Tropic of Cowboy
I don’t know that I as a white girl had the authority to agree with many of Azealia Banks’s pre-release fears about Beyoncé’s new Cowboy Carter, and I need to reinforce that anything the problematic Ms. Banks says comes with a ton of asterisks, but she had my attention.
I knew the album would be good because Beyoncé in this era delivers a premium product! She is a committed artist and artistic director of her projects and brings in extraordinary talent at every level of the process. But part of me was wondering if Cowboy Carter would be a mainstream retreat from Renaissance, from Grace Jones growling “Brukup it’s brukup it’s brukup” and A.G. Cook shaping Bey into a mutant beastmode hyperpop-sludgepop Michael Jackson.
And it’s early days yet though I still am not sure the new record does for me what Renaissance does for me. But damn. This is her Sandinista! A sandbox, a laboratory, a radio clash, a Western of the id and the ego, an insanely long branchy army-channelized basin across many states, a fight for rights, a romp through Appalachia and the frontier and the Gulf Coast and its Creole ties to the Caribbean (not to mention the Caribbean’s immense impact on sounds and sound culture from the 1970s forward).
Initial standouts: the propulsive John McVie–ish bassline on “Bodyguard,” the bluegrass-prog–minimal house of “Riiverdance,” the Hitsville U.S.A. hullabaloo revue of “Ya Ya,” the reharmonization on “Daughter” of the “Caro Mio Ben” all young classical singers know from the yellow Schirmer’s Twenty-Four Italian Songs and Arias book (pedantry: “Caro” is not “opera” as such, it’s a standalone art song).
Her “Jolene” with the new lyrics? I’m mixed. I get the delight in being petty, I truly do, and I get that this cover dates back closer to her “Becky with the good hair” period, but again I gotta cautiously tip my hat to Azealia and what she said when Lemonade came out: “You been singing about this n***a for years and he still playing you.”
