Dear Gossips,   

Beyoncé knows we are waiting…and not exactly patiently. She’s also, as always, showing kindness on the countdown and giving us new visuals. 

 

This was posted yesterday, having been made aware of course of all that conversation she started about the American flag when she released the new cover art last week, here’s a series of photos with the flag all over the place and Her Majesty serving looks, with a Pride bag, while sipping tea. 

 

I’m so happy we’re dark on Friday, so that the only work we’ll be doing is studying and listening to act ii, COWBOY CARTER! Which doesn’t mean we ever forget act i, RENAISSANCE. 

 

But just in case, she also shared some previously unseen images from her previous masterpiece. 

One of the reasons people get so excited is because of the visuals. She ended up giving us a whole film’s worth of visuals from RENAISSANCE and now, with two more sleeps until COWBOY CARTER, the question is whether or not this new album will be accompanied by any music videos, in the more traditional sense. Then again, it’s not like Beyoncé ever does things by tradition. Her relationship to tradition is much more complicated than that. It’s about buried tradition, traditions that have been silenced and overwritten. Specifically Black traditions that have not been given their due and therefore denied the right to exist as traditions – which is what she’s amplifying now in her work. As Jon Caramanica wrote today in the New York Times, COWBOY CARTER is “an extension of [her] exploration of how Black creativity fuels all corners of popular music”. Black creativity IS the tradition. 

 

For her then, Caramanica posits, she not looking to be embraced by the country music industry; Beyoncé would never acknowledge them as gatekeepers, it would be to their advantage – although if they were smarter and not so up their own asses, they’d actually realise that wholeheartedly welcoming COWBOY CARTER would empower their genre. But the pale male is always gonna pale male, so in existing outside of that structure, COWBOY CARTER will only just end up proving that country music can thrive without their involvement and/or approval. A rising tide lifts all ships, they say. And look what’s already happening with artists like Tanner Adell. I interviewed Tanner yesterday for ETALK for a piece that will air soon. Jon Caramanica called her the “most promising Black country artist currently working”, and this is just the beginning for her. Beyoncé going back to her tradition, the real tradition, is giving way to others to reclaim it too. 

Yours in gossip, 

Lainey 

Photo credits: Instagram/ Beyoncé

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