Beyoncé is breaking out.
Midway through Cowboy Carter, her eighth and most recent studio album, released this past spring, a voice makes the project's mission statement plain over blaring alarms and a thunderous beat-declaring the concept of genre to be a sense of confinement for those artists whose creativity is too wide-ranging to fit in a neat box. All before Beyoncé herself saunters in comparing herself to Thanos, the Marvel villain known for seeking precious stones of mystical power to claim as his own and assemble into one unified superpower.
There may not be an accompanying music video, but the lyrics conjure a potent visual: Beyoncé, armed with a bedazzled gauntlet, breaking down every stultifying wall, label, or box the industry ever tried to put her in across her 30-year career.
It's a theme that applies to much of what Beyoncé has been up to for the past decade or so, especially in the last couple of years: a mission of reclamation, recentering Blackness in spaces where our influence has since been de-emphasized, whether in rodeo, on the great American plains, or on sweaty ballroom dance floors.
The project has been powered by legacy. Each step forward is illuminated with a look back, a tour through time tracing her own roots, while also yielding the knowledge that her family tree is just one in a larger forest where everything is connected. Whatever she does feels that much grander because of it. A new country-influenced album isn't just an exercise in undoing the strictures of genre; it's a history lesson, where forgotten pioneers can get their props and true lineages can be explored. (That voice denouncing genres belongs to Linda Martell, the Black country pioneer whose efforts endured some of the same resistance Beyoncé faced.)
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