Culture chat: Beyonce’s Cowboy Carter
Life and Art from FT Weekend
Forhecz Topher
4.6 • 601 Ratings
🗓️ 5 April 2024
⏱️ 20 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Park your Lexus, throw your keys up, and let’s get into Cowboy Carter, the new genre-bending, country-angled album by Beyonce. Here are the facts: it’s the second instalment in her Renaissance trilogy. It features Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton, Post Malone and Miley Cyrus, and spotlights Black country artists such as Linda Martell. But what was Beyonce’s goal with this album? And how does it fit into her career arc? Lilah’s joined by the FT’s music critic Ludovic Hunter-Tilney and US labour and equality correspondent Taylor Nicole Rogers to chat about the album.
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We love hearing from you. Lilah is on Instagram @lilahrap and we’re on X @lifeandartpod. You can email us at lifeandart@ft.com. We are grateful for reviews, on Apple, Spotify, etc.
Links (all FT links get you past the paywall):
– Cowboy Carter by Beyonce is available to stream now.
– Ludo’s review of Cowboy Carter is here: https://on.ft.com/3U3L0TW
– His review of Renaissance: A Film by Beyonce is here: https://on.ft.com/3J3k54q
– You can follow Ludo on X @ludohunter. Taylor is @TaylorNRogers.
More or Less:
– Taylor wants to see less wellness in culture. For more on the dark side of wellness, check out new FT podcast ‘Untold: The Retreat’ here, or by searching wherever you listen.
– Ludo wants more David Lynch content. Read about David Lynch’s installation at the Milan furniture fair here: https://on.ft.com/3vvcOr7
– Lilah wants to see more pubs in the US. While she was in London she had pints with our producer Lulu Smyth at The Hemingway near Victoria Park and at the The Eagle in Farringdon, and everyone had a swell time. Here’s a list of the FT’s best pubs in London’s West End: https://on.ft.com/4cJz94H
– Relatedly, here’s a great piece, ‘Three Cheers for the pub’, by friend of the podcast Rebecca Watson: https://on.ft.com/4cXv6lN
Read a transcript of this episode on FT.com
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Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | Welcome to Life and Art from FTE Weekend. I'm Lila Raptopoulos, and this is our Friday chat show. |
| 0:07.6 | Today we are talking about the unavoidable, the inimitable cowboy Carter, the new album by Beyonce Noles. |
| 0:15.0 | This is Act 2 in Beyonce's Renaissance trilogy. It follows the dance album she released in 2022. |
| 0:22.3 | It's also Beyonce's first country album, And she says that it was five years in the making and is, and I quote, |
| 0:27.6 | the best music I've ever made. |
| 0:30.0 | And I be damned if I can't slow dance with you. Come close some sugar on me, honey, too. It's a real live |
| 0:35.7 | boogie and a real live hold down. Don't be a bitch. Come take it to the flow now. 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 Martel. And it has made history, maybe too little too late. Her single Texas Holdham has made her the first black woman to top the country |
| 0:54.6 | charts ever. So today we're going to talk about the album and how Beyonce wields her power. |
| 1:00.5 | Let's get into it. I'm Lila and I do know that Hussie with the good hair. |
| 1:06.7 | Joining me from London, he's a real-life boogie and a real-life ho-down. It's the FD's esteemed pop music critic Ludo Hunter Tilney. Hi, Ludo, welcome. Lila, hello. Also, with me in the New York studio, my shotgun rider till the day I die, smoke out the window flying down the 405. How am I doing? She's laughing too much. It's the FD's U.S. Labor and Equality Correspondent, the great Taylor, Nicole Rogers. |
| 1:11.2 | Hi, Lila. |
| 1:11.7 | Hi, Taylor. Welcome. Okay, 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. Yes, she did, Lila, in my opinion. I think that it's a |
| 1:45.1 | big, sprawling, epic affair, which covers a lot of ground, and she does it with Pannash. |
| 1:50.5 | Cool. I love to hear it. Taylor, what do you think? I'm not sure, honestly. Like, I loved |
| 1:57.1 | the album, but it didn't feel as country as I was expecting it to, which to me is a good |
| 2:03.0 | thing because I absolutely hate country music. But it just, it didn't, it wasn't what I was |
| 2:08.0 | expecting, but it was great. I think to pick up on Pont Taylor's point about the country music, |
| 2:13.8 | I actually feel that she's done a sort of more of a Western music type affair, which she inserts |
| 2:19.2 | herself into really quite easily, in my opinion. |
| 2:23.3 | As someone who was, who grew up in Houston, there's not a cowboy imagery running through the lyrics. |
| 2:28.7 | You get the sense of it as being like a great big giant Western, a sort of Hollywood Western, really, |
| 2:32.6 | rather than something which is more about Nashville and country music per se. |
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