Transcript — Culture chat: Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter

This is an audio transcript of the Life and Art from FT Weekend podcast episode: ‘Culture chat — Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter’

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
Welcome to Life and Art from FT Weekend. I’m Lilah Raptopoulos and this is our Friday chat show. Today we are talking about the unavoidable, the inimitable Cowboy Carter, the new album by Beyoncé Knowles. This is Act II in Beyoncé’s Renaissance trilogy. It follows the dance album she released in 2022. It’s also Beyoncé’s first country album. And she says that it was five years in the making and is, I quote, the best music I’ve ever made.

[‘TEXAS HOLD ’EM PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
The album features country greats from Dolly Parton to Willie Nelson. It features a duet with Miley Cyrus. It spotlights black country artists like Linda Martell, and it has made history maybe too little, too late. Her single “Texas Hold ’Em” has made her the first black woman to top the country charts ever.

So today we’re gonna talk about the album and how Beyoncé wields her power. Let’s get into it. I’m Lilah, and I do know that hussy with the good hair. Joining me from London, he’s a real-life boogie and a real-life hoedown. It’s the FT’s esteemed pop music critic, Ludovic Hunter-Tilney. Hi, Ludo. Welcome.

Ludovic Hunter-Tilney
Lilah, hello.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Also with me in the New York studio, my shotgun writer ‘til the day I die. Smoke at the window, flying down the 405. How am I doing? It’s scrapping too much. It’s the FT’s US labour and equality correspondent. The great Taylor Nicole Rogers.

Taylor Nicole Rogers
Hi Lilah.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Hi, Taylor. Welcome. OK, so why don’t we start with what we thought of this album? Very top line. Did she do it? Ludo, let’s start with you.

Ludovic Hunter-Tilney
Yes, she did, Lilah, in my opinion. I think that is a big, sprawling, epic affair which covers a lot of ground. And she does it with panache.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Cool. I love to hear it. Taylor, what do you think?

Taylor Nicole Rogers
I’m not sure. Honestly, like, I loved the album, but it didn’t feel as country as I was expecting it to. Which to me is a good thing because I absolutely hate country music. But it just, it didn’t, it wasn’t what I was expecting. But it was great.

Ludovic Hunter-Tilney
I think, to pick up on Taylor’s point about the country music, I actually feel that she’s done a sort of more of a western music type affair, which she inserts herself into really quite easily, in my opinion, as someone who was, who grew up in Houston. There’s lots of cowboy imagery running through the lyrics. You get the sense of it as being like a great big giant western and a sort of Hollywood western, really, rather than something which is more Nashville and country music per se.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, yeah, it felt really cinematic to me. That’s why I kind of liked it. I felt like I missed Beyoncé and she’s sort of back. I felt, you know, Renaissance was great, but it felt like a fun dance album. That was something she was trying, but not this huge statement. And, this to me felt like in a similar category as her self-titled album and as Lemonade, like she was, coming with this sort of, like, cinematic thing that you were gonna be enveloped in and sort of like on this journey with her. Yeah. I’m curious in both of you what songs, you liked or if there were any big surprises for you.

Taylor Nicole Rogers
Yeah, my favourite is “Levii’s Jeans”, because I love Post Malone and I loved, I just thought he sounded so good in this song. And it was a song that I think felt the most country and Beyoncé at the same time.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, yeah. That’s true. I like that song you like, too.

[‘LEVII’S JEANS’ PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
What about you, Ludo?

Ludovic Hunter-Tilney
Well, I like the first song. It opens with “Ameriican Requiem”, which, sort of, it ends up becoming like a psychedelic rock song, I suppose. She talks about big ideas which are buried, you know, where, which are all lying ahead. And so it’s like, it feels like quite a sort of big placeholder of a song.

Lilah Raptopoulos
And it builds like, kind of . . . 

Ludovic Hunter-Tilney
Yeah. Totally.

Lilah Raptopoulos
 . . . she’s right in the middle of it. Yeah.

Ludovic Hunter-Tilney
And also changes direction. It sort of keeps you going. It’s like this. It’s like a song that you’re like what’s going to happening next here? It keeps you, it keeps you, it’s like five minutes long as well. It’s definitely a statement for an opening song.

[‘AMERIICAN REQUIEM’ PLAYING]

Ludovic Hunter-Tilney
But also her voice is framed so much in the centre, isn’t it? I mean, you can really . . . the way her voice is lit like a really big star. I mean, it’s sort of lit with a golden light. Her voice is kind of like, it’s so sort of like it’s like watching one of the golden age of Hollywood-style stars up there on a big sort of acoustic screen in our imaginations.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, yeah. One question I have for both of you is whether you think this is a country album and whether that matters. I felt that it had all these, like, kind of fun country elements. It had the “Levii’s Jeans”, it had the Dolly Parton cover. It had, you know, she says Dosey Doe a bunch of times, but then it’s her. Like, she makes Dosey Doe sound extraordinarily sexual. She has a banjo, but, like, it’s not a tradition. It’s still her voice. Her voice sort of is never gonna . . . it defies genre in a way. It feels like it’s its own category of cultural capital, I don’t know.

Taylor Nicole Rogers
I think she could have produced it in a way that was more country if she wanted to, but I don’t think she did. And I think it worked for her. But if the mission was for her to, like, redefine the country music industry, I think this sits in a place that is maybe western and has a lot of other influences that I think Nashville could very easily be like, oh, we dodged a bullet. Beyoncé isn’t, you know, coming for us after all.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, yeah. What do you . . . what worked for you?

Ludovic Hunter-Tilney
I would agree with Taylor on that because I think when I wrote my review on Friday, when the album came out and I did say that there’s forensic attention to detail in the songs, right, about the sort of themes that Taylor has just mentioned. And actually, having listened further to the album, I thought about it more with more time to reflect upon it. I actually don’t think that she does go into such detail about the whole idea of excavating country music’s sort of African-American black history. Actually, that isn’t in that as strongly as it seemed that we were led to believe because she spoke before the album had come out.

She mentioned two things about the album. One was the backlash she faced in 2016, when she released a country music adjacent song, “Daddy Lesson”. She had a backlash when she performed it at the Country Music Awards, from country fans, and that she felt rejected. And this is like a sort of revenge best served cold, if you like, seven years, eight years later. But she also spoke about going off and doing lots of research and finding out about the black pioneers of country music and the idea that there is a long black heritage within it. Like the banjo, for instance, being invented by enslaved people in the Caribbean in the 17th century. But in fact, that doesn’t really come across quite so strongly in the album. It’s sort of we slightly lose that in between the very starry role played by Beyoncé, these other messages, in fact, slightly sort of disappear. So the forensic attention to detail that I wrote is not quite as forensic as I had imagined.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right, right, right. Taylor, did you want that history lesson from this album or no?

Taylor Nicole Rogers
I did, in many ways. I think, you know, background about my personal relationship with country music. I can’t stand it. I grew up in Tennessee, not too far from Nashville, so that made for a painful childhood. And I really wanted her to come in and reshape the country music industry, as we’ve been seeing with Morgan Wallen and the country music scene really growing and becoming more important to, like, the US music scene overall.

I wanted to see Beyoncé kind of come in and make that industry more inclusive as it’s becoming more resonant. However, that type of album is not an album that I would have enjoyed listening to. So I’m glad that she did what she did. Yeah, I think we did still have that conversation. What I’m interested to see is if that conversation is going to persist now that we know that Cowboy Carter is not traditional country music. And I’m really, really interested to see how Nashville reckons with it.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, yeah. Me too.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

OK, so why don’t we try to place this in the greater context of Beyoncé’s career? I am gonna take a crack at it and then please do riff off it as you please. My sense of the arc of her career is that she really was just an exceptional pop star for many years. She was making these, like, hits, these singles like “Check on It” and “Irreplaceable”. But then she had the self-titled album in 2013, Beyoncé, that started to feel like she was presenting a package for us to kind of work through together as an album. In that one, she made the word feminist not a radical word, but a kind of mainstream word. I remember her standing in front of a giant sign that said feminist, and suddenly everybody started saying, oh, I’m a feminist. I can say that I’m a feminist.

Then in Lemonade, she sort of eviscerated her husband for his infidelity, but then kind of very — in a nuanced way — interrogated it through this generational lens and racial lens and gender lens. And it was just like, you know, it’s considered one of the greatest albums of all time. I think it is. So she has power and she’s using it to point people now towards country. And how does this decision she made fit into the arc of her career for you?

Taylor Nicole Rogers
After Lemonade, I’ve kind of thought of Beyoncé as sitting above mainstream culture and kind of like directing it, pulling the strings like, you know, the goddess that she is. And I think this album is a continuation of that. Like there are definitely parts like definitely “Texas Hold ’Em” that will be on radio stations, will be on playlists forever. But I’m not sure that this album is going to be the album that we remember her for in 20 years. Like, I know for a fact, I will be telling my kids, like, listen to Lemonade. Like, I promise it’s still really cool. I’m not sure we’ll be coming back to Cowboy Carter. It feels like a piece of art that is a response to her experiences in country music that is really important and really beautiful, but I’m not sure it’s going to be her legacy album in the same way that Lemonade is.

Ludovic Hunter-Tilney
She makes a big pitch in it for the Grammy album of the year, which we know has rankled that she’s received more Grammys than any other musician ever, but she’s never got the album of the year. And there’s a lyric towards the end of Cowboy Carter where she references this and is clearly, you know, aggrieved. And I would actually wager, I will wager my house . . . no, not my house. I won’t wager my house, I’ll wager £10. I’ll do that instead.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Hey. Yeah. That’s fine, I’m gonna take your house.

Ludovic Hunter-Tilney
I’ll put that one right down.

Taylor Nicole Rogers
Like a thousand.

Ludovic Hunter-Tilney
I will wager quite a lot. Let me put it this way, I will wager my dignity. That’s worth a lot less. Kinda special to me. I’ll wager my dignity that she wins the Grammy album of the year award next year.

Taylor Nicole Rogers
Really?

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, I agree.

Taylor Nicole Rogers
You think over Eternal Sunshine and over Tortured Poets Department?

Lilah Raptopoulos
I just think that, like, I’m actually with her on this. I would feel aggrieved too.

Taylor Nicole Rogers
I mean, I feel aggrieved, I should say, I should clarify. I don’t think the issue is that she doesn’t deserve it. I think the issue is that the recording academy does not recognise her . . . 

Lilah Raptopoulos
Right, right, right.

Taylor Nicole Rogers
 . . . in the way that they should because she does binge genres. She does bend formats in a way that they are just not interested in quite frankly.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. I mean, I think it would be pretty embarrassing if she didn’t win, for them, if she didn’t win genre of the year.

Taylor Nicole Rogers
They don’t seem to care about being embarrassed.

Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s true.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

OK, let’s talk about Beyoncé’s place in the industry more broadly. She seems very singular to me in the way that she consciously wields her power and directs the mainstream to her will. I don’t really see other pop stars doing it quite the same way. But I’m curious what you both think.

Taylor Nicole Rogers
Well, I hate to compare female artist to female artist, but to answer this question, I think about Taylor Swift’s Evermore album and her Folklore album in which a country star turned pop star takes on a bit of like alternative acoustic albums. And they did really well. Folklore won album of the year. But, you know, no one else was having that conversation about, oh, I now wanna go listen to like, alternative folky music. Like, that never crossed anyone’s mind ever. And that was a big album. Like, Folklore was a big album.

But with Beyoncé, it’s a completely different conversation. Like with Cowboy Carter, now we’re all . . . everyone is looking at the country music industry. Everyone is thinking about these really big questions about is it inclusive, is it not? What are its roots? Like, you know, how are we going to take this industry as it continues to move more into the mainstream? So I really think it is impactful in that way.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah. What about you, Ludo?

Ludovic Hunter-Tilney
I . . . well, one thing which I find interesting. Well, actually, I feel grateful to Beyoncé for this as a pop critic is that she’s among a group of artists who really are showing a lot of commitment to the album as a form. We’ve had so many sort of like talk of albums. The album is over. Who’s gonna buy an album? Even the idea of buying an album would cause, you know, people of younger generations to look at one as if one was talking about phonographs. So I think that the fact that you have someone like her and someone like Kendrick Lamar and indeed Taylor Swift with Midnights, Folklore, Evermore, all of these have themes running through them. They’re like concept albums, in a way.

And in Beyoncé’s case, I feel that — Act I: Renaissance, 2022, Act II: Cowboy Carter, 2024 — these feel like a sort of pop music version of a great American novel of someone who’s just like some huge, great big, sprawling, sort of like, overview of the culture as it is or as actually as she presents it. I think that I’m enjoying watching it. I would be really intrigued about the next one, because I do feel that this is a sort of like this big, epic project. It just bears fruit, just watching it develop.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
A last question for you both on this. In a dream world, is there a genre that you would want Beyoncé to put her energy next? Is there like a place you’d love the Beyoncé version of, you know, heavy metal or I don’t know.

Taylor Nicole Rogers
Like, I cannot tell you what I would not do: for Act III to be pop once again.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Just a straight-up, simple pop.

Taylor Nicole Rogers
Yes. I love pop music. I would love for her to come back and do . . . like, I wanna hear more about the history, the roots of pop music.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Sure. I like that.

Ludovic Hunter-Tilney
So do you mean pure pop like Taylor? Like, really just like straight, pure pop.

Taylor Nicole Rogers
Pure pop. Yes.

Lilah Raptopoulos
What about you, Ludo?

Ludovic Hunter-Tilney
Well, I believe that there’s a rumour that it’s meant to be a duet album with Jay-Z, like she did before. (Inaudible)

Lilah Raptopoulos
Oh, I’ll take that.

Ludovic Hunter-Tilney
 . . . which should be like a return to hip hop, which would be sort of like squaring the circle, wouldn’t it? Back to hip hop, R&B. But actually what I would like is, is that a long time ago, she once talked about her love of Broadway musicals and how she would love to do a Broadway musical. And what I would really like — along this tour of these different types of music — I would love to see her end with like Broadway music. I wanna hear a Broadway belt from Beyoncé.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Interesting. I kind of want Beyoncé to do her Folklore, her like sad boy, sad white boy. (Laughter)

Taylor Nicole Rogers
I would totally tune into that.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Just, I mean, it’s just gonna be so much better. I think it’ll be really . . . 

Taylor Nicole Rogers
Yeah. Like, you can get Noah Kahan. It would be great.

Lilah Raptopoulos
I think so, too. Ludo and Taylor, thank you so much. This was so much fun. We will be back in just a moment for More or Less.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Welcome back for More or Less, the part of the show where each guest says one thing they wanna see more of or less of culturally. Taylor, what do you have?

Taylor Nicole Rogers
For me, it is wellness as a concept, and I would love to see so, so much less of it. I was just having a conversation about a week ago with a friend who is telling me that she, like, has had some very ambiguous health problems. You know, traditional western medicine has not been able to help her. So she dove headfirst into the world of wellness. But she started taking electrolytes and then went for a traditional blood screen. And her, like, sodium levels were dangerous. And I think if we continue down this path that we’re on, where things like taking electrolytes and taking magnesium and getting all these different types of like drainage and IVs for fun without medical insights, I think it’s unhealthy. And I also think it takes advantage of women who are looking for alternatives.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Taylor Nicole Rogers
Like, types of healthcare for very good reasons. And I would really like us as a culture to really like step back and be like, why are we so interested in wellness? Why do we listen to people who have no business giving anybody health and fitness advice?

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah, it also seems like the wellness industry is somehow also encouraging me to do Botox, which doesn’t seem like . . . 

Taylor Nicole Rogers
Yeah, it makes no sense.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Everything is like wrapped up in wellness. Ludo, what do you have?

Ludovic Hunter-Tilney
Well, I would just say I agree completely with that. And not only should there be less wellness, but there should be no wellness albums. And I’m thinking here actually quite specifically of Kacey Musgraves’ latest album, which is a wellness album through and through. I completely think Taylor’s spot on there.

I would like to go for more of something. And it’s, I was reading in the weekend FT about the installation that David Lynch, the film director, is doing in the furniture fair in Milan, and his installation is a room called the Thinking Room. And I really would love to see more David Lynch film, television, of which there hasn’t been any in ages. So the more has to just, like, come up from zero, frankly. Let’s have more David Lynch. Someone needs to step in and give him some money. Quite a lot of money to make a film.

Lilah Raptopoulos
OK, more David Lynch. Great. Mine is a more, too. I was just in London a few weeks ago and was reminded of the beauty of pub culture. And I want more pubs in America. I just don’t think we figured that out. Like big room, roaring fire, too big of a meal, old couch that’s questionable, you know, as like, you know, questionable things stuck in the cracks. It’s not a dive bar. It’s not a coffee shop. There’s a real gap.

Taylor Nicole Rogers
Do you know? I think that’s right.

Lilah Raptopoulos
Yeah.

Taylor Nicole Rogers
We just need to have, like, the sleepy girl cocktails that the wellness people will have at the pub in New York. (Laughter)

Lilah Raptopoulos
Less of that. Ludo, Taylor, thank you so much for coming on the show. This was such a joy.

Ludovic Hunter-Tilney
Thank you.

Taylor Nicole Rogers
Thanks for having us.

[MUSIC PLAYING]

Lilah Raptopoulos
That’s the show. Thank you for listening to Life and Art from FT Weekend. Take a read through the show notes. We have links that expand on everything mentioned today, including Ludo’s review of Beyoncé’s album, and every link that goes to the FT gets you past the paywall. Also in the show notes is a discount to a subscription to the Financial Times and ways to stay in touch with me on email and on Instagram. I love hearing from you.

I’m Lilah Raptopoulos and here is my talented team. Katya Kumkova is our senior producer, Lulu Smyth is our producer. Zach St Louis is our contributing producer. Our sound engineers for this episode are Sam Giovinco and Simon Panayi, with original music by Metaphor Music. Topher Forhecz is our executive producer and our global head of audio is Cheryl Brumley. Have a lovely weekend and we’ll find each other again on Monday.