"Beyoncé Knows How To Talk Without Talking"

What You (May Have) Missed Over at the Culture Study Pod

Happy Friday, Happy Day After New Taylor Swift Album Drop, Happy Get Ready for Our Episode of

The Culture Study Podcast

on the new album (with Sarah Chapelle of Taylor Swift Styled, which we’ll be taping on Monday and NEED YOUR QUESTIONS (about the album, about all the looks)….which you can submit here).

We’ll get to Taylor soon, though. Right now, we’re still very much talking about Beyoncé and Cowboy Carter — and I wanted to send you some highlights of my conversation with Elamin Abdelmahmoud if you haven’t yet added the pod to your rotation.

The Country Heart of Cowboy Carter

[This is all Elamin, because he’s the Beyoncé genius]

Beyoncé is largely a conceptual artist. She's been a conceptual artist for maybe the last 12 years or so, since 2013. So when Self-Titled came out. Halfway through her career, she sort of switches modes and becomes this larger conceptual artist. The albums are not albums, they're sort of explorations of ideas, you know? You get Self-Titled, which is like different explorations of the nuances of womanhood in that particular moment in her career. Lemonade explores all these nuances of marriage, you know….

…She's now in this Renaissance project. And to me the Renaissance project, it's a project of repatriation. There are musical ideas that have been divorced from their history. And that is not going to sit well with Beyoncé. You can sort of imagine her being like, "Nope, this belongs in my museum, thank you.” She's just taking all these ideas back. She does it for house and techno music, which has become like, largely disembodied from its Black history. And then, with a single album, she manages to sort of recreate that history or sort of replace that history sort of upfront. And then she says, I'm making this country album and everybody's like, "Oh, here we go!"

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Beyoncé knows how to talk a lot without talking. She can create psychodrama, she can create conversations in your head. And that's her artistry: making you think about two ideas by juxtaposing them next to each other, while trying to make a record that is, like, semi-competitively trying to get on the charts. And in fact, ends up going to number one. So that's part of what makes her the greatest living artist in popular music right now.

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She's coming to you as a historian and an archivist who can say: here are all the tools you need to understand how we got to this musical moment. You can do the thing that people do when they engage with pop music and go like, this is fun, and I want to dance. Or you can go: this is history, this is a library, and I'm going to spend my time trying to figure out and decode all the connections and the ways that these ideas are engaging with each other. And the fact that it works in both dimensions is not easy at all. I say this as one of many people who have tried to like, you know, write the vegetables into a popular story!

Like all artists, all writers, all creators, try to do this, try to be like, I need you to understand this thing about this larger idea. But also, it should be fun to read and engaging. And so many times people are like, I'm just here to dance, buddy. And Beyoncé’s like, if you're here to dance that's cool, get on the dance floor. But if you want to do some history, maybe spend five minutes looking into why I made this choice and not 100 other choices.

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…I think part of the thesis of this record is saying you have been lied to your whole life if you think that country music is this certain set of characteristics. To me, Beyonce is trying to say, I've been watching, and you guys have not been really limiting who gets to call themselves country, except for certain people. And so I'm now sort of admitting myself into this canon as well.

I think of the beginning of "Tyrant," for example, and you hear that fiddle, and then the fiddle gets a trap drum immediately. And I'm like, Okay, so we've just invented fiddle trap, let's go! That's how a genre moves forward. It sort of borrows from the moment to recast itself as something new. And in that way, that's about as country as you can get. You take something from the past and say: this is how it speaks to right now. I think country music is very discursive in that way. And I think like a lot of other genres don't have that quality — and I really love Beyonce's contribution to that dimension. ●

Listen to the rest of the episode, including Elamin’s take on Jolene:

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