(September 21, 2024). The Internet and even some of country music’s elite have pushed the narrative that the Country Music Association “snubbed” Beyoncé and her Cowboy Carter album by not giving them any nominations last week in its announcement for 2024’s awards.
Nothin’ could be further from the truth.
Cowboy Carter made history earlier this year by becoming the first album by a Black female to reach No. 1 on Billboard’s Top Country Albums chart. It was the critics’ darling upon its release in March. The album was lauded for Beyoncé’s ambitious experimentation into music genres not normally associated with Black people, including Americana, folk, and country. She also raised awareness of the contributions of many Black women who came before her — including pioneer Linda Martell — who’ve been overlooked by an industry that is largely seen as white and male dominated.
It’s that white male dominance that made Beyoncé’s foray into country music such a bold move this year. It was Queen B’s otherworldly success for nearly three decades in other genres including R&B, hip-hop, pop, and — to a lesser degree — rock music that made her country-imbued release such an event.
We were a captive audience when she announced the new music during her “Break the Internet” ad at last February’s Super Bowl, and then unleashed “Texas Hold ‘Em” and “16 Carriages” to streaming services. The two songs ultimately crashed the top ten of Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart with “Hold ‘Em” becoming the first by a Black female artist to reach No. 1 there.
There’s no doubt Cowboy Carter was a grand event, a spectacle to behold. It contains some of Beyoncé’s finest music — in this blogger’s opinion at least — and stands up very well against her other seven solo albums. It stayed true to Bey’s well-honed take-no-mess image and was a Beyonce album through and through.
Songs like “Ameriican Requiem,” “Daughter,” and “Bodyguard” were standouts among many gems, which played on repeat in my streaming app for weeks. Remakes like “Blackbiird” and “Jolene” drew immediate and even favorable comparisons to the originals by The Beatles and Dolly Parton, respectively. There’s little doubt the LP will be among this year’s Best Album Grammy nominees when those are announced later this year.
Masterpiece: Was Cowboy Carter Beyoncé’s Songs In The Key Of Life? A comparison.
It was a great album, indeed. A masterpiece even. But was it a great country album? Queen Bey herself — on the eve of the LP’s release — declared that Cowboy Carter “wasn’t a country album but a ‘Beyoncé’ album,” perhaps in a bid to get us to focus not on genres or categories but on the quality of the music itself. Nowhere was this more evident than on the track “Spaghettii,” one of the album’s several hip-hop detours that featured Martell giving a monologue about the confining nature of genres, and introduced country rapper Shaboozey to the masses. With his inclusion btw, we have Beyoncé to thank for this year’s longest-running No. 1 single, “A Bar Song (Tipsy)” from the upstart singer out of Woodbridge, VA.
Clearly, Bey’s album didn’t disappoint, at least not her longtime legion of fans — known as the Beyhive — and perhaps some other open-minded people who were willing to strap on their boots, saddle up and go along for the ride.
But, from the start, the country music community at large didn’t really embrace Cowboy Carter. Readers may recall at least one country station’s program director famously refusing to play “Texas Hold ‘Em,” later recanting his refusal and blaming a lack of awareness that Beyoncé had released a country song for his apparent slight.
Still, when country radio did add that first single it seemed to do so reluctantly. The hoedown-inspired tune never rose above No. 33 on the 50-position Billboard Country Airplay chart, which monitors radio play solely from the nation’s country stations. The song instead fared better on the other airplay charts it graced: R&B/Hip-Hop (No. 19), Rhythmic (No. 7), and Pop (also No. 7).
Worse, none of the other 26 tracks on Cowboy Carter even touched the Country Airplay chart, which in any given week is still about 80% comprised of songs by white male acts.
As I’ve written in this blog before, Beyoncé’s No. 1 success on the multi-metric Hot Country Songs chart wasn’t reflecting country radio’s acceptance of the Lemonade singer but a dubious artifact of how Billboard compiles that chart. Hot Country Songs basically mimics the all-inclusive Hot 100 by using that chart’s formula, fed by an all-genre radio panel, plus streams and downloads of individual tracks.
In other words, if a song is receiving airplay from pop, R&B, rhythmic and country stations — as “Texas Hold ‘Em” did — then all of that airplay counts towards its position on Hot Country Songs, even if its country radio component is the minor player, as it was for Bey’s hit.
All of the magazine’s main genre-specific charts use this same formula, which means it’s left to Billboard’s chart managers and editors — i.e., humans — to decide which multi-format songs fall into which genre charts. In Beyoncé’s case, “Hold ‘Em” was deemed a “country” song and thus Hot Country Songs was the main composite genre chart for which it was considered eligible, despite it receiving more air time on R&B/Hip-Hop and rhythmic stations than country ones. (By this same token, Billboard omitted “Texas Hold ‘Em” from its other composite charts like Hot R&B/Hip-Hop Songs despite its greater airplay there.)
Billboard’s shenanigans: Why won’t chart authority allow Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter chart in non-country genres?
This same Billboard rule was applied to all of Cowboy Carter’s tracks — thus allowing them to chart on Hot Country Songs — despite the fact that they received little to no love from country radio.
So country music’s gatekeepers never accepted the notion that Cowboy Carter was a hit country album, much less a good one, or one that would test well with their core listeners. Instead, they stood idly by while Billboard pushed the narrative that the album and its tracks were breaking all kinds of records, which made for some pretty historic headlines.
It was great for social media clicks and helped country music’s image, which had the appearance of finally allowing some of its demographic barriers to be broken down. Country was able to double down on this newfound openness by embracing Shaboozey, Bey’s one-time protégé who now has the biggest country record of the year and certainly one of the biggest ever by a Black man, who received two CMA nominations for it, btw.
Yet, anyone who remained skeptical of all this enlightenment had good reason. The country music industry has never caved to social pressure from outsiders. In fact, it’s prided itself on doing just the opposite.
The biggest country artist of this decade is unquestionably Morgan Wallen, a man who’s been met with trouble more than once — including for uttering the N-word during a recorded drunken rant in February 2021 and for throwing a chair off the roof of a building earlier this year, nearly missing law enforcement officers below.
The two full-length sets he’s released since 2021 — Dangerous: The Double Album and One Thing At A Time — are the two biggest country albums of this century (based on Billboard chart performance). The latter has remained in the top ten for 80 consecutive weeks — and counting — since its No. 1 debut in March 2023. The former has shattered records as the non-soundtrack album with the longest stay in the Billboard 200’s top ten in the chart’s history (now with 157 weeks and counting). Both albums are still in the top ten this week and no other LP this decade — regardless of genre — has outperformed them, chart-wise.
Sure, the industry gave Wallen a slap on the wrist in 2021 by banning him from awards shows and not promoting his records, but his album sales and streams have soared as a result. Fans won’t say it out loud — or maybe they will — he is the “anti-woke” ambassador for a genre of music that has long thumbed its nose at outsiders trying to tell it who it should and should not embrace.
Beyoncé — like it or not — is the epitome of an outsider to country music fans. She’s the half-billionaire wife of a billionaire New York-based rapper whose foray into country is expected to be sandwiched between a house music album (2022’s Renaissance) and a rock-and-roll one (TBD) as part of a genre-smashing trilogy.
While no one can claim that the Texas-born icon didn’t come by her southern roots honestly, she’s built a superstar career on music that wasn’t country. This album was created largely by writers, producers and musicians like Raphael Saadiq, Jon Batiste, The Dream, Pharrell Williams, and Swizz Beats who weren’t Nashville-based and who aren’t exactly known for their country music catalogs.
Let’s face it, Music Row still likes to reward its own or those it feels have devoted themselves to the genre of country music.
Does that genre have a race and a gender problem? Absolutely. The chart statistics continue to show it. The embracing of Morgan Wallen, controversies notwithstanding, as its top artist shows it. The fact that former rapper Post Malone — another white male — was completely supported by country radio and received four CMA nominations this year for his Morgan Wallen duet “I Had Some Help” screams it.
Related: Maren Morris highlights unsung Black female country singers at the 2020 CMAs.
The decision by former country music superstar and five-time CMA winner Maren Morris to leave the genre because of its unwillingness to deal with issues of racism and misogyny highlighted it. And the fact that only one Black female — Tracy Chapman — has ever won a CMA for Country Song of the Year and only after it was re-recorded 35 years later by a white male artist, practically proves it.
That it took an album by Beyoncé and her spotlighting of legitimate Black female country artists who’ve been snubbed by the industry for years demonstrates that the genre still has a long, long way to go in its reckoning with race and women, specifically the Black females who’ve tried for decades to make their mark in it.
But the “snubbing” of Beyoncé didn’t occur with the CMA nominations. Cowboy Carter was a great album. Whether it was a great “country” album was always up for debate, as Bey herself highlighted both in her marketing of the LP and in its content. Its success on the country charts was dubious at best, as illustrated above by Billboard’s questionable methodology in how it creates its genre-specific rankings, like country, R&B and the others.
Bey’s omission from CMA nominations was merely a recognition of that dubiousness, a reflection that Cowboy Carter was exceptional for raising awareness and sparking a conversation about race and gender in country music, but not for striking a nerve with the genre’s core fans or its gatekeepers.
Likely more important to Queen B will be the Grammy nominations coming later this year. The question then will be whether or not NARAS will fall prey to this past week’s CMA fallout and reward Cowboy Carter in country music categories.
We already know she’ll be up for the non-genre-specific Best Album category with the only question then being whether the Grammys will give the “Halo” singer her first-ever win of its biggest award.
But let’s acknowledge that we were tricked by the industry into believing that Cowboy Carter was this huge heartland hit that resonated with country music listeners. It wasn’t. And, as such, it’s unfair to say that it was “snubbed” by the CMAs.
But it was still a great album, one that many fans — including some country ones — have praised since its release, both for its groundbreaking content and the awareness it raised.
Multiple things can be true at the same time.
DJRob
DJRob (he/him) is a freelance music blogger from the East Coast who covers R&B, hip-hop, disco, pop, rock and country genres – plus lots of music news and current stuff! You can follow him on X (formerly Twitter) at @djrobblog and on Meta’s Threads.
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