My Country Tis of Thee: Beyoncé's Magnificent New Album "Cowboy Carter"
PLUS: Catching up on this spring's best new albums
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
Those words are spoken by Linda Martell at the beginning of “Spaghettii” from Cowboy Carter, the new “country” record by Beyoncé and Act II in the trilogy of albums that began with Renaissance (2022). Musically, I tend to think in terms of genre, as it helps me track artistic movements and the musical and social factors artists are responding to. The more I’ve immersed myself in genre, however, the more I’ve noticed how oppressive and fragile those categories can be: Oppressive in the sense that they exclude many interesting and quirky artists who, for whatever reason, don’t quite fit the prototype, and fragile because once you do include those artists in the genre, the genre begins losing its definition. Suddenly timeframe and the artists who are communicating with each other in the moment across genre begin to matter as much as style.
Beyoncé likely selected Martell to speak those words because Martell—who, in 1970, became the first Black female country singer to perform on the Grand Ole Opry—was a musician who did not meet people’s expectations for the country music genre. Consequently, she wasn’t always well-received by country fans. Audience members often hurled racial epithets at Martell when she toured with Waylon Jennings and Hank Snow in the early 1970s. I’ll let you decide for yourself if Martell’s music is “country” enough:
The title of the song Martell introduces on Cowboy Carter is also a way for Beyoncé to play with the idea of genre. “Spaghettii” likely nods to “spaghetti westerns,” movies filmed in Italy and Spain in the 1960s that often upended the conventions of Hollywood-produced western films. Along with director Sergio Leone and conductor Ennio Morricone, the person most associated with the iconography of the spaghetti western is Clint Eastwood, whose anti-heroic, gunslinging Man with No Name stood in stark contrast to the upstanding heroic characters typically played by Hollywood screen legend John Wayne. Yet today, Wayne and Eastwood are probably the two actors most associated with the Western genre. In other words, genre does not need to be an inherently constrictive concept.
So I guess the question is how “Spaghettii”—which I suspect most would identify as a rap song—qualifies as a “country” song. I’ll let you figure that one out for yourself:
Once you do figure that out, not only do a lot of the walls built around genre begin melting away, but you may even begin wondering who built them in the first place, and why.
With Cowboy Carter, Beyoncé continues to defy pop cultural gravity. More than twenty years into a solo career and more than twenty-five years after she made her debut with Destiny’s Child, Beyoncé continues to release critically-acclaimed and culturally-significant albums. She has never faded from the spotlight nor needed to mount a comeback. While most other artists begin transitioning into legacy acts at this point in their careers, Beyoncé keeps ascending new artistic heights. She reigns as the most vital popular musician of the twenty-first century.
Cowboy Carter is Beyoncé’s most surprising album yet. Recording a country album is a high-risk proposition for a highly successful Black female pop/R&B artist like Beyoncé. It could easily be rejected by country fans. It could easily be ignored by her fanbase. But the catch, as Beyoncé admits herself, is that Cowboy Carter “ain’t a Country album. It’s a ‘Beyoncé’ album.” The strands of country are there, running through Beyoncé’s Alabama-Louisiana-Texas heritage. Her advantage, though, is that those strands aren’t woven together with one another. They’re loose, and she can string them through her music anyway she sees fit and to make any point she wants.
Cowboy Carter doesn’t sound like anything you would hear playing on a mainstream country music station today. Some of the elements you might find in those songs are there, but you won’t hear a conventional (by today’s standards) country song. Instead, you’ll discover the traces of country music: A boot-stomping rhythm, a twangy guitar lick, a drawled verse. There are references to country tropes scattered throughout the album:
“This ain’t Texas (Woo)/ Ain’t no hold ‘em (Hey)/ So lay your cards down, down, down, down”
“Wheels in the gravel/ Davis in my bones”
“So I laugh and I lie and the coyotes cry”
“Rodeo in your room, that shoot breaks loose with perfect timin’”
“Life is comin’ at me fast, keep my Bible on the dash/ His pistol in my seat, just in case I gotta blast”
“Every time I ride it, every time I ride this/ I don’t like to sit up in the saddle, boy, I got it”
“You want smoke, I’m the Marlboro man”
More than anything else, you’ll hear harmonies and layered vocal arrangements. It is as though Beyoncé is arguing the problem with “country” today is that the idea of the whole and what collectively passes as the whole of “country” has obscured the parts. It’s the parts Beyoncé finds interesting, what she yanks away and attaches to other ideas. The result isn’t the singular whole that passes as country today, but a collage made up of country’s constituent parts.
Beyoncé wrote she began thinking about recording a country album after appearing on the CMA Awards in 2016 with the Dixie Chicks to perform “Daddy Lessons”, a country-styled song from her album Lemonade. Many in the country community said a pop artist like her didn’t belong at the awards show even though other pop artists like Justin Timberlake and Ariana Grande had performed at the ceremony in the recent past. The irony of course is that Beyoncé’s songs are topically as “country” as any country song you’d hear on the radio: She’s a mama bear, a survivor, something of a hick, a choir girl, a devoted wife (albeit one who sings more explicitly about her love life than the average country singer.) She is also, of course, the scorned woman, which is why she covers “Jolene”:
Dolly Parton introduces that song for Beyoncé by referring with a chuckle to the infamous “Becky with the good hair” mentioned in “Sorry” from Lemonade who Beyoncé’s husband Jay-Z reportedly had an extramarital affair with:
Hey Miss Honeybee, it’s Dolly P
You know that hussy with the good hair you sing about?
Reminded me of someone I knew back when
Except she has flamin’ locks of auburn hair
Bless her heart
Just a hair of a different color but it hurts just the same
It all comes down to the strands again, right? Are they so interwoven that they can’t be pulled apart, or do they run everywhere and through everything, catching a bigger notion of country in their weave? Dolly and Beyoncé exist on different stations on your radio, but in another universe, they’re kin.
In many ways, Cowboy Carter sounds like an alternative history of country music, one that clears different paths through its past. All those harmonies and vocal arrangements situate the women of the Carter Family as country’s founding mothers, suggesting the genre’s story doesn’t need to barrel like a freight train from Jimmie Rodgers to Hank Williams to Merle Haggard to George Strait. At one point during the album, someone is heard flipping through radio stations. It’s like time travel: The listener hears Son House, Sister Rosetta Tharpe, Chuck Berry singing “Maybellene”. These Black artists are typically treated as outliers within the story of country music. Beyoncé strings them together and then ties them into a Willie Nelson interlude. Their stories and their experiences could constitute country as well.
By the end of the album, Beyoncé imagines the paths country music could have taken and maybe even invents its future. “Desert Eagle” is a funky square dance with a bass line Stevie Wonder (who plays the harmonica on “Jolene”) could have created in the 1970s. “II Hands II Heaven” is an electronica song set in the high desert of the American Southwest that samples the seminal techno track “Born Slippy Nuxx” by Underworld. Southern rap features prominently on “Tyrant” and “Sweet ★ Honey ★ Buckiin’” as if to remind listeners that the forces driving both hip-hop and country today originate in the Deep South.
That latter song opens with Beyoncé singing Patsy Cline’s “I Fall to Pieces”. Cline is primarily associated with the Nashville Sound that emerged in the late 1950s and married country music to the more sophisticated arrangements characteristic of traditional pop. It’s a reminder country music often does draw from the sounds of pop music. But Beyoncé also uses Cowboy Carter to demonstrate how the sounds of country music have seeped into popular music. She covers the Beatles’ “Blackbird” (which Paul McCartney—who plays on the track—wrote about the Little Rock Nine) and builds the touching “II Most Wanted” upon a foundation supplied by Fleetwood Mac’s “Landslide”. The So-Cal sound of the 60s and 70s pops up in multiple places on the album. It can be heard on “Ya Ya”, which, in addition to sampling Nancy Sinatra’s “These Boots Were Made for Walkin’”, draws inspiration from the Beach Boys’ “Good Vibrations” (sing the chorus to “Good Vibrations” with a Southern drawl to discover its debt to country) and “Bodyguard”, which is inflected with America’s brand of soft, 70s-era country rock.
One of the more interesting choices Beyoncé makes is bringing Miley Cyrus and Post Malone into the studio to lend vocals to “II Most Wanted” and “Levii’s Jeans” respectively.
Neither Cyrus nor Post command much respect among music critics. Cyrus, who rose to fame as the star of the Disney Channel’s Hannah Montana, is the daughter of country singer Billy Ray Cyrus (whose one hit, “Achy Breaky Heart”, re-popularized line dancing in the early 1990s) and the goddaughter of Dolly Parton. Cyrus has a reputation as an artless and tacky pop star, someone whose outrageous behavior appears orchestrated only to court media attention. Post (who’s having one hell of a year, as he’s also a guest on Taylor Swift’s latest single) is a white rapper often accused of cultural appropriation. His music and public comments (as when he put his hair in cornrows and called himself “White Iverson”) are frequently seen as cringe-worthy. Beyoncé, however, likely hears two key qualities in their music: Genuine soulfulness, and a sort of underclass appeal, meaning they may come across as more authentically “country” than many of today’s polished Nashville acts. To paraphrase Parton, it takes a lot of smarts for Beyoncé to work with two artists this trashy.
At 78 minutes, Cowboy Carter is a long album that, although brimming with ideas, could be tightened up in places. The greater sin, however, is that the physical copies of the album that came out last week omit songs, including “Spaghettii” (featuring Linda Martell’s intro) and “Ya Ya”, two of my favorite tracks. Perhaps Beyoncé decided to add those songs to streaming services at the last minute when the album debuted last month, but it does make it feel as though the physical versions aren’t definitive. That feeling is reinforced by the fact that the cover of the physical edition swaps out the picture of Beyoncé dressed as a rodeo queen riding a horse for the photograph of Beyoncé in a Statue of Liberty pose smoking a cigarette.
Both images are striking and packed with meaning, but the difference is significant because Renaissance, the first part of this trilogy, also featured Beyoncé riding a horse, implying continuity between the albums. My advice is to listen to the album on streaming services and wait to see if Beyoncé releases the full record on vinyl or CD before purchasing a hard copy.
Cowboy Carter begins and concludes with “Ameriican Requiem”, a song she worked on with Jon Batiste that contains an interpolation of the classic 1966 protest song “For What It’s Worth” by Buffalo Springfield. It’s a stunner, the sort of table-setter great albums demand.
The song—whose composition is vaguely reminiscent of a national hymn—opens with gospel harmonies tinged with pain, sadness, and dejection as Beyoncé confronts an old “friend” who kind of seems different but hasn’t really changed:
Nothin’ really ends
For things to stay the same, they have to change again
Hello, my old friend
You change your name, but not the ways you play pretend
American Requiem
Them big ideas (Yeah) are buried here (Yeah)
Amen
Beyoncé is singing about America, her “country.” She’s had enough. The lyrics become a prayer for strength, and as soon as it ends, the listener is dropped into the middle of a wild west showdown a few minutes before high noon. The music rumbles with tension, Beyoncé’s voice deepens and fills with resolve. “It’s a lot of talkin’ goin’ on/ While I sing my song,” she declares. “Can you hear me?” she asks, but it’s not really a question. Soon enough she stakes her ancestral claim to this nation, then asserts her grievance:
Used to say I spoke too country
And the rejection came, said I wasn’t country ‘nough
Ooo, said I wouldn’t saddle up, but
If that ain’t country, tell me what is?
Beyoncé spends the rest of the album deconstructing and reconfiguring the idea of “country.” On Cowboy Carter’s final song, “Amen”, she revisits “American Requiem”, singing of a “house…built with blood and bone” that has “crumbled” and “statues” made of “lies of stone.” Beyoncé asks, “can you hear me now?” The whole is shattered. We stand amongst the rubble. Do with the pieces what you will. Amen.
Signals and Noise
The House approved a $95 billion foreign aid package for Ukraine, Israel, and Taiwan. Republican Speaker of the House Mike Johnson finally brought it up for a vote after months of delay. The final vote on the Ukraine portion of the bill was 311-112, with all 210 Democrats present in favor and only hardline conservative Republicans opposed to it. The package now goes to the Senate, which is expected to pass it.
By Annie Karni of the New York Times: “Johnson, Like Pence, Draws Praise for Defying His Party and Doing His Job”
Republican nutcase Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene has said she would move to vacate the Speaker if Mike Johnson put a Ukraine aid bill up for a vote, and this week she picked up a second Republican to help her do just that in Rep. Thomas Massie of Kentucky. That means Republicans alone would be unable to save Johnson’s job.
Johnson’s response: “I’m not resigning.” (OK. Was he going to resign?)
Anonymous Republican representative upon hearing Massie’s news: “We are screwed.”
In an extraordinary move before the final vote, Democrats on the House Rules Committee stepped up to support Johnson’s foreign aid package. The Rules Committee, which sends bills to the floor of the House and is controlled by the speaker, typically votes along party lines on everything, but three of the six Republicans voted against the bill, which brought Democrats to the rescue. The move signals Johnson is effectively a coalition speaker.
“It’s four years of scorched earth when Donald Trump retakes the White House.”—RNC co-chair Lara Trump at a Republican fundraiser
The Washington Post reports Trump’s strategy in his hush money trial (which will last months) is to “deny, delay, and denigrate.” The New York Times observes Trump is more focused on winning over the court of public opinion than he is with winning over the jury.
Erica Orden of Politico notes one major complication for the prosecution in Trump’s hush money trial: Their star witness—former Trump fixer Michael Cohen—is an admitted liar.
Sleepy Joe? More like Sleepy Don. Reporters noticed Trump dozing off during the first day of his trial. (And this past Friday.) Talk about low energy. Not sure if he has the stamina to be president.
Trump is suffering inside a freezing courtroom for you. (Those nefarious liberals and their thermostats…)
Jake Lahut of The Daily Beast notes the first week of Trump’s trial has proven just how disruptive it will be to his campaign.
Zac Anderson and Erin Mansfield of USA Today found Don Trump’s campaign keeps funneling money into his business enterprises. For example, the campaign wrote checks to Mar-a-Lago for over $400,000 in February alone. The money is for official campaign events, but it’s weird for a wealthy (albeit cash-strapped) candidate not to cover the costs himself. (Note to the Trump campaign: There are certainly cheaper places to hold campaign events.)
Alex Isenstadt of Politico reports the Trump campaign now expects GOP candidates who raise money off his name, image, and likeness to slip him 5% of the total funds raised. (Democrats will keep raising money off Trump, but I kind of doubt he’ll be collecting from them.)
Roger Sollenberger of The Daily Beast investigates a $50 million loan Trump had on the books that a watchdog group claims never existed. Legal experts think Trump could have used the “loan” to evade taxes on tens of millions of dollars in income for years.
A New York Times poll found a small but not insignificant number of voters over the past four years have adopted rosier views of the Trump administration, particularly when it comes to his handling of the economy and national security. He is still seen as a divisive figure, though.
Jack Herrera wonders in The Atlantic if Texas’s new immigration law—which, like “show me your papers” laws in California and Arizona, allow law enforcement officers to stop and arrest anyone they suspect has crossed the border illegally—will lead Latinos in the state to abandon the Republican Party.
Russell Berman of The Atlantic is skeptical Biden can ride the coattails of candidates in state elections to victory, as many Democratic strategists are hoping.
A handful of neo-Nazi Proud Boys showed up at Trump’s North Carolina rally Saturday (which got cancelled due to bad weather; tough week for Trump on the campaign trail.)
Trump’s supporters began chanting “genocide Joe” at a campaign rally, a phrase used by pro-Palestinian activists to attack Biden’s support for Israel during its war in Gaza. Yet Trump has also pledged unconditional support for Israel.
Drew Harwell of the Washington Post profiles the small-time investors who are buying Trump’s Truth Social stock, which is rapidly declining in value.
Republican Wisconsin senate candidate Eric Hovde is explaining why he doesn’t actually think elderly Americans living in nursing homes shouldn’t be allowed to vote.
Jon Stewart (and every other late night comedian) covered Don Trump’s bonkers remarks about the Battle of Gettysburg last Saturday night.
Republican New Hampshire Governor Chris Sununu (who had endorsed Nikki Haley for president) confirmed to ABC’s George Stephanopoulos he would support Don Trump even though he believes Trump lied about the validity of the 2020 election and fomented an insurrection. Sununu said he would continue to support Trump even if Trump was convicted of a crime. Jonathan Last of The Bulwark ripped Sununu apart, writing, “Sununu is part of a large class of Republican elites who have been not just willing, but eager, to play dice with liberal democracy.”
Former Trump attorney general and Bill Barr, who once said voting for Don Trump was like playing “Russian roulette,” said he would vote for the Republican presidential ticket this fall (which he agreed was still like playing “Russian roulette” but added voting for Biden was somehow worse.)
The Senate quickly dismissed impeachment charges against Homeland Security Secretary Alejandro Mayorkas. The vote was along party lines. Republican House prosecutors didn’t even have the chance to make their case. Legal scholars noted the accusations leveled against Mayorkas did not constitute a high crime or misdemeanor, the standard set for impeachment. Republican senators, most of whom attempted to dismiss impeachment charges against Trump in 2021, claimed they did somehow.
Meanwhile, in the House, Republican Oversight Committee Chairman James Comer could only tell Democratic Rep. Jamie Raskin that he would “find out very soon” what crime Republicans want to impeach Joe Biden for.
Baynard Woods writes in Rolling Stone about how Republican Maryland senate candidate Larry Hogan has turned the city of Baltimore into his archenemy with a series of misleading and often untrue anecdotes that also function as racial dog whistles.
Republican Rep. Marjorie Taylor Greene wants to use—her words—“space lasers” to patrol the southern border. Space Force has been hard at work on the technology:
Is Marge trolling the libs with her own unseriousness? Like, “seriously, don’t take me seriously.”
William Bredderman and Jake Lahut of The Daily Beast pick apart the story Republican Rep. Elise Stefanik tells about her not-so-humble origins.
Amanda Seitz of AP finds that instances in which pregnant women have been turned away from emergency rooms have spiked following the Dobbs decision. Hospitals are reportedly concerned treating pregnant women in distress may lead them to run afoul of states’ restrictive abortion laws.
Arizona House Republicans blocked yet another attempt to repeal the 1864 law that banned nearly all abortions in the state. Senate Republicans introduced a bill that would repeal it. (One of those supporting the bill in the Senate once introduced a bill that would allow pregnant drivers to use carpool lanes on interstates.)
Republican Arizona Senate candidate Kari Lake downplayed the significance of the 1864 Arizona abortion bill by pointing to the availability of the procedure in nearby states. (“[Y]ou can go three hours that way, three hours that way, and you’re going to be able to have an abortion.”)
Lake also told supporters to both “put on the armor of God” and “strap on a Glock” (which she said they could wear on their hip, front, or back) as they prepare for the upcoming election.
The Supreme Court declined to hear, and thus let stand, a case out of Louisiana that held the organizer of a mass public rally was liable for the criminal actions of a single rally participant. As Ian Millhiser of Vox notes, the decision is obviously wrong, as it puts a damper on free speech, since no one would organize a mass event if they were legally responsible for the actions of every participant.
Hannah Natanson and Anumita Kaur of the Washington Post counted 100 bills in 27 Republican-led state legislatures that would penalize librarians with prison or fines for recommending “obscene” or “harmful” books to patrons.
James Finn of nola.com reports the Republican-led Louisiana House will vote on a bill that will repeal a law requiring employers to give child workers lunch breaks. The bill is sponsored by a legislator who owns a number of Smoothie King franchises who said the child workers he employs want to work without lunch breaks.
Federal Reserve Chairman Jerome Powell indicated interest rate cuts won’t occur as soon as expected due to higher than expected inflation. For an historical overview of federal interest rates, see the chart below. (The rate is high in light of recent history, but comparable to the 1990s rate and lower than it was throughout much of the 1970s and 1980s.)
Michael Powell of The Atlantic writes about what upper-middle class liberals don’t get about voters’ concerns with inflation.
By Eric Levitz of Vox: “Tell the Truth About Biden’s Economy” (“The signature strengths and weaknesses of the Biden economy — its low unemployment and elevated prices — are byproducts of one fundamental policy decision: Faced with the Covid recession, the US government chose to prioritize poverty reduction and full employment over minimizing the risk of inflation. Put differently, instead of forcing the nation’s most vulnerable workers to pay the inescapable economic costs of the pandemic through prolonged periods of material deprivation and joblessness, we spread those costs across the entire population through a temporary period of high inflation.”)
Biden called for tripling tariffs on Chinese steel imports.
Catherine Rampell of the Washington Post argues Trump’s proposal to devalue the U.S. dollar “might well be Trump’s most inflationary and economically destructive idea yet.”
Michael Podhorzer writes in The Atlantic about the paradox of the American labor movement: It’s a great time to be in a union, but not a great time to try to start one. (This is a good article to read to learn how US law preserves existing unions but has made it difficult for workers to unionize since 1948.)
Yet a Volkswagen plant in Tennessee became the first automobile factory to vote to unionize in the South since the 1940s.
Israel retaliated against Iran for Iran’s missile and drone attack with airstrikes. The response appears limited and designed not to escalate tensions but to demonstrate Israel’s capacity to strike deep within Iran.
Following last Saturday’s foiled missile and drone attack on Israel—the first time Iran has targeted Israel directly from his home soil—Barak Ravid of Axios reports Biden told Israeli Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu the United States would not support a counterattack against Iran. Nahal Toosi and Alexander Ward of Politico write American diplomats hoping to avoid a wider conflict are urged Israel to “take a breath” before responding.
Brett Murphy of ProPublica reports Secretary of State Anthony Blinken is sitting on a recommendation from a State Department panel to sanction various Israeli military and police units for human rights abuses.
Siobhán O'Grady and Kostiantyn Khudov of the Washington Post report the war in Ukraine is largely frozen as the skies above the front lines are teeming with drones that attack anything that moves on the ground.
Mary Ilyushina of the Washington Post looks at how Russia has ramped up old but reliable weapons production.
By Jamie Dettmer of Politico: “Ukraine is Heading for Defeat”
Top 5 Records Music Review: Catching Up on This Spring’s Best New Albums
Whoa, got a lot of music reviews coming at you this week! Didn’t exactly plan that, but that’s how it worked out.
I don’t know what it was about the pandemic that seemed to sap the music industry of its vitality, but the past few years have hardly been notable on the pop music front. That’s not to say there haven’t been good interesting albums released so far this decade, just that there haven’t been many, and few that have been able to generate any level of buzz approaching a Taylor Swift appearance at a Kansas City Chiefs game. I would have thought artists would have spent the pandemic filling their vaults with future releases to drop on us as soon as concert venues reopened, but maybe everyone just needed to get their groove back.
That seems to be happening this spring. In a few short months this year, I feel like I’ve listened to as many good new albums as I listened to over the past three years. I’ve reviewed a few of them in past posts but suddenly I’ve fallen behind, so let’s get you caught up.
For Your Consideration by Empress Of
The phrase “for your consideration” is used in marketing campaigns during film award season to draw attention to movies or roles studios believe are “award-worthy.” A lot of films get released every year, and studios want screeners to know which performers are most deserving of not only nominations but trophies. In Hollywood, where everything is a show, “for your consideration” signals a very specific sort of courtship is underway.
For Your Consideration, the new record by Honduran-American musician Lorely Rodriguez, who releases music as Empress Of, is a courtship album. This is not a work about an unrequited crush or an innocent flirtation, though. The relationships here are already steamy, sexual, or, as the title of one of the album’s more risqué songs puts it, “Sucia”. (About half of the tracks are recorded in Spanish.)
Rodriguez is eager to turn that carnal passion into something more serious and enduring; as she sings on “Fácil,” “Me monto en tu carro rápido, rápido/ Tus labios me tocan y veo la boda”. Her lover, however, does not seem ready for that kind of commitment yet. During “Lorelei”, she sings about finding another woman’s earrings in his bedroom, and on the title track she wonders if she’s being used. She’s long past the audition and the performance; she’s deserving of her flowers.
The songs on For Your Consideration alternate between dance tracks laced with Latin club rhythms and ethereal pop ballads. The beats on the skeletal dance tracks aren’t heavy but instead skitter through the songs, suggesting there is something there to build on. The dreamy ballads—a specialty of Empress Of—swell and flush with emotion. Through it all, Rodriguez sings as though she’s whispering in her lover’s ear, conjuring up the sort of intimacy a couple finds when they lose themselves in each other on the dancefloor.
At the end of the album, Rodriguez begins questioning her approach. On “Baby Boy” she finds herself chasing another one night stand, well aware that the emotionally-stunted men she’s pursuing are only interested in one thing. Having been jilted by someone with greater long-term potential, she’s fine with that. She has certain needs. But on the last song, “What’s Love”, she admits when the endorphins take over, she ends up falling hard for the boys. Perhaps for Rodriguez, lust is too easily mistaken for love. And perhaps men too easily distinguish between the two.
Tyla by Tyla
When the Recording Academy handed out the first-ever Grammy for Best African Music Performance in 2024, the winner wasn’t an established Afrobeats artist like Burna Boy or Davido but rather Tyla, a 22-year-old South African, for the amapiano song “Water”. (Amapiano is a subgenre of kwaito and house music that draws on jazz. Tyla has been called the “Queen of Popiano” for her blend of amapiano and pop.)
“Water” was released in the summer of 2023 and hit #7 on the Billboard charts in January. The single preceded the release of her self-titled debut album, which came out in March of this year and is packed with sultry, so-hot-they’re cool not-quite slow jams about falling in and out of love. Highlights include “Breathe Me” (“Mouth to mouth when you’re touchin’ me/ Open up, baby, I’ll fill your lungs/ CPR”) and “ART”, which Tyla characterizes herself to a suitor as a work of.
Despite thriving music scenes throughout the continent and some notable achievements in the United States, African artists have yet to break through and lodge themselves within the mainstream of American music. Tyla could change that. Two artists immediately leap to mind when listening to her. The first is Aaliyah, who, like Tyla, could lure a listener into a song with her soft but assured vocal delivery. The second is Rihanna, who created a unique spot in the pop music world of the new millennium with her fusion of Caribbean dancehall, R&B, and hip-hop soul. Some have argued Rihanna is the most important pop singer of the 21st century for the way she smudged and kneaded those influences into something that was both slightly alien yet universal. You can hear Tyla doing the same thing in her music, connecting Cape Town to Bridgetown, Chicago, and London. Listening to Tyla is like floating in-between places and drifting into undiscovered islands. Explorers get to chart and define these new territories for themselves. Tyla’s already at work doing this. She’s an artist to keep an eye on.
Tigers Blood by Waxahatchee
Alabama singer-songwriter Katie Crutchfield has been releasing records for about twelve years now as Waxahatchee. I thought her grunge inflected 2017 album Out of the Storm was that year’s best. In 2020, though, she ditched the alt-rock influences and adopted a more country/Americana sound for the well-received Saint Cloud. Crutchfield is back now with Tigers Blood, which picks up where Saint Cloud left off.
I personally prefer Crutchfield’s punkier side, but Americana music comes naturally to her. Tigers Blood sounds like a lazy summer Sunday afternoon spent wandering rural back roads in a beat-up pick-up truck or watching the grass grow in your front lawn. It’s lovely music that’s easy to drift away to.
Crutchfield’s lyrics will frustrate some listeners. Her songs often don’t have clearly discernable themes or subjects and grow more oblique from line to line. She also has a tendency to tangle up metaphors, which adds to her music’s indecipherability. Yet others might consider her twisty lyrics Dylan-esque, like these lines from “Lone Star Lake”:
Shirk every rule of thumb
I got more where that came from
My expectations are a cinderblock
I tote around like a hollow gun
Like Dylan, the point here probably isn’t to understand the lyrics at a literal level, but to allow her delivery, the instrumental arrangement, and the imagery to leave an impression on the listener.
Imprecision and ambiguity seem to be key ideas here. Crutchfield and the characters she addresses on the album never completely understand each other. She sings on the standout track “Bored”
I keep my head up
Fill up your empty cup
All in the name of love
While you get the hang of
A shade that suits me
Crutchfield seems to be saying here that our relationships with others are always in a state of adjustment. Revealing ourselves or different sides of ourselves to others only leads them to recalibrate their own persona, and on and on. We end up stumbling through relationships, getting close to an understanding of each other but never quite getting on the same page. You can hear this best in the song “Right Back to It” (see Exit Music). The vocals, the instrumentation (including guitars by MJ Lenderman) and the percussion all sound like they’re trying to get in sync with one another, and while the arrangement is beautiful, it also sounds like a group of musicians stumbling over each other a bit as they try to figure out in real time how to fit around, fill in, and complement each other. “[Y]ou just settle in/ Like a song with no end”, she sings, adding, “If I can keep up/ We’ll get right back to it”.
Yet there is no cacophony and barely a trace of anger on the album. Tigers Blood is a record that encourages patience. Crutchfield seems to be saying if you have a falling out with another person or struggle to really, truly understand someone (or their lyrics) what you need is time, a long afternoon to let everything simmer down and sort itself out. Even then, sometimes, that just won’t happen. Maybe the best we can hope for is a better yet incomplete and constantly evolving understanding of each other. There’s just no use forcing it.