The Possibilities and Perils of COWBOY CARTER in 3 acts

It's a real life boogie

act i: GRATITUDE.

For as long as I can remember, my gratitude for popular music has been devotional. I am devotedly grateful for the elevation of my experience from what has played on the radio and now most likely plays in my headphones. I have a visceral memory of the first time I was taught and then allowed to drop the needle on a record myself. My small hand shook and moved very slowly, remembering—under my mother’s watchful eye-- to be gentle and not scratch the vinyl. I remember how nerve-wracking it was to try and how exhilarating it was when I succeeded. It meant I had free reign of the record collection now. What I played that day was one of my 45s, UB40's “Red, Red, Wine”—specifically, the B side, “Please Don’t Make Me Cry.” 

I feel close to the divine when I (routinely) light incense, dim my lights and have a sweat-breaking dance party alone. When I burrow into my big armchair to listen to well-worn playlists or make new ones. When I take over the aux chord at a family function and move the vibe around like my aunts move the plates of food. Popular music has given me my oldest, most personal, and essential rituals. For joy, grief, memory, and daydreaming, for as long I have been alive.

I was in college when I learned, through an egregiously Eurocentric curriculum, that people did take seriously the idea of a hierarchy of art and culture, where the popular was derided and equated with a lack of quality. I always was immune to that bullshit. I was born and raised in the extreme and explicit cultural bigotry that Europeans imposed on Africans. Class stratification practiced in full is not merely about economic haves and have-nots. In my native Cabo Verde, I grew up in a world split into somebodies and nobodies, high and low culture, people that mattered enough to be studied in school, and the rest of us. Though we were never as good as the White, the European, or the foreigners, we stratified ourselves into those “of known people” (bourgeois, Portuguese-descended or Portuguese-adjacent, middle-class minority) and those “of the people” (the poor and working-class majority). I was born after independence and came of age as our society matured from the more stringent version of this cultural divide. Maybe that is why I grew up so partial to popular music and the unencumbered access to pleasure and an elevated experience of being in the world it gives everyone. I love the tears, the transcendence, and the goosebumps that happen when a favorite pop song comes on, proving that I belong to a human family that knows of me.^[1]In theory, all art does that, but in our world bound and gagged by supremacist delusion, only popular art does that for “all the people, all the time.”  I am grateful for the Beyoncé album for making millions of us happy when happiness feels impossible.

act ii: BEYHIVE.

We now expect the genius and creativity that the Beyhive uses to celebrate each new Beyoncé project. We consume it as an official addendum to her projects: the Beyhive’s outpouring begins before the album drops and continues long after it premieres. Having fans who ride or die for their idol is nothing new. I grew up in the eighties, watching Michael Jackson fans, who seemed to always be fainting or climbing walls like zombies. I remember the loudness of the grief of everyone around me when Bob Marley died. I came of age in the era of the bi-coastal hip-hop beef. The Beyhive is like other fandoms, but they are distinctly made in the image of their Queen Bey. The Beyhive invests in being creative, sophisticated, and wholly original in its use of digital media to create appreciation for Beyoncé. I mean, the hive works. Over the years, they've used videos, tweets, posts, and memes (and combinations thereof) to package their reactions, reviews, choreographies, and messages. This was most recently displayed during the months between the release of Renaissance and the tour. The hive, respectfully and hilariously, kept clamoring for Beyoncé to release “the visuals,” expecting the album to have a visual component. They did this while creating a truly outstanding global visual and sonic collage.   This collective artwork was better for completing the Renaissance cycle than anything Beyonce could have done herself. We all felt it, and she seemed to know it.

In Martin Scorsese’s film, The Last Waltz, documenting the last concert from The Band, he upends expectations by not including footage of the audience—the standard at the time was the Woodstock film, with an actual split screen to the audience. A profound music lover, Scorsese felt that (to paraphrase him) if Joni Mitchell is singing “Coyote,” you don’t cut away because who cares what the crowd is doing. Not so with the Beyhive.  Beyoncé knowingly devoted significant portions of her Renaissance concert film to footage of her fans. They were the visuals, baby. The way the Beyhive stuns and stunts in their celebration of Beyonce is intelligent, luxurious, and boastful fanaticism; it is a spectacle made in Beyoncé’s image. It is exuberant love, and love isn’t just good to feel; it’s good to witness, too.

act iii: PERILS AND POSSIBILITIES  

The person I couldn’t wait to share Beyoncé’s album with was my dad because he is the reason I love the sounds of American roots music: the heartbroken piano, the tangled-up slide and bass guitars, the banjo, the drum, the clap, and stomp. Roots music sprawls underneath genres with evermore distinct names that my father and, I suspect, most people don’t bother to parse: blues, country, bluegrass, and (classic) rock. I grew up knowing this music as music that our people—Africans, together with all kinds of other people, made everywhere they were forced to land. Who performed that roots music had no bearing on our love of the sound. What was Black in the music was always clear. Bob Marley, probably the most successful crossover pop artist of all time, made another thing clear:

One good thing about music

When it hits, you feel no pain

Roots music is the sound made by aboriginal people, first people, people of the land, and people who work the land. The sound is like water on this planet, a single entity no matter the endless tributaries, permutations, and states it takes. I love being reminded of this coherence, like when I noticed that key instruments used in New Orleans zydeco are the same as those used in our traditional funaná music. When I discovered that my hometown of Mindelo can pass for Charleston, SC, San Juan, Puerto Rico, or Cartagena, Colombia, the ingredients being the same in the people as in the food. In the documentary Rumble: The Indians Who Rocked The World,  as I was learning about the classic Native American drum pattern that Link Wray used to revolutionize rock’n’roll, I noticed that, if sped up, it was the same as what Cabo Verdean batukadeiras play. Is this because humans heard similar sounds in different places and drummed accordingly? It doesn’t matter how these things come to pass; what matters is that they do. That hybridity can be explained by a bloody and fraught history, but it is also a testament to how we have prevailed. Being recognizable to oneself not just at home but in faraway places, in other people’s faces and sounds, is how I know belonging is a practice and not something ascribed. Belonging is not a gift bestowed by some to others; it is a right that we must create together, over and over again.   

This is why I was a bit heartbroken when I read Beyonce’s “Cowboy Carter” announcement, where she referenced that part of the inspiration for the album had come from “an experience that I had years ago where I did not feel welcomed…and it was very clear that I wasn’t. But, because of that experience, I did a deeper dive into the history of Country music and studied our rich musical archive.”  I did not want Beyoncé to fall for that okey-doke that Toni Morrison warned about:

The function, the very serious function of racism is distraction. It keeps you from doing your work. It keeps you explaining, over and over again, your reason for being. Somebody says you have no language, and you spend twenty years proving that you do. Somebody says your head isn't shaped properly, so you have scientists working on the fact that it is. Somebody says you have no art, so you dredge that up. Somebody says you have no kingdoms, so you dredge that up. None of this is necessary. There will always be one more thing.

Morrison cautioned against racist distraction because she understood how vulnerable we would be to it. It is fundamentally human to seek to belong and, when excluded, to strive to be accepted by being excellent and deserving. The peril lies in believing that this will work. But the possibilities when we craft our belonging together? Those are endless and beautifully illustrated by the moment in this interview of Rhiannon Giddens where (around minute 7) she describes watching Black people dance to her banjo playing on “Texas Hold ‘Em.”

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^[1] Everything said here is about music. I would say (and more!) about cinema.