If country music is about being from the South, she playfully rejoins, why isn’t Houston’s gritty “chopped and screwed” style sufficiently country? If country music is about murder ballads that romanticize the darkest, most transgressive human desires, why isn’t it romantic when a Black woman is the one doing the killing? If country music is about defending hearth and home for the love of a good woman, she taunts, why aren’t her stoic Black father and her young daughter an American family worth fighting for? The only way for Big Country to answer these questions honestly is to talk about race and gender, racism and sexism, history and power. But these subjects are all verboten.
That sucks for country music. The genre’s most successful artists trend toward apolitical pablum because they can’t or won’t say anything interesting. Their loss is this album’s gain. Beyoncé can ask these questions of country music because she is not an insider. As one of the biggest stars in the world, she can take the heat that comes with disrupting country’s white noise problem. When country music performers are mostly white, the genre can pretend it’s one big family. That is easy to fake when it controls who is considered family. But the sound becomes inbred. New blood highlights the difference. Country music’s self-consciousness about its status as real or cool music is its own fault. You cannot create art without getting something more substantial than mud on your tires.
Opinion | Beyoncé’s ‘Cowboy Carter’ Asks, and Answers, a Crucial Question in Her Latest Album - The New York Times
