Beyoncé Carter-Knowles has always had a big appetite. Since her first album Dangerously in Love (2003), she's been gathering all the ingredients that urban contemporary music (R&B, pop, hip-hop) has to offer.

At the age of 42, the American singer entered the world of country music. It's a world consistently stereotyped as white, Southern and ultra-conservative. It's been labeled redneck, racist and Trumpist, whereas in Washington in January 2013, Beyoncé sang "The Star-Spangled Banner" for Barack Obama's second inauguration.

Her eighth album, released on Friday, March 29, with the usual teasing, makes her intentions known in its title, Cowboy Carter, and a cover where she poses for an equestrian portrait. Here she is as a rodeo queen, sitting sidesaddle on a majestic Lipizzan and brandishing the Stars and Stripes. The visual is a continuation of the cover of Renaissance (2022), where she sat virtually naked on a luminous glass horse, to indicate the second part of a trilogy envisioned during the Covid-19 pandemic. The songs are oddly spelled with double "I"s, probably as a reminder that this album constitutes Act "II" of the project.

The first was designed as an album in homage to club culture (disco, house), born on the margins of American society. This one is conceived as a radio program, which is what the most prestigious country institution is: the Grand Ole Opry, broadcast since 1927 in Nashville, Tennessee. Beyoncé's songs are announced by two historic hosts, Dolly Parton and Willie Nelson. Their presence is no coincidence: The first knew how to humorously play on her "dumb blonde" image (as she sang it) to establish herself among the chauvinists; the second, a Texan like Beyoncé and a marijuana-smoking hippie, is associated with outlaw country, which rebelled against the conservatism of this milieu in the 1970s.

This isn't the first time a dance star has dressed up as a cowgirl. Madonna, another queer icon, preceded her in 2000 with the album Music. Except the sound didn't go along with the outfit, it was merely a sartorial effect. Our rider, on the other hand, intends to take the bull by the horns and to assert that she's just as legitimate in taking on country music as her formidable counterpart Taylor Swift, who headed for Nashville in her teens.

Beyoncé has loved this music since her childhood in Houston, where she regularly attended the Livestock and Rodeo Show, a huge gathering combining rodeo (a recurring word on the album), agricultural shows, concerts and barbecues. In Cowboy Carter, she often brings back memories of her teenage years – the age of 15 in "16 Carriages," lulled by Robert Randolph's pedal steel. She does it without always getting caught up in clichés, as she does in the ballad "II HANDS II HEAVEN", whose imagery combines "wild horses," "rhinestones" and "whiskey." She describes herself as a "stallion running."

You have 66.7% of this article left to read. The rest is for subscribers only.