eccentricsimply
Staff member
they/them
My scores are in. The intention originally was for me to share my album averages but. Well...
BIG POP GIRLS 2024
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But it's bloated all the same! Delete it, fat!
Cowboy Carter is overwrought and messy, and that's the key difference between Beyoncé and Taylor here. We've already seen Taylor Swift tread water. We've seen it a few times! But there's never really been a messy Beyoncé album before. (A bad Beyoncé album? Sure, but I Am... Sasha Fierce is decidedly not messy and instead brought down by its own self-imposed restrictions.) There are moments that feel unpolished and rushed, confirmed as much by the haphazard track listings of the physical copies. And it sort of makes sense as to why. Creativity doesn't know deadlines! Ya Ya is the beating heart of the record, wherein its (oft patronizing if not especially profound) insistence in discussing capital G Genre and the exploration of country music as a wide and diverse history--as opposed to the increasingly narrowed sound and identification that proliferates its 'popular' interpretation today--come together as a scattershot and time-travelling mission statement. The record doesn't work without it! Of course you'd go back to the drawing board to shove it in there somewhere, even if the album is already filled to the brim. It's one of those moments in art where you realize what you've been going for the entire time only at the very end of the process, because art is nothing if not serendipitous.
But if this presumed timeline is to be believed, this extension is also what gave us... Spaghettii? I'm sorry, y'all, but she loses me at the Thanos line and never recovers it from there. It's corny. Perhaps it's a song meant to raise the question of what constitutes as "country," but if that's the case, it trips over its own feet by serving... the kinda meh Beyoncé bonus track sound we've already heard. The album is not better off for it, the narrative not especially enriched by it, and the question it seemingly presents feels more like navigating an academic loophole than anything particularly thought provoking. Cut it!
It's not that much of a stretch to suggest that a 27 track album--sorry, a 22 track album with 5 interludes, some of which contain chord progressions--and an 80 minute runtime is a little overstuffed. This feels especially true when you consider the multiple career-defining highs to the number of tepid and bland surface-level 'country' tracks, the latter sounding exactly like what the album's best moments suggest that country music deserves to be considered as better than. Comparison: Renaissance is not that much shorter but does not leave a feeling that the album could be improved by removing some of its parts. The distance between its highest highs and its 'low' points--which I believe are largely considered to be Plastic Off The Sofa (the wrong answer, it's a 9) or All Up In Your Mind (the right answer, and it's still a 7)--is not a particularly large gap, and it never succumbs to the common pitfalls of dance music cliches. But the qualitative difference between Ameriican Requiem and Jolene? Staggering. (And that's to say nothing of the fact that choosing to cover Jolene of all things for your country album is a bit of an "Anyway here's Wonderwall" moment.) The album doesn't need it and it just gets in the way of better shit. And there's some good shit here.
The worst part about the subjective bloat on Cowboy Carter is that it not only lessens the listening experience, but it's at odds with the very best parts of the album, the ones that really see Beyoncé tap into the undeniable core of the genre in a way that she maybe can't explore with... any other genre of music.
Country music may be, above any other form of popular music, one of the rawest, purest expressions of honesty in art. At its best, it tugs at heartstrings with explorations of the highest highs and lowest lows of the human condition. It addresses and defies the status quo, "the man," corruption of power, and bullshit autocracies for no other reason than because right is right, wrong is wrong, and if we search deep enough within ourselves, we have the capacity and the wherewithal to know the difference, we just need to be honest with ourselves and with our neighbors. It asks that if a guitar, a voice, can sound this beautiful, why can't we expect the same of the world that created it? (And sometimes it asks for shitty beer and an oversized pickup truck at the insistence and payout of said "man" because if the messages of actual country music were to proliferate the masses, they'd all be doomed. Alas.)
There are moments like this that come up throughout Cowboy Carter, and they're moving and incredible. There's urgency and vulnerability. In its best moments, it feels like expressions that she needed to make, and they wouldn't be possible with any other medium. It had to be a country album. Ameriican Requiem is moving, it's powerful, it's an artist with something to say. Songs like Protector and Daughter are internal reflections and confessions unlike anything we've heard from Beyoncé before. (The closest prior being Lemonade, and it's no coincidence that album is shaded with country tones.) They dive with reckless abandon into the ugliness of honesty. (Okay, Protector is a lovely and sweet song and maybe my personal favorite. But hear me out, is it not also a nepotism anthem? The truth--and love--can be ugly!) They're not always interesting or revealing messages. 16 Carriages (sidebar: why is it not 16 Carriiages?) reveals to us that... touring is hard and... Beyoncé sweats. Wow. But it's her truth all the same, and it's hard to lob any criticisms at it beyond that its sentiment is a bit of a "well, duh."
(And I'm not trying to argue that country music has to be all deep personal reflections and charged statements all of the time. Fun things are fun! Bodyguard is a fluffy, breezy little bop, Riiverdance and II Hands II Heaven are some of the album's better "what is genre?" sonic experiments. They build upon what the album clearly sets out to do, its world and soundscape richer for having them, the notion of what constitutes a 'country' song expanded by their inclusion.)
All of this to eventually arrive at the crux of what I'm trying to say. The tracks in the middle are high-key filler. It's true. And I like Alliigator Tears! But does it say anything? No. Does it... do anything? No. So when an album feels like it's overstaying its welcome, perhaps it's best to consider leaving a track like that behind, the ones that are destined to become nobody's favorite and instead contribute to an album becoming an exhausting experience.
But the bigger issue is with that stack of collaborations in the middle. Smack dab in the middle of an album full of raw and powerful performances is 15 minutes of country karaoke night. I don't hear a particularly felt performance in Just For Fun. It's... detached, the aura present throughout the album's markedly better songs decidedly absent, seemingly lacking in the genre's requisite honesty. Counterpoint: Willie Jones's performance does sound honest and felt, a clear if inexplicable difference in their deliveries. Admittedly, it's an abstract and subjective criticism, unable to be measured by any real metric and I don't really have any way to defend it beyond "I'm not feeling it."
The same goes for II Most Wanted, which never sounds like anything but a Miley Cyrus ballad. (Fun fact: the first time I heard this song, I wondered why they put such a weird filter on Beyoncé's voice in the first verse. Oops.) It's a fine song, you'd be hard-pressed to find anything particularly negative to say about the writing or the performances. But it's just kind of there; it's a generic by-the-numbers country-pop ballad on an album otherwise determined to prove--successfully, too--that it's better, its grasp of the genre and its history stronger, than this.
Levii's Jeans is the worst offender here, being both faceless country-pop and an endorsement for the powers that be (even if said corporation manufactures the only jeans I'll buy). We've missed the point entirely here. Boo capitalism, boo outsourced--presumably child--labor. Solidarity forever. Country music is and deserves better than this.
Above all, the collaborations are lacking completely in that urgent honesty and masterful sense of studied revere for the genre that permeate and define the album's numerous best moments. They don't posit any sort of interesting discussion or perspective, and they're sonically bland; it's caricature country on an album that insists that the genre be held to a higher standard. They sound, by Beyoncé standards (which is to say still better than any other living singer's very best day), a bit phoned in and frivolous, ergo the very definition of filler and bloat, diminishing the mission statement that the rest of the album so thoughtfully and expertly crafts. Cut them all.
I suppose there's also the little 60 second songs peppered throughout, which you could argue as half-baked and unfinished, but they're so brief and relatively charming that it's hard to consider them as weighing the album experience down in the same way. They're interesting little tidbits that make the album a bit messier, but they enrich the album and it's ultimately fun to hear a Beyoncé album get a little unpolished and messy. (Unless we're counting Oh Louisiana as a song and not an interlude, in which case it's grating and unlistenable. But surely we're considering it an interlude given that Smoke Hour mostly consists of chord progressions and sung lyrics and we all have the wherewithal to recognize that as an interlude, right?)
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he/him
Manifesting that extension.
And who was chatting shite
COME GET ME OUT OF CALIFORNIA
NO LEAVES ARE BROOOOOOOWWNN
I MISS THE SEASONS IN MISSOURI
MY DYING TOOOOOOOWWNN
NO LEAVES ARE BROOOOOOOWWNN
I MISS THE SEASONS IN MISSOURI
MY DYING TOOOOOOOWWNN
Honestly, with the amount of overlap between the two, the deadline being a couple days before the Grammy's is probably for the best, considering the whole robbed/deserved winner/underserved winner element will probably affect people's feelings about these albums quite a bit, especially in the days right after the ceremony.
He/Him
Who’s in the group chat
