MUSIC REVIEW
The day of the BeyHive presale for Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter tour (open to members of her official fanclub), I was sitting at my desk grading papers. Having not joined the BeyHive in time to qualify, I had resigned myself to buying tickets from the following day’s presale for Verizon customers, worried there would be none left. Twelve minutes before ticket sales were to open to the Hive, my phone buzzed with a call from a dear friend and fellow teaching assistant.
“I just sent you a text,” she said. I know, I thought, my brain scrolling through our self-pitying exchange from earlier that morning about how many papers we had left to grade.
“It’s my BeyHive code… I thought you might need a pick-me-up today.”
“Don’t you need it?!” I asked, incredulous.
“I thought you might get better use out of it. I’m not sure I’ll go.”
I shared giddy words of gratitude and hung up, still not allowing myself to believe. I checked the time and, still stunned, rushed to log in to Ticketmaster. I worried I’d be 12,367th in line. That the system would somehow deny me for not having the name or email to match the code. That the universe wanted to limit my experience of the album to my car radio and my AirPods.
But with each step, the website loaded and moved me forward. Just 20 minutes after receiving my friend’s text, I was the elated ticketholder of two seats, retail price, for the tour’s first night at MetLife stadium.
Ten years prior, mother to a 3- and 5-year old, nights out were harder to come by. All I wanted for my birthday was a cheeseburger and a night out. If you know me, you know I like to celebrate on the day — not the weekend after or a day before, but on the day — and in 2015 the universe delivered: Garth Brooks came out of retirement to tour for the first time in 13 years, his Boston dates coinciding with my birthday. While I have been a country music fan for close to three decades, the grainy photos I posted to Instagram from TD Garden that January marked a departure from the largely behind-closed-doors fandom I’d cultivated since my late teens. Country was never the dominant (read “cool”) genre of the places and spaces in which I came of age, but 34-year-old me didn’t care if the world knew I was a long-time country fan.
Three months after that concert, I became pregnant with my third child and my outward embrace of country music continued to swell. Today I marvel at how each of my girls was born to a different iteration of me — my understanding of who I am as a woman and mother ever deepening, my ability to articulate my desires ever sharpening. While Beyoncé’s 2024 album, Cowboy Carter, defies categorization (it’s country music and it isn’t), in it I see so many mirrors for how to navigate this evolution. Beyoncé, with whom I share a birth year, continues to reflect the light from her many facets. Every conversation I have these days with women my age touches on the shared midlife reckoning we are having — albeit in different ways — as we continue to grow into ourselves. Cowboy Carter models a profound reckoning for all listeners in its unabashed assertions of history, motherhood, and self-actualization.
The album opens with the lyrics, “Nothing really ends, for things to stay the same, they have to change again.” This encapsulates what Beyoncé does in her latest opus: she takes up space within a musical expression that is both her legacy and has been hostile to her, and she does it against the backdrop of country music’s gender gap, which only intensifies for women over the age of 40. Beyoncé’s 27 tracks — which won her her first Album of the Year Grammy earlier this year — are their own rendering of the soul of America, all while delivering a rollicking good time. To quote Queen Bey: If that’s not Country, I don’t know what is.
Growing up in New York City in the 80s and 90s, my early music life was dominated by hip hop and R&B, while the dorm rooms at my New England liberal art college were filled with Dave Matthews Band and Dispatch. In between it all, I secretly fell in love with Country. My friend Sarah, who drove me back and forth for most school breaks, played Garth and Tim McGraw on the three-hour stretches between Western Massachusetts and Manhattan. Alone in my dorm room and through my headphones in the library I continued my education, finding parts of myself in the storytelling of Reba, Shania, and Dolly.
As a creative writing major, I relished how country songs were self-contained narratives with larger-than-life love stories and murderous plot twists. My late-adolescent self was also primed for their quiet reassurances to trust myself, as the deepening complexity with which I saw the world and my place in it pulled me into periods of unsteady mental health. I see this love of storytelling-through-song burgeoning in my Swiftie daughters, too — Taylor began as a country-pop star; her first song to chart on the Billboard Hot 100 “Tim McGraw.”
At the start of Beyoncé’s song “Spaghettii,” we hear a voiceover by Linda Martell, the first Black woman to play the Grand Ole Opry: “Genres are a funny little concept, aren’t they?… In theory, they have a simple definition that’s easy to understand. But in practice, well, some may feel confined.” I am continually pushing against others’ pigeonholing as I trod the non-linear path of understanding what it means to be a biracial Asian woman in America, a mother to three strong daughters who are doing the same. I embrace these labels on my own terms, and they can feel confining when others project their definitions onto me. I’m learning to love my many fragments and the sense of wholeness I’ve fought to embody. In Cowboy Carter, I hear Beyoncé modeling the same: for her children, for the younger singers included on her album, for all of us. To accept her Album of the Year Grammy she brought her eldest child, Blue Ivy (born one month before my middle daughter) on stage with her. Beyoncé closed her acceptance speech by dedicating the award to Martell, saying, “I hope we just keep pushing forward, opening doors.”
I tear up each time “Protector” plays — from young Rumi Carter’s voice at the start of the track, to the lyrical flips between projector and protector in the refrain, “Even though I know, someday, you’re gonna shine on your own, I will be your projector.” I too wish to magnify my daughters’ light into the world, not to take credit, but so they can feel seen. Beyoncé does this seamlessly through her current tour which features Blue Ivy in multiple songs, and Rumi who joins her mother onstage during “Protector.” Getting to see all three on stage together during this song was the highlight of my night at MetLife stadium. The triangle their bodies formed, with Blue at its apex, was a visual metaphor of the strengths and complications baked into mother-daughter (and sibling) dynamics. A dozen or so dancers, their long, gold dresses flowing around them, surrounded and cocooned the mother-daughter triangle as Beyoncé sang. I was reminded of the community of women who continue to mother me as I learn to mother my girls.
Parallel to the Cowboy Carter tour, Beyoncé’s mother, Tina Knowles, is on a book tour for her memoir Matriarch, which follows her trajectory from coming of age in Galveston, Texas to becoming mother to powerhouse singer-songwriter daughters Beyoncé, Solange Knowles, and “bonus daughter” Kelly Rowland. In a recent interview with Australia’s The Morning Show, Knowles revealed she rarely misses a Cowboy Carter show, for which she manages the team of stylists who handle the 600+ outfits the tour features. When asked what she has learned from her daughters, she shared, “to be bolder, to not be so behind the scenes that I’m afraid to come out… to be brave and not to care so much about what people think.” Matriarchs need mothering too.
I never grew sick of all the TikToks to “Texas Hold ‘Em” (my favorite), the song that will forever motivate me to kick up the pace when it comes through my AirPods during a run, and make me start dancing in the kitchen, my daughters cringing as I do so.
As a lover of Miley Cyrus — and duets, and road trips — I adore the Miley and Beyoncé duet “II Most Wanted,” which shares a chord progression with “Landslide,” a perennial favorite by genre-fluid Fleetwood Mac about being bold enough to change. Whether you project a romance or a friendship onto the chorus, “I’ll be your shotgun rider ’til the day I die,” you can revel in two powerhouse women harmonizing about supporting each other. I want my own girls to continue to find love and care in each other as they grow, and to still want to ride next to me in the car, the site of many of our best conversations.
Beyoncé’s legitimacy within country music, when questioned, reveals more about the questioner’s deficits. It is also a deeply ahistorical take, rooted in gatekeeping and misogynoir, as the very roots of commercial country can be traced to the music of enslaved people and their descendants. In the words of Tressie McMillan Cottom, “Country music did not merely get whiter as the nation integrated; it got whiter because the nation integrated.” Cowboy Carter showcases how deeply Beyoncé knows the textured histories of this country, and herself. This awareness, coupled with a grounding in her roots, is precisely what empowers Beyoncé to (re)define genre, and in turn herself.
Redefinition is my forever hope for my daughters: may they continue to grow into the people they need to be for each phase of their lives; growth that will sometimes find seeds in pain and heartbreak (something Taylor too lays bare). Which brings me back to Garth. In one of my favorite songs “The Dance,” he sings:
I’m glad I didn’t know, the way it all would end, the way it all would go. Our lives are better left to chance, I could have missed the pain, but I’d have had to miss the dance.
Singing along to these lyrics at his Vegas residency in May of 2023, I understood how I’ve heard and needed them in different ways across my life: as a teen, as a new mother, now.
May my daughters continue to molt versions of themselves, knowing I am doing the same, ever celebrating their wholeness. May they, like Beyoncé and her mother, write their own stories, without needing to be legitimized by anyone. And may they someday want to dance beside me, even if it makes them cringe. In the meantime, I take heart that they approved of the jean jacket with silver rhinestone fringe I wore to my very first Beyoncé concert last month. Small victories. And in the fact that my eldest is a budding country music fan, something she doesn’t feel the need to hide from anyone.
Image: Courtesy of Beyoncé promotional material under the Fair Use Copyright Law.
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