How Beyoncé changed the country music conversation

During the Super Bowl last Sunday, R&B and pop megastar Beyoncé seized the media spotlight by announcing a new country music album, called Act II, and releasing two new singles, Texas Hold 'Em and Sixteen Carriages. 

But she's not the only pop star who's making a country crossover this year. Big name artists like Lana Del Rey, Post Malone and Maggie Rogers are also planning to put out country music albums. 

Country isn't like other genres. Navigating the industry and its politics is a whole other rodeo. 

Music journalists Andrea Williams, Marissa Moss and Carl Wilson join host Elamin Abdelmahmoud to dig their boots into this country crossover phenomenon, why Beyoncé's move to country matters for Black artists and what it says about the socio-political landscape of North America.  

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow the Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud podcast on your favourite podcast player.

LISTEN | Today's episode on YouTube:

Elamin: We've had a chance to live with these songs for a week now. What are your thoughts? What are your feelings about these songs and about the way this creates conversation? 

Andrea: Honestly, I'm excited. I felt — as we've had these conversations in the past — like I was screaming into a void. I've long said that it might take people outside of Nashville to care about this in order to move us in another direction. I'm not a critic, so I am not going to speak to whether these are good songs. 

I absolutely love the fact that Beyoncé did Beyoncé country songs. I think a lot of times we get people outside of country music that are like, "I better go talk to Jay Joyce and Dann Huff if I want to do this country record, and if Hillary Lindsey is not on the project, then I don't have any well-written songs." That makes it really difficult to get different voices and different styles that ultimately can push this genre forward, particularly when we're talking about Black artists in it. I'm just excited that she did her own version of this. That is very Beyoncé and very Black and it really says, "I don't need your system."  

Elamin: Lana Del Rey's got a rendition of John Denver's Take Me Home, Country Roads, Maggie Rogers has a new single, Don't Forget Me, and then Post Malone did a song with Morgan Wallen and Hardy. Lana and Post have both said that their next albums are going to be country records. Maggie has collaborated with people like Zach Bryan in the last year or so. Kylie Minogue is hinting that she might get in on the action. Carl, what is happening here? What do you think is pushing all of these pop singers into the world of country right now? 

Carl: Let's talk about what's happening in pop. It's been kind of low energy for the past few years. And when that happens in pop, people look for other wells of inspiration to draw from. For 20 years, that's mostly been in hip-hop, and I think in some ways, freshening up your sound by making it more hip-hop is a played out move. And so they're looking to country music as a fresh well of inspiration. So I think all of those things together are creating this moment. We saw the beginning of it last year, where there was a series of crossover country hits, not all ones that we might have been happy to see, but certainly a level of attention to country from the pop audience. 

That's unusual. And we had that moment with Luke Combs and Tracy Chapman at the Grammys last week. That kind of represented the best possibilities of that. It can't be controlled by the usual Nashville gatekeepers that we've been talking about.

Elamin: Marissa, you might actually do us a good service here to spend a moment setting up the way that radio controls what happens in country music. Because I think if you look at any other genre, there's that understanding of how dominant radio is as a force. Radio is so central to who becomes a star in country music. But country is kind of built differently. Do you want to spend a minute setting up how significant the radio pipeline is?

Marissa: It is the thing that all of Music Row — and I say Music Row to talk specifically about the Nashville infrastructure that is controlling all of this — everything revolves around it. It is the litmus test for market share, for success in terms of who's headlining festivals, who gets the promo deals, all of those things, whether we like it or not. That is how everyone structures their business investments, their promo dollars on radio. And labels will say, "Radio is in charge of what we decide." But if you talk to radio, they will say, "No, labels are in charge. It's their promo budget." Everyone's blaming everyone else on who has the control. Nobody wants to take accountability for anything, really. But they're all working together to ensure the success of cis het white men and one chosen blonde woman, usually.

Elamin: Carl, there's this larger conversation about the impact of Hurricane Beyoncé. And she did this with Act I when Renaissance came out and suddenly we were having refocusing conversations about who really invented house music, who really invented the genres that she was working in, who really innovated these genres and brought them to life. With this album, you begin to see a little bit more of what the project of Renaissance is, which is to say it is a corrective to the record. It is saying, "Here is a genre that you believe to be predominantly done by white people. But as a matter of fact, we were there at the beginning and we are the innovators of it."

I'm interested in how you see that fitting in with the general Beyoncé mission statement and how we see Beyoncé as an artist. 

Carl: Beyoncé, through her whole solo career, has been a conceptual artist. Lemonade certainly was a culmination of that. And then this new phase, it's partly called Renaissance because it's a new phase in that way. But it's also asserting herself as a Renaissance woman and in some ways asserting Black culture as a Renaissance culture in a way that incorporates all of the skills and all of the genres.

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Panel produced by Stuart Berman