Cowboy Carter Review: Ridin' Through, Just To Put My Eyes on You

Reviewing night one of Beyoncé's Cowboy Carter tour in Los Angeles.

Lyft Every Voice and Sing: This post was made possible by a ride and tickets from Lyft.

Photo: Me. (Lol.)

I got in trouble once with a DJ because I kept requesting Frankie Beverly’s “Before I Let Go.” Again? he glared at me. “Well, what about the Beyoncé version?” I hissed. You heard that song while playing with your cousins and moving coleslaw around on your plate to make it look finished, or you heard it while an Unc manned the grill in sandals and a Bluetooth in his ear, forever waiting for a call or just getting off the phone. Beyoncé’s “Before I Let Go” cover, which closed out the Netflix doc about crafting her 2018 Coachella performance — unquestionably the pinnacle of her career — becomes the standout of a stellar Cowboy Carter tour and for good reason. This is a song, and a show, that’s about putting that shit on.

“Renaissance” brought us underground to the disco, to the club. Cowboy Carter’s tour leans into the landscape: the viscous “Just For Fun,” sure, but the resplendently horny “Riiverdance.” Beyoncé shows us a place and a culture that’s close to her heart in this tour: the porches, the dirt roads, the walking around outside barefoot. I think often of the video Mama Tina posted once, asking her (now ex) husband how to pronounce “Champs-Élysées.” “You gon’ fuck it up anyway becuase you’re country,” he shrugs. Cowboy Carter turns that diss into a thesis. Jiffy cornbread, booty cornfed. Body rolls at the rodeo. I'm coming home — night one at the Cowboy Carter tour in SoFi was an expert at work. Decked out in denim, snakeskin boots turn luminescent, Burberry tassels, rhinestone trucker hats. There is such a resplendent sense of place in this tour that keeps it laser-focused. By the time Beyoncé rides around the arena in a Cadillac suspended in air singing “16 Carriages,” it’s hard to think anything other than she’s brought a black rodeo wherever she goes.

Growing up, being from Oklahoma was what I most wanted to change about myself. In the SoFi arena on Monday night, it was my proudest achievement. Four black girls — me, Peyton, our friends Trelawny and Kaela — set off in a Lyft and made our way to the show to seats in the seventh row on the floor. Maybe I liked this album better than anyone else — do I really need to write something else about how “II Most Wanted,” the Beyoncé-Miley collab about that kind of calling-in-every-favor love, is one of the best songs of either woman’s catalog? I grew up sulking through rodeos and pageants and parades that I’d one day feel nostalgic for. Papa, my paternal grandfather, was a deputy sheriff in a small town. He didn’t have one cherry red Cadillac, he had two. When Remy comes home from daycare, I say she smells like outside. I’ve lived in New York City for almost 10 years, but I have country roots.

It’s a misunderstanding to think that Beyoncé made country music because she could, because she hadn’t before, or because it was the only genre her oval nails hadn’t yet tapped. A supercut of white political and cultural pundits plays early in the show, cycling through a series of grossly racist critiques: Beyoncé making country music is cultural appropriation, she’s greedy, she’s wrong. “Been thick, been fine, still a ten, still here, that's all me,” Beyoncé sneered on “Thique.” Been country could’ve been on that list too: Born and raised in Houston, she knows her way around a black rodeo. The Cowboy Carter tour hits every target: she begins with the National Anthem. She ends with a lap around the arena, bidding farewell while singing “16 Carriages,” a tune that feels more like a memoir than a regular ballad.

A rodeo is, literally, a show of expertise, performing how well one can manage the ornery and the mercurial. What better way to describe the pop music fan of the 2020s: flighty, indecisive, but impassioned. Beyoncé juggles the crowd between a handful of stages and catwalks. She steps downstage flanked by a cadre of back-up to confront “Jolene.” “Ya Ya,” a song that always struck me as befitting a Sears back-to-school sale commercial, is a hit of high octane here. “Alligator Tears,” where Beyoncé cradles her microphone for a bewitching soliloquy of toxic love, sounds smoother and sharper than on the album. A three-hour show is full to the brim with the newest releases; there’s not much time to revisit the old hits.

The Renaissance tour, which began two years ago in Stockholm and concluded with an AMC-released tour film, was “The Beyoncé Experience” made multiverse. It was a fizzy dizzy of sonic delights: that underrated “4” track “Sweet Dreams” was hidden in “Alien Superstar,” “Get Me Bodied” and the first counts of “Freakum Dress” heralded the jubilant Frankie Beverly “Before I Let Go” cover that closed out the Coachella “Homecoming” film for Netflix. Did you hear a little bit of the nearly 20-year-old “Naughty Girl” as “Virgo’s Groove” bounced into “Move?” The music direction of that tour was the strength of a production that could rely too much on a revolving door of set pieces rather than the simple fact that Beyoncé is — thank you — Beyoncé. She is a woman who sings like no one else, moves like no one else, walks like no one else, wears sunglasses like no one else. That singular quality could be obscured on a stage of shiny objects.

Cowboy Carter understands that assignment. She doesn’t dance as much as she used to (but still quite a lot!), but the attitude is the same. Is she repeating herself then, when some of the Renaissance tour’s best moments are re-staged here again, whole cloth? It plays more like throat clearing with an eyebrow raise: Well, it did all sound so good the first time. The press conference delivery of “America Has A Problem” and the tucked-into-the-covers delivery of “Cozy” get the same treatment here, and to the loudest applause in SoFi. It’s hard to keep “Renaissance” and “Cowboy Carter” in conversation with one another, but the Cowboy Carter tour doesn’t belabor the point. These are good-ass songs, and this is the best way to present them. “Spaghetii,” which unfortunately features the corniest line of Beyoncé’s career — “like the snap of my fingers I’m Thanos” — becomes seductive when dancers line up behind Beyoncé to make it look like she has a dozen arms ready to vanquish you.

The Renaissance tour film made clear who really runs the show: Blue Ivy Carter, the teenage management prodigy. She’s kept “Diva” on the setlist (if there’s any song to meet the scissors…), and blessedly spared us “Halo,” “Love on Top,” and “Run The World (Girls).” Blue inherits the famous “Deja Vu” choreography, and there’s a real tearjerker moment when Beyoncé serenades seven-year-old Rumi with “Protector.” Is there a more beautiful lyric than “I first saw your face in your father's gaze/There's a long line of hands carryin' your name, ooh Liftin' you up so you will be raised?” That sense of inheritance is heavy in the Cowboy Carter tour: salon chairs plug Cecred, but also that “Bills, Bills, Bills” video. Beyoncé is not passing that old material up, but down. (At some point, though, we must discuss why she never gives “B’Day” its due.)

Renaissance, as an album and an era, was a release. Cowboy Carter is an exegesis. Who said America was theirs? Beyoncé calls it a reclamation, but really, it strikes me more as a declaration: what if she can dismantle what they used to try to destroy us? It doesn’t always work. (“American Requiem” and “Amen” still feel from, I don’t know, 2004.) Dressing up an American flag doesn’t do a lot to change it. The strongest point of Cowboy Carter, as an album and a performance, are the places where Beyoncé begins as country, and lands somewhere electrifyingly new: the raucous “Sweet Honey Bucki’,” zooming around an arena like a celestial wrangler, draped over a horseshoe, the too-lovely-for-words “Bodyguard.” A supercut of black music icons — Tina Turner, Linda Martell, Nina Simone, and Little Richard — is cut between country cowgirl tot Beyoncé and regular black folks sitting on a porch or showing off their spurs. What is more black than presenting oneself, what is more black than putting that shit on? Cowboy Carter grounds it all in a thrillingly realized sense of place, an arena where Beyoncé is bronc, bulldogger, sharpshooter, and rodeo queen.

An incredible night that I was so happy to share with my friends. With that floating Cadillac booked by Bey, Lyft got us on the road, to the rodeo, and back.

hunterh

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