Lies of Stone, and Maurizio Pollini's Intellectual Passion
Beyoncé's Cowboy Carter listens to history and the noise inside the noise
Cowboy Carter, Beyoncé
(Parkwood Entertainment/Columbia, 2024)
A release event like this turns the reaction into a subject, this subversive C&W move attracts more attention than its material. This music points backward and forward and inspires Hunter Harris’s real-time group listening chat to the Guardian music section’s McCartney feature on “Blackbird” by Dave Simpson. You can’t do Danyel Smith’s early days roundup around many other titles.
THE ALWAYS UNDERRATED Vox.com has a fine nut graph to get you oriented, built around Avishay Artsy’s conversation with songwriter Alice Randall:
Randall tosses off a pretty sturdy definition of the genre from her book, My Black Country: “God is real; life is hard, road whiskey and family are significant compensations, and the past is better than the present…” “16 Carriages” puts that obscene idea to bed.
Beyonce’s moment cries out for larger, and largely omitted, context. Country music has a tradition as a halfway house, or protected zone, for miscreants and lowbrows. After leaving the UK in shame in 1958 for marrying his first cousin once-removed, 13-year-old Myra Gale Brown, Jerry Lee Lewis retreated to C&W, the only genre that would have him, but more importantly: where whites went to wash off sin. The music itself wasn’t racist, but most of its audience certainly leaned that way, and the industry’s broadcast pipelines were as proudly segregated as a Birmingham public school.
For a long time now, country radio’s brand has mirrored the NFL’s on that slippery moral low ground: nobody even thinks about taking a knee (so stay tuned: Taylor Swift’s boyfriend spells all the wrong kind of trouble).
As McMillan Cottom points out below, that Nixon moment in Ken Burns’s documentary tilted in just the wrong direction. The blatantly token figure of Charley Pride proves the rule, everybody knows his 1966 hit, “Just Between You and Me,” came into the world by concealing his identity. Only a few picked up on Merle Haggard’s “Okie From Musgokee” as good-natured hokum (redneck stoners have more fun than hippies). MAGA blew all this up, of course; those Tea Partiers and their mayonnaise insurrections. By 2015, radio consultant Keith Hill’s “tomato-gate” layered misogyny on top of a longstanding prejudice.
For a long time now, country radio’s brand has mirrored the NFL’s on that slippery moral low ground: nobody even thinks about taking a knee (so stay tuned: Taylor Swift’s boyfriend spells all the wrong kind of trouble). At the same time, female country has steered more and more into universal pop sounds (Nikki Lane, Kelsey Ballerini, Lainey Wilson, and even Kim Richey’s new single “Joy Rider”). Like a good icon, Beyoncé makes it all seem as though it points toward her. Broadcast playlists have treated these women as contemptible, to the point where Lil’ Nas’s 2019 “Old Town Road,” and 2020’s Mickey Guyton’s “Black Like Me” breakouts felt triumphant, double proxy wins for Colin Kaepernick. Tracy Chapman’s smile updated this energy during her Grammy “Fast Car” duet with Luke Combs.
This all feeds into this Beyoncé bubble, even as it right-sizes earlier totems. Darius Rucker’s “Fires Don’t Start Themselves” trots along as a pop-rock confectionery, pitying anybody who hears it as honky-tonk or lonesome whistle. (And Rucker oversings too.) The genre debate isn’t really about style: If “Fires” counts as country, what about Rihanna’s “Love on the Brain”?
This cuts both ways: for an embarrassing example of how far not to steer towards pop, listen to Rhiannon Giddens’s You’re the One from last year, the Big Pop Move that didn’t. Watching for Linda Martell to chart again.
hitch your wagon
Tressie McMillan Cottom in the NYTimes (“Big Country—the Nashville-controlled, pop-folk music that commodifies rural American fantasies—is the cultural arm of white grievance politics…”)
Julianne Escobedo Shepherd in Pitchfork (“It’s as though the Renaissance dancers took a detour through Alabama for a little choreo by the Coosa before dipping back to the club…”)
Jon Pareles in the NYTimes (“But ‘Cowboy Carter’ is a bumpier ride than ‘Renaissance,’ ‘Lemonade’ or ‘Beyoncé.’ It suggests that Beyoncé wanted to pack all she could into one side trip before moving on elsewhere…”)
Chris Richards in the Washington Post wins Best Pull Quotes:
“By the time she reaches the one-two punch of ‘Desert Eagle’ and ‘Riiverdance,’ she sounds like she’s doing Wild West bedroom cosplay in outer space…”
“Beyoncé has chosen to do Dolly Parton karaoke and elevate the public profile of Post Malone…”
Who Does Country Music Belong To? by Alex Abad-Santos, and Kyndall Cunningham talks to Jocelyn Neal about “Jolene,” both in Vox
Alexis Petridis in the Guardian (“Country isn’t so much a genre as a law unto itself…”)
Jacob Ganz on NPR’s music page (“…dips its Paris Texas stiletto boot-clad toes into what seems like dozens of genres and styles…”), also with more links
on rotation
Linda Martell, Color Me Country (1970)
Tina Turner Turns the Country On! (1974)
Mickey Guyton, Remember Her Name (2021)
“Jolene” by Dolly Parton with Pentatonix, Miley Cyrus, White Stripes, Olivia Newton-John with Dolly, see playlist below
quote of the month
NYTimes: What's the last great book you read?
Kate Zambreno: I am reading Magda Szabo's "The Door," and it's all I can think about. It's like I'm living in that claustrophobic dyad between two women in a Hungarian village… (from By the Book)
Maurizio Pollini 1942-2024
David Allen in the New York Times (“He took perfect command of his instrument, a prowess that came across ‘as neither glib facility nor tedious heroic effort,’ the critic Edward Said once wrote, but instead as a technique that ‘allows you to forget technique entirely…’”)
Tim Page in the Washington Post (Arthur Rubinstein, the honorary chairman and among the most celebrated Chopin pianists of his time, spoke for his colleagues [judges in 1960 Chopin competition] when he declared that Mr. Pollini “already plays better than any of us on the jury...”)
Barry Millington in the Guardian (“Particularly in his later years, Pollini’s breathless, impatient delivery of Beethoven’s sonatas often seemed to deny their rhetoric, as though he was embarrassed by large romantic gestures or overt emotionalism. Pollini’s cerebral instincts appeared to deprive him of the ability to live in the moment: romantic subjectivity, it seemed, had constantly to be interrogated…”)
Riley reviews Pollini’s recording of Chopin’s Nocturnes, with interview at 34:40, WBUR, 2006
trail mix
May 2024: includes all those “Jolene”s, Willie Nelson, Earth Wind and Fire, and St. Vincent, and the numbers Randall mentions in that Vox podcast:
