Cowboy Carter: The Beyoncé Record That Became a Genre Argument

The first time I listened to Cowboy Carter, I was driving east on the M4 out of Cardiff, and by the time I got to Swindon I had pulled over twice to make notes. The second time I listened to it I was drunk. The third time I tried to take the thing apart and realised it was not going to submit to being taken apart.

A year and change later, Cowboy Carter is the Beyoncé record I have spent the most time thinking about since Lemonade. Not because it is her best record. I am not sure it is. But because it is the record where her project, as opposed to her songs, became unambiguous.

What the project actually is

Cowboy Carter was released in March 2024 as the second installment in a trilogy, following Renaissance (2022). Renaissance was her house record. Cowboy Carter was, nominally, her country record. The third installment, which as of mid-2025 has been gestured at but not announced, is variously rumored to be the rock record or the opera record, depending on which interview you trust.

The surface-level story was that Beyoncé, a Black woman from Houston, was claiming country music as hers. The 2016 CMAs incident, where her Lemonade-era performance of “Daddy Lessons” with the Dixie Chicks was received with open racism from the genre’s commercial gatekeepers, was the backstory everyone knew and everyone referred to.

This surface story is not wrong. It is just incomplete. Cowboy Carter is not a response to the CMAs. It is a response to the entire mid-century American music industry’s work of racial partition, the specific historical project by which country music was separated from what became R&B, which was separated from what became rock and roll, which was separated from what became pop. Beyoncé is, on Cowboy Carter, refusing every boundary that project produced, in roughly chronological order.

Why the opening tells you what is about to happen

The album opens with “AMERIICAN REQUIEM,” which is not a country song. It is a gospel-inflected ballad with a rock bridge and a choir. The second track, “BLACKBIIRD,” is a duet of Paul McCartney’s 1968 song, rearranged as a contemporary folk piece and sung with four young Black women country artists, Brittney Spencer, Tanner Adell, Reyna Roberts, and Tiera Kennedy, whose inclusion is the first of several pointed political acts on the record.

McCartney, in 1968, said he wrote “Blackbird” in response to the US civil rights movement. Beyoncé covering it, fifty-six years later, with four contemporary Black country artists, is not an interpretation. It is a retrieval. She is claiming the song’s lineage for the tradition it was written about, not the tradition that received its initial performance.

Every subsequent song on the record does a version of this move.

The Willie and Dolly moves

The two moments the album orchestrates most carefully are the appearances of Willie Nelson and Dolly Parton. Willie introduces “SMOKE HOUR” as a faux-radio broadcast, taking the role of a Black-audience country DJ host. Dolly introduces “JOLENE” with a spoken-word intro before Beyoncé reworks the 1974 standard.

Both of these are gestures of legitimation from within the genre. Willie Nelson has been the country figure most willing, across his career, to make Black artists part of his collaborative practice (Ray Charles, Wynton Marsalis, Snoop Dogg). Dolly Parton is, simply, the figure whose authority in country music cannot be questioned. Getting both of them to stand next to the record is, among other things, a strategic act of institutional shelter. Beyoncé is not asking the genre for permission. She is making sure the genre’s two most unimpeachable figures have endorsed her before anyone thinks of objecting.

The effect was almost completely successful. A year later, the conversation about Cowboy Carter as “not really country” mostly happens in the comment sections of people who cannot invoke Willie or Dolly.

Where the record is strongest

The album’s middle, from “DAUGHTER” through “SPAGHETTII” and “ALLIIGATOR TEARS,” is where the genre-scrambling is most audacious. “DAUGHTER” is a Nina Simone-style ballad that pivots into an operatic Italian aria. “SPAGHETTII” is a trap song featuring Shaboozey, whose own career took off the same season. “II MOST WANTED” features Miley Cyrus in the kind of two-woman harmony arrangement that most labels would have killed for on their own records.

These tracks, taken as a sequence, are the argument. You cannot listen to them in a row and emerge with a coherent genre label for the record. That is the record’s victory.

Where it flags

I will grant a complaint. Cowboy Carter is long. At 78 minutes across 27 tracks, it is longer than it needs to be, and some of its interstitials (the multiple “radio” transitions, for instance) feel like scaffolding left in place when the finished building no longer needed them. This is, I think, a structural feature of the streaming-era album, where length has become a statement in itself and editing has become optional.

The album would be tighter at 55 minutes and 18 tracks. It would also be a different kind of cultural object. It would not feel like an encyclopedia of claims. For what Beyoncé is trying to do, the overkill is, arguably, the point.

What it changed

Cowboy Carter won Album of the Year at the Grammys in February 2025, Beyoncé’s first after three previous nominations. It also did something I have watched happen only a few times in my career, which was materially reshape the commercial viability of Black country artists. Shaboozey, Tanner Adell, and a dozen others have had material career boosts on the back of the record’s ecosystem. Country radio, which spent thirty years refusing these artists, has had to reconsider.

A year on, the record is not the genre-defining sensation of 2024. It is the genre-demolishing sensation of 2024. The difference matters, and the next fifteen years of American popular music will be more interesting because of it.

Put it on again. Skip the interstitials. Listen to the middle.