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Here's a helpful bit of context for this conversation. There was a moment around that time when you had the most powerful man in the world, Barack Obama. This is Piers Morgan talking to Beyoncé on CNN back in 2011. You, the biggest singing star in the world. Tiger Woods was then the number one golfe in the world, which would have been unthinkable 20, 30 years before. Exactly. The scene change really came through personal achievement as much as anything else.

Absolutely.

She's about 29 years old here, and he was reflecting on the moment the country was in after the election of Barack Obama to the presidency. Have you had to put up with racism as you grew up? Did you experience the bad side of it? A bit. But I feel like now people, at least with my career, I've broken barriers, and I don't think people think about my race. I think they look at me as an entertainer and a musician, and I'm very happy that that's changing because I think that's how I look at people, and that's how I look at my friends.

It's not about color and race, and I'm just happy that that's changing.

Like I said, this was 2011, and a lot has changed. For us, and for her. Now, like Taylor Swift, Beyoncé is an economy shifting international star. But her ability to shift the cyclops eye of cultural attention, well, that's unmatched. And this year, this election year, she trained that eye on country music, whose gatekeepers, radio programmers, record executives, marketers, well, they still maintain a fair amount of power in the streaming era, which is made for a clash of Titans, Beyoncé, her fandom and scholars, versus the country music industry and its reputation for selective nostalgia and stringent gatekeeping. So today we're asking, what just happened? Lots of artists have tried to boot-scoot their way onto country music charts. Why did this album cause such a stir? And what about both this pop star and this political moment has caused all this conversation? I'm Audi Cornish, and this is The Assignment. There's been a ton of writing about the album Cowboy Carter since it dropped this spring. But what grabbed my attention is a new documentary on CNN called Call Me Country, Beyoncé and Nashville's Renaissance. Basically, country music is entering is a cyclical pop moment, when stars from Post Malone to Lana Del Rey are reportedly going country.

But unlike the '80s and '90s when this last happened, radio is not quite what it was. Album sales aren't what they were. And When the host, 9/11 pop country is more than just popular, it's been in a way co-opted as a red state cultural signifier. So I spoke with NPR music journalist, Sydney Madden, about how and when the politics of Beyoncé started to aim in this direction.

I absolutely agree with the sentiment that neither of these two big institution and forces need each other, but I don't think that is the impetus of why Beyoncé chose to do this at this time in her career. To your point, Beyoncé is a singular force in the music industry. Beyoncé is the genre, right? When she even preface the album with a very rare Instagram to talk about what this album was going to mean, she said, It's not a country album, it's a Beyoncé album. That really followed through with the different ways that she enmeshed traditional country, and I'm using the air quotes here, everybody, with sub-genres and also with so many different seemingly disparate other genres, like rock, blues, gospel, hip hop, R&B, all that. It's a beautiful shorty sport in a way that very few artists can accomplish. But at the same time, it feels very methodical. So we know that this album is presumably act two in a three-act trilogy that Beyoncé is putting out. It comes after Renaissance. It's acting in renaissance. Yeah.

And just to stop you for a moment, I want to come back to that Instagram post because it has become this little bit of a Rosetta Stone of figuring out her thinking going into this. For real. But one of the things she said is that this was born out of the idea of her feeling unwelcome. And everyone sleuthed that back in the Internet land to her appearance at the Country Music Awards in what, 2016? Which is an interesting time politically, if you think about it. But then she does something that is political by bringing the chicks with her, Natalie Maine, people who had notoriously been blacklisted by the country music industry. And my understanding is the CMA is the industry, capital I, right? Like, it's the radio play folks. It's the executive folks. It is the body that has turned country music into what it is today in terms of a business.

Absolutely. It is the pillar. And I think it was very, again, methodical and strategic back in 2016 to perform Daddy Lessons, her country song, off of Lemonade, and perform it with the Chicks, because the Chicks, at the time, formerly known as the Dixie Chicks, they were They're pretty much lepers of the institution for calling out George W. Bush in the wake of the war in Iraq, and everything that happened in the early 2000s.

And it's also coming in the few years I don't want to spend so much time on the timeline, but I think it's important. This was a few years after her Super Bowl appearance, where she came out during the Cole Play show in a Black Panther-themed political... Not Black the Disney movie, but like, Black Panther, the political movement. Way more militant. Way more militant than that. And again, it was a moment where, I remember SNL making a joke about it, where people suddenly saw her as a Black artist who was also political and had maybe... Who was willing to talk about her history and ties to Black political movements. And then a militant one, right? Like, at the Super Bowl. So to all these years later, then to show up at the CMAs, right, with another finger in the eye. It just feels like she was on this path for some time.

Absolutely. And I think that's the distinction that sets Beyoncé as a big planet in the pop sphere, apart from a lot of other artists, is she's played by the roles of the music industry for a very long time. Some argue that she still is playing by rules with the fact that she still goes to the Grammys, even though she's been denied album of the Year, things like that. There are definitely some parameters she still sticks by. But as one of the biggest pop and R&B artists ever in the history of the genre and the business, she doesn't shy away from making very overt political statements. I think that's why the American flag on the album art of Cowboy Carter really caught people off guard. But again, I think this is part of the point.

Not just an American flag. She's on a white horse in rodeo queen gear, side saddle, flag, right? And the blonde hair. I see blonde hair. Yeah. She really just said, Okay, you don't think it's country enough? I'm going to give you every cliché conceptually that you have about this. If she could have had a truck and a beer in the background, I think she would have tried to fit it in. It just didn't work with the esthetic. But I know. Someone probably thought about it. The pick up in the Bayes of Hill. Exactly.

The pick up in the Bayes of Hill, we're just off camera. Yeah, but taking up those esthetics is actually calling out the hypocrisy that America represents a lot. And you feel that in a lot of the tracks in the album, whether it be Jolanne, which is the dolly part in classic, which she flips to go from begging a woman not to take her man to Beyoncé is warning a woman not to take her man, or songs like Tyrant, one of my personal favorites. She's a tyrant.

Every Where she's lamenting over this outlaw who takes and takes all the men in the town to actually becoming and embodying the Fem Fetal outlaw.

I am such a tyrant.

Every You hear it in a lot of the songs. So even in the context of that song, when you think of the history of lynching of Black people, the history of vigilante justice against Black men in the South and otherwise, again, that's another one of those songs that has a lot of unearthed history. Layers. Yeah.

Yeah. And again, that's why this album compared to Renaissance, which was disco and dance-themed and inflect and influence. This album feels so much more strategic and methodical. You can tell she thought a lot about this album. She came with receipts. She gathered up pioneers and contemporary acts. She's doing so much more thinking versus Renaissance. To me, even though it, again, is an amazing conceptual piece of work, Renaissance is rooted in feeling. This is an album that is rooted in strategic thinking.

Now I want to talk about the gatekeeper, so to speak, talking about country music and the music business. Now, I had joked in the past that country is one of those few genres where when you come and go from it, you have to like, announce it. You know, when I was I'm thinking of Maren Morris, who's a country pop singer. Last fall, she left officially, said, I'm not going to be a part of this anymore because she felt like her politics was very much at odds with the industry. And then some other people- Or Tiller Swift. Yeah, exactly. So first of all- Not so much on the political tip, just on the commercial. Am I wrong? Maybe hip hop and jazz are the same way. How do you think of it?

I love how you said the announcement of coming and going and gatekeepers, because country music as an industry, as a commercial operating body, it very much runs on those gatekeepers. And the gatekeepers, in large part, are the people who push the button in country radio formats. And you might think that this isn't that important in the streaming era when everyone can access music with a few clicks of their phone as a touch point of who is cosigning you, who's allowing you to be in these who's allowing success in country music, it is still very much in the hands of country music programmers. There was a study that came out that logged and looked at country music from 2000 all the way up to 2020. It proved what a lot of casual listeners know to be true, which is the country radio format leans incredibly male and incredibly white.

That's part of the business. That's not actually your reflection. Yeah, exactly. It's very much part of the business as this model, not so much the culture of country music and Nashville sounds and just the diversity and dexterity of collaboration.

But when you literally go through that funnel of who's getting that tap on the shoulder, who's allowed to perform at the award shows, who's allowed to get these brand deals, these Super Bowl commercials, it usually very disproportionately leans to white male artists, even if they've got a bit of pop sense to them or they've got a couple of face tattoos. It's really a lot of the same type of white male cissette artist over and over. That's a lot of what this album really bucks.

Also, we heard in this documentary from CNN, from Keith Hill, who is a radio consultant who notoriously fell into a scandal which has been nicknamed Tomato Gate, for reasons that will be obvious. Tomato Gate is a flare-up that happened when a radio programmer was quoted saying that, To maximize radio listenership, women should be like tomatoes in a larger salad of male artists.

Never played back to back, and never more than about 20% of the mix.

All of a sudden, I was this idiot saying, take women off radio. Now, he since has spoken. One of the things I found interesting in this documentary is he says, A, he didn't appreciate being have painted as the bad guy when he felt like he was saying out loud something everybody knew. There are a thousand ways I can respond to the question of, how do we make radio more diverse? But fundamentally, we don't want to. In a country where we think there's racism, and there is, there is no racism by country radio. If you give me a great record, I don't care what your skin color is. Like, I actually appreciated him talking because I feel like all of this dialog and writing has been, Beyoncé, poor Beyoncé, she's the real underdog in this story. And I just thought, first of all, no, she's just highlighting something. Because you're a music journalist, when you hear someone like that just say outright the rules, so to speak, is that jarring? Is that unexpected? You cover this world in general, and how notable is it when people just say, Look, this is our business, and we've decided this is the way it works?

From a journalistic standpoint, I don't want to say I like it, but I need it to be said because it proves the point so that it's not all just rhetoric, and it doesn't all seem like people who are in marginalized communities or minorities in America are just complaining. Yeah.

Yeah, you're writing a story, and you have to say, People say. And it's like, you want every once in a while someone to just- We really said it.

Exactly. Every once in a while, when you put your butt in your mouth, you prove our point. You prove our concept right there. And we thank you for that, for you getting a little too comfortable at your kitchen table and letting it slip on a microphone. But it's one of those sad truths that constantly comes up in a misogynistic patriarchal society. It reminds me of when Neil Portnow, the ex-executive of the Recording Academy, he said that women were not winning as many Grammys because they, quote, unquote, need to step up artistically. He said they need to step up. Or it reminds me of when hip hop executives or big hip hop names say they would never sign a woman because women are too expensive and they'd be afraid that everyone in their label roster would want to be distracted and want to have sex with that woman. These are real quotes that prove the point, and prove the point that it's not all in our head, that these imbalances- And across Zandra.

I mean, thank you for reminding me of that.

Exactly. Yeah, it's not an anomaly in the country space. I do think that it needs to be said in order to be eradicated, because what you don't say, you condone. And that's how these imbalances get so calcified in our culture.

So we tried to get a little data so that we could understand the context for all this. And this is from early April. And it shows that after this album has been out, we've all talked about it to death. Beyoncé had eight songs on the Hot Country chart. Texas Holdem charted at number one. So Hot Country songs charts, it's like that is, I assume, streaming, etc. Because then when you look at country airplay, which is radio, Texas Hold'em, the big single, Which is 33. It tops out at 33. And the other song on the chart is her remake of one of Dolly Parton's most famous songs, Jolie.

Yeah, one of the most famous country songs ever.

You can't do better than that, right? And that tops out at 56. So how, as a music journalist, how do you read charts, and what did we just witness after all of this conversation?

I always read charts with a little bit of a grain of salt, because it's It's not indicative of where the culture, where cultural upheavals and shifts are actually happening. It's often just where things bubble up to be.

That's how we talk about political polls. Exactly. It's a snapshot of the moment.

It's very much the same. But I think in terms of radio airplay versus streaming, one of the lasting legacies of this Cowboy Carter era is going to be just discovery. You have Beyoncé as this, again, this planet, this bellwether, this huge figure in any genre. She's proven she can do any genre and cause all this commotion. But what I think the real legacy is going to be is people learning the names of Linda Martell, Shibuzi, Brittany Spencer, Tanner Adele, Willy Jones, all of these Black country pioneers and contemporary names who have been in country, but haven't gotten the same type of highlight, the same type of shine. And there was an article that came out, I believe it was by the Hollywood reporter, that showed that all of their streamings and their discovery of every single artist I named spiked at a minimum of 40 %. Some of those people spiked as much as 180 %. And that's on the streaming tip. And I think we're not only seeing this influence and this impact on the charts and on streaming, we're seeing it IRL, right? So at the most recent CMT Awards, Tana Adele, Brittany Spencer, Tierra Kennedy, and Reina Roberts, four young Black women who's been working in country, whether they're assigned to a label or they're independent.

They were all featured on Beyoncé's rework of Blackbird on the album, and they all came together.

Which just pause for a moment on that. Like a Beatles song. Paul McCartney has given the thumbs up on this song, and then she put these four people on it. Almost unavoidable, right? She was saying, You're going to learn four new names here, because she knew that would be a song that would draw a lot of attention.

Again, education. And then thinking about the message and the thesis of that song being about for the plight of Black women during the civil rights era. These are the layers that we're going to continue to unpack, the discovery. So you see all of those four artists getting their shine, getting their due at a major country awards show. And then what I love is just as a little aside, the amount of Black music fans I see on TikTok, Twitter, Instagram, say things like, Beyoncé got me to listen to my first country album. Because so much of the reclamation and reeducation is about people peeling back the layers of appropriation.

In a way, you're saying that it's not just about there's gatekeeping and some, as you said, white patriarchal. There's just some guy somewhere saying what we all can and can't listen to You're also saying we, as fans, have, in a way, we've embraced our silos. Yeah.

Exactly. I thought a lot about this album in relation to that Tony Morris' same quote, where she says, The serious function of racism is to distract you. It's And the worst part about white folks taking country and commodifying it and cutting black and brown and Indigenous people out of the equation is that years later, generations later, Black and Brown people in large swaths don't recognize that this is music of their own ancestors. They don't feel like it's a place for them, and they don't hear and see themselves in it, figuratively and literally, for the most part. And That's the most insidious thing about appropriation, is it can make you forget what's yours and where you came from, who you're connected to.

I'm talking with NPR Music reporter, Sydney Madden, more in a moment.

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Apollo, the God of music, was also the God of medicine. There's been a long time link between music and sound and health. That is my favorite of the month. Apollo, the God of Music, was also the God of Medicine. I'm Megna Chakrabarty. Let's explore the world we're living in every weekday with On Point from WBUR, Boston's NPR. Find and follow On Point, wherever you get your podcasts. It's The Assignment. I'm Adi Cornish, back with NPR music reporter, Sydney Madden. We were talking with some folks in Nashville, and one of the things that came up, and And I lived there for a couple of years. The music business is the music of the town. I would tell someone, they'd be like, What do you do? And I'd be like, Oh, well, I'm a writer. And they'd be like, Oh, great. You're a songwriter. And I was like, Actually, I meant reporter. I felt ashamed that I wasn't part of the business of the town. But she called it a 10-year town, that it takes 10 years to build up the support, the connections, your own personal infrastructure to really get your music seen, heard, et cetera.

And that for some Black creatives, they don't go through that whole 10-year period, right? That they get discouraged earlier. I wanted to get your opinion on that.

I think anything that is normally 10 years for someone who fits the mold of what country can be or who is popular in country. And again, this is a big reason why Beyoncé Dawns that icy white platinum blonde because she's showing you, this is your archetype of a country star, but it's on a black woman. So what you're going to do now? You're telling me that's not country? Anyway. But I think anyone who looks the part, acts the part, plays by the rules, again, because we talked about how there are rules You can probably count on 10 years to be overnight success. You're working on that community, those relationships, you're doing those writing camps. But for a black person to even enter a space of a writing camp, you got to call out the elephant in the room before they do. You got to deal with all these different microaggressions or very overt aggression, similarly to how B did at the CMAs in 2016. It's not a one-size-fits-all journey or battle. I'm reminded of Lenny Long, who's an R&B singer who's found a lot of success recently in the R&B space. She used to work in countries.

She went by a different name. She told a story recently about how she would always bring a bottle of brown liquor to writing sessions, and she would break the ice of saying, Oh, I didn't want to be the only brown thing in the house. Bring that in to literally address it first and foremost. Because not only are you working as an up and coming artist and sharing ideas and being in a vulnerable place, you're working at the deficit of being often the only one in the room.

Right. And working off people's other-Preconceived notions. Yeah. One of the artists, I think it was, was it Aaron Vance, talked about someone once asking him like, Oh, you're a performer. You must do hip hop.

No, I do traditional country. And that was it.

He didn't say too much, and he just walked off.

Yeah. So he's a white country artist, and he has all this opportunity and look at his attitude towards somebody he don't know, and he just seen a color.

So that gave me more fire to keep doing me, keep writing what I write, keep living my life, and don't worry about artists like that, because artists like, they got it made in the shade. I ain't got it made in the shade. And he felt so discombobulated by this interaction, right? Where he is a Southern person. Like, this is the... Like, he grew up on a farm, et cetera. It felt like he had every credential, but not the credential that mattered.

Yeah. I mean, think about some of the big patron saints of country music. Like Shania Twain, right? Where's she from?

Canada. Keith Urban is my favorite one to talk about. Yeah. And he from Australia?

Yes. But see, it's not even about where you're planted and where you grow from, where you're bred, like the archetypes of country that should be the badges on your belt that gets you into the room and they give you that lived experience. It's so much about the physical, the presentation, and what they feel, again, they being the white country format, radio button pushers, what they feel they can sell to that audience.

But isn't hip hop the same way? I mean, we talked about the audience embracing its silos in a way, and over time, because if you go into the history, there was hillbilly music, air quotes, which became white country music, radio as we know it, and then race records, which was a way of saying all of the Black artists had to be pushed in a different direction. And over time, all kinds of communities have embraced those silos. And I feel like I hear this each year, let's say, the Latin American Music Awards, where people are like, who's actually Latin American? Should Rosalia, who's from Spain, be in this conversation? Why? Why not? Hip hop has always had this fraught relationship with outsiders. It just feels like, I'm not excusing country music, but it feels like this is What Beyoncé has asked us all to do is question genre, and we're not all really ready to do that.

Exactly. Because many people are creatures of habit. They love routine. They will sit in the same spot, and they won't question a lot of pillars and parameters that have been created around them. But yeah, that's another thing that is such a big lasting theme of this album. It's divesting and dismantling the color lines of genre in a really big way.

Also in the age of streaming where they don't make sense. You do not need to broadcast to your tiny region and only appease that audience in your tiny region because your radio signal only goes so far. That doesn't exist anymore.

I do think in the hip hop space, you do need to get your region or your state or your hometown. You need to get that solidified, and if that's going to be part of your identity and part of your sound. There still is a very big regional aspect to hip hop, whether it be New York or East Coast or LA or Southern or Midwest. That's still feels very set in stone. But again, you always have the outliers of that. You always have people like Childish Gambino or Kid Cutty, or Playboy Cardi, or Tierra Wack or no name. People who don't fit into the bubbles and boxes of what you think a Southern hip hop artist should be, a black female.

Which are always signaled through style of dress, certain kinds of production. Yeah, signatures. Yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. I mean, that's the whole point of this. If Beyoncé is saying, I am embracing my Southern roots and also pushing the tendrils out far further, it's really breaking every box and preconceived notion of what a Black country artist should be, what a Black artist should be, what a Black pop star should be. She's been doing that, and I think, again, this is the most research-heavy, methodical manifestation of it.

One of the things that struck me about this moment is that country music, in so many ways, has become one of the markers of our political and tribal identities, because because of the ways that it's been drawn into modern conservative politics. And Beyoncé, because of the way she has behaved in terms of her own personal politics coming through her music, is on another end of the political poll, and that this, in a way, even though we all weren't talking about it, was also at play. It was like one of these culture war right-left conversations, right? Where you had a bunch of people writing essays about misogyny, patriarchy, white gatekeeping, a lot of the political language of the progressive left overlaid on what was basically an album against country music and everything that we perceive it to represent.

I mean, we have to remember when this is dropping, too. This is an election year, an era when there is decreasing trust for media. There's a divestment in a lot of the places that people have looked up to or looked to for a long time to give you a sense of scale and a sense of truth-telling. So a lot of what this music is infused with from its esthetic so far, because she hasn't dropped the visuals yet, to the double and triple entendres and all the songs, to the meshing of different subgenres together, is how hypocritical the American experience is, the hypocrisy that is imbued in being American.

Which we've talked about a lot on this show, that there's a lot of questioning right now about who gets to tell the American story, what aspects of it, how it's edited, right? What's in, what's out, and why that's such a fight, from book bands to whatever. It's interesting to put her in that spectrum as well, of saying, look, well, I've got a story to tell, too, and here's how it might look.

That's why such a big theme that comes through is, and it's on songs like American Requiem, they're saying, If that ain't country, tell me what it is. I've been planted in Texas. I grew up here. That's why such a big theme is that double consciousness. And I have to shout out Monica Barcante from Rolling Stone. She introduced this idea of double consciousness, a term first coined by W. E. B. Devoyce. And it's that this album, it Again, two, it has that double consciousness of it, of how B is refusing to relinquish or throw away her Black Southern roots and the beauty and the depth of that culture while she's also reconciling with the racist roots of the American South that translates and reflects out to the Southern country music machine.

Sydney Madden is a reporter for NPR Music and co-host of the podcast, Louder Than a Riott. You can find season 2 wherever you get your podcast. The assignment is a production of CNN Audio. This episode was produced by Lauryn Galloretta. Our senior producer is Matt Martinez. Dan DeZula is our technical director, and Steve Ligtai is the executive producer of CNN Audio. We got heard from Haley Thomas, Alex Manasari, Robert Mather's, John Dianora, Lenny Steinhart, Jamis Andress, Nicole Pessereau, and Lisa Namarau. Special thanks to Katie Hidman. I'm Audi Cornish, and thank you for listening.

Quality sleep is essential, and that's why the Sleep Number Smart Bed is designed for your ever-evolving sleep needs. So you can choose what's right for you whenever you like. Need a bed that's firmer or softer on either side? Helps you sleep at a comfortable temperature. Quiets their snores. Sleep Number does that. Sleep better together. Jd Power ranks Sleep Number number one in customer satisfaction with mattresses purchased in store. And now, save 40% on SleepNumber limited edition smart bed for a limited time. For JD Power 2023 award information, visit JDPower. Com/awards. Only at sleepnumbersores or sleepnumber. Com.