Monday Roundup Mix
featuring Beyoncé, Blondshell, Waxahatchee, and more!
Happy Monday! I spent a good bit of this past weekend doing what I’m sure many of you did which was listening to Beyoncé’s new album, COWBOY CARTER.
In an Instagram post ahead of the album’s release, Beyoncé said she made this album after an experience where she was not welcomed in the country music space [the 2016 CMAs]. She goes on to say, “this ain’t a Country album. This is a “Beyoncé” album.” And it, of course, is. She moves through various genres and sounds as well as samples, references, and features lots of different artists, both country and otherwise [I will say that I am genuinely shocked that The Chicks don’t make an appearance on this album considering they are part of Beyoncé’s CMAs story!!]. It is, as it was intended to be, a country-fied continuation of RENAISSANCE.
Like RENAISSANCE, COWBOY CARTER is best when listened to in order. On RENAISSANCE, this made the album feel like a true dance party with each song blending seamlessly into the next. On COWBOY CARTER, the song order hinges on the concept that you are listening to a radio station - several times throughout the album, Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton, and Linda Martell play the part of country radio DJs before introducing the next song. In an industry where playing female country artists on the radio has been compared to putting “the tomatoes in a salad”, where Lil Nas X’s “Old Town Road” was removed from country charts, and where requests for Beyoncé herself on country radio go rejected, this framing is personal and important.
Beyoncé’s call outs of the industry come just a few months after Maren Morris, one of the biggest names in contemporary country, announced she would be “leaving” the genre because of “the country music industry’s unwillingness to honestly reckon with its history of racism and misogyny and to open its gates to more women and queer people and people of color.” Beyoncé can’t solve all these problems with a single album, but if anyone was going to force a reckoning, it needed to someone as big as Beyoncé.
I have a weird relationship to country music. I grew up listening to the occasional country song - my sister and I loved singing along to “This Kiss” by Faith Hill in our babysitter’s car and there was no escaping “Man! I Feel Like a Woman” - but I’d never considered myself a country fan. When I moved from the Midwest to the South in middle school, I was culture shocked. My new classmates had southern accents and used different words than I did and for some reason they used composition notebooks instead of spiral bound notebooks (this one still confuses me). They also all seemed to like country music. I decided then and there, in order to maintain my outsider status, that I “hated country music.”1
Since then and since being introduced to some country artists I really do like, I have done some serious reflecting on why I’d spent so long hating an entire genre. Part of it certainly had to do with being a contrarian around my new friends. I also think a lot of it had to with the reasons why Maren is leaving the industry. And why Beyoncé felt so unwelcome at the CMAs. And why The Chicks were blacklisted from the industry. And on and on and on! In my mind, liking country music meant you supported conservative politics. And to a lot of people this was and still is true. But there lots of women and people of color and queer people in the country music space trying to change that narrative. I am so curious to see the ramifications of COWBOY CARTER and Beyoncé’s attempts to disrupt the genre while uplifting the black artists already leading the way.
I feel spoiled- there has been a lot of good new music over the last few weeks! In addition to an early favorite off COWYBOY CARTER, today’s mix includes new tracks from Sarah Shook and the Disarmers and Waxahatchee, some of my favorite artists under the country/Americana umbrella; FLETCHER, whose new album, In Search of the Antidote, is every bit as high energy and messy as you’d want from a pop album; Blondshell and Bully, who individually released two of my favorite albums of last year and have now teamed up for a new song; and Olivia Rodrigo, who released the extended version of her album GUTS which includes what is probably my favorite Olivia song since “deja vu” (still reigns supreme!). Plus other new tracks from Remi Wolf, Maggie Rogers, Tierra Whack, and more!
Some great reads and listens about the landscape of contemporary country if you want way more!
Country Music’s Race Problem- podcast episode from Into It: A Vulture Podcast with Sam Sanders
Beyoncé’s Country- podcast episode from Switched on Pop
Thanks for being here, for reading, and for listening! If you enjoy Made You a Mix, please share with a friend!
The trouble with this stance is that the line between country music and pop music can be incredibly thin. After I heard “Our Song” by Taylor Swift for the first time, I went home and secretly, shamefully bought the song on iTunes. If I hated country music, why did I love this song? Why did Fearless later become my favorite album (and why does it remain my favorite Taylor album to this day)? I found ways to justify it - Taylor was played on pop radio, therefore it was fair game - and to justify that Taylor was the only country artist I listened to for many, many years.