#6. On role models: Beyoncé, Cowboy Carter II and why is so important to do you.
Bèyonce' s new album seems to questions her figure as a role model, conventional feminism, and black southern womanhood, while actually she is just being herself.
For as long as I can remember, I have heard the words “model” and “example” reverberating from my mother’s lips and flushing through my father’s eyes. Being the first born daughter of immigrant parents often comes with an invisible yet highly demanding badge of leadership that writes: “your siblings look up to you” “you have to be a role model”, “an example”. The physical manifestation of the typical hype phrase “show them”.
I wonder, show them what exactly; my vision of the world won’t necessarily appeal to my siblings, or some people as something to aspire to, we are probably different, we see the world differently, yet still according to my parents, If I would abide to the what so called conventional norms that imply the reach of academic success, professional satisfaction and happy home making I could be a model to follow, something to look up to, and something I should look up to in people. Thankfully they have outgrown this notion. Thankfully I was never about it.
In the song “No Role Modelz” rapper J Cole argues about a category of women from Los Angeles who got shallow and materialistic only because their only role models were talentless reality TV stars who had nothing more to offer other than their looks. Their conventional norm rhymed with body enhancing surgery, quick money instead of regular career paths, and mostly lust based relationship rather than a traditional marriage; so basically that’s what they have turned into.
Again, I wonder, is it important to have a role model in our lives, isn’t that supposed to be the role of our parents? But again what if their life experience hasn’t equipped them enough to be one. How much the presence or lack of it impacts who we become and the path we choose in life. When do we become one, if we ever do, and is a role model somebody to actually follow or simply someone to aspire to?
These musings, naturally, are the results of my personal life experiences as well as observing the many journeys of friends and acquaintances over the years, lately though these same musings have resurfaced quite often, and with slightly different nuances, particularly as I found myself deeply invested in the discourse that has been surrounding the release of the widely acclaimed “country” although I would say “southern” album by Beyoncé: Chapter II Cowboy Carter.
The second chapter of the Renaissance trilogy of something of sort arrived on March 29th anticipated by compelling visuals evoking complex and unparalleled notions that I deeply believe cannot exist without one another; blackness, southerness and americanness.
Beyoncè appears sovereign on the album cover, sitting on a white horse dressed as a fashionable cowboy hats and boots. She looks proud holding the lower body of the flag of the United States which I think has been voluntarily cropped to stroke immediately what is her message behind and through this album: “Cowboy Carter II Isn’t a Country Album It’s a Beyoncé Album”.
Album cover act ii - COWBOY CARTER
The erasure of the upper body of the flag stands can be taken as to signify how she doesn’t aim to represent “conventional” passing America, or better the whole of America through her artistry, although that’s still a big part of who she is. Probably the reason why she did keep the lower body with the stripes, which represent the thirteen British colonies that declared indipendence from Great Britain, in the American Revolutionary Act, five of the colonies were in the South.
Cowboy Carter is the culmination of a five year research and work that sees Bèyonce re interpretation or better reappropriation of a genre that for years has been solely, and I’d say falsely relegated to a certain type of America, understood as a nation with traditional values conservative principles and often far right ideologies. Originating in the Southern and Southwestern United States, country music is since always synonymous with the “Good Ole South”; the epitome of fertile pastures, warm meals, and old bearded white guys with southern belles perfectly groomed to be housewives right by their arms; these are the images that come to mind when most people think of country music.
Personally, I think about the song “Jolene” by Dolly Parton, who Beyoncè also reinterpreted in Cowboy Carter, and you may think about some traditionally sound and mellow records by Lady Antebellum, who knows. But although traditional and more conventional country music, is and represents an important facade of the genre as a whole, it is fundamental to recognize the overshadowed truth that lies behind its celebration and popularization.
A product and in ways a quintessential element of the South, when we think about the Southern States where country music was founded and originated from, we must (and I emphasize the must) imagine african-americans, enslaved people, as well as oral traditions and ways of survival through music, stemming from a new found demographic who was violently stripped away from the coasts of West Africa to the the southern plantations of the United States. It is imperative to understand that there is no country music without the efforts and the stories of black people; without its community, and its molding.
As a self proclaimed Texas Bama, Beyoncé knows that well.
In fact, before being a multi millionaire pop diva Beyoncé is a black southern woman, “a Creole banjee bitch from Louisiane” as she refers to herself in her rendition of Dolly’s Parton Jolene.
Born in Texas from an African American father who hails from Alabama and a Creole mother from Louisiana she considers herself a Creole girl from Louisianne (the French pronunciation of Louisiana) which historically included parts of modern-day Louisiana and Alabama. Furthermore “banjee” is a term coined in the milieu of New York City’s Black queer culture, and can be said to be originated by the modern banjo, a stringed instrument derived from instruments and tools that have been recorded to be in use in North America and the Caribbean since the 17th century by enslaved people.
Growing up in the South, country music is southern music and southern music is country music, therefore, it is only natural that the communities and the artists who have originated from their founders regardless of popular recognition have continued to pioneer the arts and the antics of it, Byoncé being one of them. Silently, yet very loudly through Cowboy Carter II, Bèyoncé offers the opportunity for mainstream culture to acknowledge just how much country music owes its sound and history to black artistry, to black people.
The 27 songs and 80 minute long album offers perspective and intimacy into the world of a woman that for years has been and still is considered as “the artist to look up to”. From her style to her versatility, Bèyonce has effortlessly navigated times and genres with the agility of multifaceted artists as well as the mannerism of a seasoned diva that leads by example no matter the role she decides to embody. With the release of Cowboy Carter II, for the first time this notion has been questioned. May it be because she dared to challenge a genre who’s black history has been long forgotten and overshadowed, or simply because her version of it aims to be a celebration of her own vision rather than the more traditional one that hails from the very same source but looks nothing like her. I can’t tell.
On this lengthy piece of work, each and every song sounds like a handwritten note taken from the diary of a now mature southern black woman who has juggled and juggles artistry as well as identity politics whenever it comes to entering in a space where designation is awarded upon outdated racial and social metrics. On “AMERIICAN REQUIEM”, in a voice deep and earthy as Texas red dirt, the Houston native sings, “Used to say I spoke too country/And then the rejection came, said I wasn’t country enough.” She nods again, as she’s done before on songs like “Formation”, to her family ties to Alabama moonshiners and Louisiana Creoles. “If that ain’t country,” she wonders, “tell me what is.”
Gracefully and smoothly she is able to give country a new nuance, a nuance that sounds warm, homey and incredibly familiar; contextualizing country as an offshoot of the Black American musical canon.
An autobiographical, storytelling infused record that brings together the past and the present, history and progress from tributing pioneering artist within the likes of Linda Martell, as well as bridging generational gaps through the rendition of country classic as well as one of my personal favorites I must say, country song Jolene.
Dolly Parton singing Jolene
Jolene is probably one of my favorite songs of the album, again for all the right and wrong reasons. Quite differently than the original one, where Dolly Parton (the song’s author and singer) vulnerably pleads to “Jolene” not to take her man whilst recognizing her beauty, in Bèyonce’s version, the singer uses persuading ebonics to boldly tell Jolene, not take her man as she is just as good, if not better than her. According to critics, taking the vulnerability out of the song does lessen it a little, but does it? This is literally a rendition, of course Beyoncé is going to put her own spin to it. Whatever that means, and implies.
As pointed out by Spencer Kothe in a long and thoroughly written textual exploration in The Atlantic, Beyoncé “isn’t just playing into some trad-wife cultural resurgence” or presuming herself superior over other women, but is instead echoing the right of the Black family to “defend itself,” especially within the context of the album as a “subversion of the double standard” of violence in music, where the predominantly white field of country music will rally behind themes of dominance and violence, but those same themes in the predominantly Black field of hip-hop get artists “vilified as dangerous, and even prosecuted.”
The so-called “anti-feminism” portrayed by the song has ignited and sparked multiple debates and think pieces, arguing why in 2024 would someone like Bèyonce pen a song about fighting with another woman for a man. My question is why not? Bèyonce isn’t and never aimed to be representative, or a role model of all women, and in a world where we so often often preach about not fighting for a man, but our elders, our mothers, our aunties come from generations where that was the norm, I wonder what’s wrong in challenging our ancestors as well as the women who in a ways, weather right our foul have fought to preserve the integrity of a family when unfortunately they didn’t know better, and if they did, they couldn’t do better.
Just because we now have all the knowledge and resources in the world to choose and emancipate ourselves it does not mean, that’s always the case. Black women, women in general, we are not a monolith, and as controversial it may sound Black american women have every right to defend what they’ve worked so hard to create, especially in America, where the social system has tried to disintegrate the black family and unions with discriminatory policies for ages.
We have every right to be vulnerable, to be loving, and to stand our boundaries, while mutually being in love with what we have, protective about it, and potentially even delusional about it, about our relationship. That is not to say that a woman should go to war with another woman for a man, but I do think it is important to contextualize the history, the past, and the upbringing of a woman like Beyoncé. We have probably all heard how the rumors of infidelity and abuse from her father have clouded and pervaded a marriage to the point of its dissolution. Art allows us to channel things and experiences that have been lived by us, and through us, and through Jolene I believe Bèyonce is channeling just that. As emphasized by Doreen St. Felix, in the Cultural Comment on the New Yorker; “She is a real old-school diva, groomed in the school of Motown grace. Accusation and projection must provide some of her lifeblood, but a real old-school diva, as the etiquette goes, is not going to outright admit to the nature of her bottomless appetite.” As in almost everything, I feel there are nuances to it and just because they do not fit our personal perception of things that doesn’t mean that they must be wrong.
As I kept on reading tweets, and little thought pieces about the matter, a recurring comment was what struck me the most : “She’s Bèyonce, she should know better”; well my question is should she?
This comment and comments of this sort were coming from feminist thinkers, women and platforms arguing that with this album, and this song particularly, Bèyonce has diminished feminism while setting black women back to the standard of succumbing to the wish and desire for a man in spite of everything else. Well, first, personally I don’t think Bèyonce embodies feminism, and if she does, she embodies a feminism that is let’s say unconventional. In 2013 Beyoncé used a sample of N igerian writer Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie “We should all be feminists” TED Talk in her 2013 self-titled album, and through that she provided a huge platform for feminism suddenly moving mainstream discourse around it, Adichie herself argued that there is difference between their feminism: “Still, her type of feminism is not mine, as it is the kind that, at the same time, gives quite a lot of space to the necessity of men. I think men are lovely, but I don’t think that women should relate everything they do to men: did he hurt me, do I forgive him, did he put a ring on my finger?” she says in an interview to the Dutch.
Furthermore professor and scholar bell hooks whose work was the entry point to feminist theory for many women and thinkers globally, famously leaned into critiques of Beyoncé, calling her award-winning visual album “Lemonade” “capitalist money-making at its best, while also referring to Beyoncé as a terrorist and anti-feminist. She said, "I see a part of Beyoncé that is in fact, anti-feminist, that is a terrorist ... especially in terms of the impact on young girls."
Well, while is not up to mine to define what is good feminism and what is not I do feel we should stop trying to sew our own precise and finite ideologies on people, as especially on artist who we want to see so desperately as role models while they they are busy pushing their own artistic, personal, emotional agenda. As they rightfully should.
Like most artists, she is a storyteller, not a truth teller, and I feel this is a universal truth we should learn to embody when we tend our arms to celebrity culture and public figures subject to constant limelight in search for reassurance, guidance, or something to aspire to.
Architect and designer Gaetano Pesce, who just passed away, in his most recent interview on SSENSE said something that stretched my mind wide while also making me feel all warmth and fuzzy on the inside: “I am incoherent. From the time I was 18, I understood that to be incoherent is a form of freedom—free from yourself. Free from what you were thinking yesterday.” I feel that his word stand for a universal truth that belongs to most people, particularly artists, even if they are not aware of it. Oftentimes, in order to make art that is consumable and profitable they must reinvent themselves, break themselves open and mold their beings into new clay, constantly. And that can mean being incoherent, being subversive and yes controversial too.
So why would we attach ourselves, or better see a person who continuously embodies incoherence as a role model?
I feel that our need to search for models, things and people to follow outside of ourselves is the easiest way to project what we want to be through the lens and the actions of you know someone who we may admire, that has walked a similar path or simply just looks like us. And that’s cool, it’s aspirational as someone would say, seeing someone walk and succeed on the same miles you wish to take gives you a kick, a drive, the type of energy that says “I can do it too”. It is comforting, as I often stress representation is vital. This representation shouldn’t limit us, you know, from following what’s inside of us beyond what we aspire too. What do you feel? How is your heart? What moves it? What do you value?
Role models could and should feel as inspiration, but they aren’t necessarily something or someone to follow. Although you know, it is good, and very helpful to have a guide following someone else's journey too closely leads to losing your own individuality, your own singularity and there is no journey on earth that can articulate your own life, your own choices and desire better than you do.
It may be silly, but through Cowboy Carter, I have found answers to thoughts I never even knew were so loud. Beyoncé multilayered rawness express in raunchy verses, and voice that sounds as deep as the Texan soil reminded me that we are not meant to be role models. If we become it, we often have no say in that, and that although it is incredible and beautiful to have something to aspire to and be inspired by the only person we should follow is ourselves, and if you are religious as I am, God and what He speaks through and in us.
Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu once said, “He who knows others is wise; he who knows himself is enlightened, well Beyoncé is definitely enlightened and through her latest album I feel she is teaching us just that. Know yourself, follow yourself.
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Until we unravel again!