sexy symbol of feminism and minority rights, Beyoncé Carter-Knowles has always had an appetite. A beautiful abdomen which earned her the nickname “Queen Bey”, in reference to the queen bee. Since his first solo album, Dangerously in Love (2003), she delved into all the flowers that urban music offered her (r’n’b, pop, hip-hop).
We didn’t expect that at 42 years old, the American singer would leave her comfort zone to drag herself into a world as ruthless as that of country music. A world that stereotypes uniformly portray as white, southern, and ultraconservative. Redneck, racist and Trumpist, while Beyoncé sang, in January 2013, in Washington, The Star-Spangled Bannerthe national anthem, for Barack Obama’s second inauguration.
His eighth album, released Friday March 29 with the usual teasing based on withholding information, displays his intentions in its title, Cowboy Carter, and behind a cover where she poses for an equestrian portrait, a privilege reserved for sovereigns. Here she is as a rodeo queen, riding side-saddle on a majestic Lipizzaner and brandishing The Star-Spangled Banner. The visual is a continuation of that of Renaissance (2022), when she was almost naked on a luminous glass frame. In order to indicate the second part of a trilogy imagined during the Covid-19 pandemic. The songs are also curiously spelled by doubling the “i”, probably to remind us that this album constitutes act “ii” of the project.
Legitimacy
The first was built like a playlist in homage to this club culture (disco, house) born on the margins of American society. This is designed as a radio program, which is what the most prestigious country institution is, the Grand Ole Opry, broadcast since 1927 in Nashville (Tennessee). Beyoncé’s songs are announced by two historic hosts, Dolly Parton and Willie Nelson. Two presences which owe nothing to chance: the first knew how to play with humor on its image of « blonde stupide » (she sings it) to establish herself among the machos, the second, a Texan like Beyoncé, a marie-jeanne-smoking hippie, is associated with the “outlaw” movement in rebellion against the conservatism of this environment in the 1970s.
This isn’t the first time a dance star has dressed as a cowgirl. Madonna, another queer icon, preceded her in 2000 with the album Music. Except that the sound did not accompany the outfit, it was only a clothing effect. Our rider intends to grab the bull by the horns. And to affirm that she is as legitimate in taking over country music as her formidable competitor Taylor Swift, a girl from the East Coast, who took the road to Nashville in her adolescence.
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