Cowboy Carter Live

Halftime at the fall of empire

I’m part Sicilian, and I love a crime family, from the bloodline to the pulpy semi-fictional movies and shows about what I can never completely be. When I met Tony Soprano on screen, I fell in love, but when I met his daughter Meadow, I realized it was filial love, nothing erotic, just the inflated tear nestled in the webs of the eyes of girls whose fathers are perpetually in a danger of their own making. We internalize the guilt and shame these men we are born of never allow themselves to acknowledge. Even as it visibly gnaws at them and erodes their grip on sanity, they refuse to confront it. So we shed their tears, vicariously afflicted, restoring their private agony to the dignity and grace of public fragments of sorrow and lament. And with the knack for diplomacy this oblique menace instills in us, we could deescalate a world war in one unwavering glare.

We are warned to never look conflict in the eye in public, however, our inherited skills patronized as if we are being spared so we can placate the fairy tales we’ve been denied. My dad was a black cowboy bard, not a mob boss, however, and I embrace my country negritude roots with the attitude the poet Aimé Césaire advanced when he wrote Notebook of a Return to the Native Land, accusing his colonizers of condemning him to the desolate whimsy of the nomad trapped between worlds, for whom no conditions but limbo and chaos suffice and life becomes a defeatist’s adventure/tantrum. I want to return to Southern Gothic gentility and Southern Italian crime sprees in the name of family, and am forbidden return except in fantasy. I learn to fetishize perpetual exile until exotic to myself. I embrace estrangement, when it hurts, become a masochist. And no matter how self-aware I am, I am bound by blood to legacies of retributive violence and never above learning how to deploy or reconcile them in my favor.

All of this musing about my own interiority to examine where I identify with Beyoncé’s allusions to spaghetti westerns, black fretless banjo, Lipizzaner Stallions that are born black and turn white, her own exilic hyper-symbolic status between commercial artist and involuntary diplomat as exemplified by her recent Christmas halftime performance. Beyoncé, who amplifies the tradition of difficult, sometimes alienating love, humiliation-ritual-love, the love where you attempt to save the father from himself and end up an accomplice in a mafia you pretended you were mere accessory to. While seemingly exceeding every peer, becoming peerless in craft, she surrenders publicly to romance marred by betrayal, ridicule, undermine, contradiction, irrefutable pain and pangs of this-is-all-wrong, but must be upheld because too many of our best songs have leveraged its myth for refuge. And the songs sell and sell until self-sabotage and self-promotion share a position on the field of American dreams and she is stranded in the legend of herself, forever platinum blond on a not-quite-white horse, this Christmas, performing a medley of tracks from her most recent album, Cowboy Carter, released in the spring of this year as part two of her Renaissance trilogy.

She enters, a rider with a bandanaed escort, to deliver two nostalgic ballads about innocence lost during a pre-recorded segment which shifts to the live NFL halftime stage in her native Houston, where the energy is convulsive and upbeat, the former all-white accented by more red, blue and dazzle now, rendering the whole scene a seamlessly produced commercial for our gutted little deathbed empire, advertising the pride before the fall as if it’s a transaction on the path to subdued glory. It’s all reminiscent of her 2018 Coachella performance, formulaic but lush in its flaunting of a formula that succeeded once before, for Netflix, and live, and will surely impress again and generate the quota of streams and data points she needs to maintain her status as master of ceremonies. On “Texas Hold ‘Em” the centerpiece of the live portion, she’s joined by her daughter, Blu, a regular accompanist during her live performances now. And the field-turned-stage is covered in dancers and a locally-bred marching band. They enact simulacrum, a patterned scene you can glance away from and still understand because it lives in and activates the subconscious. You’re immersed whether or not you’re watching. In this sense, the nearly thirteen-minute performance reads more like a ritual than a show-for-entertainment’s sake. There’s nothing gratuitous involved, every moment and detail is deliberate advertisement for its own renewed grandeur. But the stakes have raised, the images that were once revered without question or over-interpretation, are under scrutiny this year. The performer and her husband need our positive attention to deflect from at-risk reputations more than we need the diversion this round.

Act 1 of Renaissance swooped in like permission to reenter the club and our bodies after two years of isolation, and the subsequent world tour was a rite of passage and a global spirit possession that most welcomed. It was too big and prescient to fail. The high concept of Act 2 has met with less enthusiasm and some suspicion and dismissal. Yes, country music is black music, as is the work’s prevailing thesis. Sonny and Cher cover a song my dad wrote “All I Ever Need Is You,” as if lounging on some gallant Georgia porch he would be shot for approaching with mail. His music, but it’s their territorialized identity it amplifies. Cowboy Carter’s artistic statement is, this is ours, and therefore mine, to possess with more unassailability than relish, not just to reclaim but to redefine. Are versatility and conceptual fluidity turning into a virtue signal to help oversimplified tropes rise, or was this work really heartfelt homage and expansion? Some of both is the feeling. The scrutiny of intentions has intensified because the music industry is on trial. Diddy, or the idea of him, (where are the pictures) is in prison, and not long ago he was toasting to Black Excellence™ with Beyoncé's husband at their notoriously didactic annual brunch. The implications remain unaddressed. The hush is gaudy; it’s tacky. The couple has taken to pretending the controversy doesn’t exist and directing attention to their affectively low-key and high profile social lives as if nothing has changed. It seems a little psychotic to just get back out on stage and and into drill team formation hoping the storm passes or the bustle of the show drowns out all encroaching lawsuits, but this has been the strategy. The NFL, with its habitual complicity in the injury of players, general enclosure of dysfunction in marketing gimmicks, and demented style of entreating fans to embrace roman circus style contention, is the perfect testing ground for this effort in image rehabilitation. Not only does Jay Z work for them, the objectives are reciprocal, identical— turn something notoriously problematic into gratifying leisure, let it obfuscate all analysis with spectacle or give those involved actual brain damage so they cannot form the damning questions that otherwise loom. Watch it explode.

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It’s not Beyoncé’s fault alone that the soul and the thrill are gone from these scandals of mass distraction meant to seem wholesome and all-American, but if she isn’t relieved of her decoy position soon, I fear she’ll join the martyrs of popular song who came before her— Michael, Whitney, Prince, James Brown, Tupac, Elvis. She needs an escape plan that isn’t through the stadium or affiliation with corporate interests. The tradition goes: they are loved and cherished unto terminal disembodiment, they work harder than anyone around them until their bodies can no longer handle it, and then they are mourned insincerely as fallen tragic heroes, sad clichés, relics, hasbeens. It doesn’t seem like this could recur in Beyoncé, she is hyper-aware of her position and the attendant optics and navigates them like a general in combat, but patterns are more reliable than husbands and hushed dissent.

Who has transcended music superstardom alive and unscathed? Show trials loom like divine interventions as audiences are becoming both more complacent and harder to please. Adjacent Xmas Day headlines read: Airstrike kills journalists in Gaza, and Beyoncé sleighs at Netflix Christmas, ensuring one scene becomes the grave on which the other dances and gyrates for our viewing pleasure or trance. To be platformed, whether for inflicting damage or for being the spectacular relief from it, the commercial break from dull-humming terror somewhere over there, is more important than what we are platformed for at the current stage of social unraveling and incoherence. Call it anything— country music, renewal of your contract with public opinion, further breach of said contract, reconstituted army band of the silent war years. Do we clap, scream, or escape the cult of escapism and its consequences using its tricks, pretending that if we ignore it, everyone else will. Beyoncé’s performance was everything we expected it to be, clever, seamless, enchanting, country, a bandaid that suffocates a wound in need of air. The next day a judge refused Jay Z’s request to have a lawsuit against him fast tracked and the accuser’s identity revealed, and scolded the rapper’s legal team for a barrage of desperate motion filings to that end.

The will to be distracted, and attempts to accommodate it by delivering music that shifts the zeitgeist toward wholesome softly militant musicological revisions that insinuate black music is owed a debt and Beyoncé has come to collect, is being directly thwarted by the god complexes of men whose desire to be worshipped and admired is crashing down on them, the debris of the fallout grazing their families. Beyoncé’s ability to hold her talent and resilience up like a shield against the blows is harrowing, but the public is craving the gallows on the other side of pedestals, some justice, and an indication that those who marry into the mob might be informants and not co-conspirators. Breaking character would be human. What makes her among the greatest performers in recorded human history however, is that she’d enter her alter-ego and step over her own corpse if the choreography or lyric demanded it, more are afraid of her than afraid for her. She has forfeited the fallibility and fragility of normal people. Like a mechanical bull, like a mechanical bull, she chants during her halftime stunt, herself the bull and the rider. She is not the one who will be jettisoned off balance by the machinations of the culture machine, she will be the force, the thrash, by which the history of the stage and staging is deposed. In their place, not knowing where to look, we’ll find solace in the whirlwind. If there is a last show of empire, like the last meal of convicts being put to death, Beyoncé, we’re told, makes a cameo in every act, the flavor an ecstasy of repressed betrayal set to verse, that ends with a predictable bang, air guns in the place of real shooters but the threat of retaliation is clear.

Future live-streamed shows, I predict, will be stranger, less astringent, less about being trapped between stages of an obsolete game. All of this until the singers are replaced by machines and clones, and run off into the embers of a prison yard sunset humming that’s no way to say goodbye. Until that day, whatever they’re hiding is far more interesting and important than what’s on display, and the concerts are taking on the stench of political rallies with no ideology, over-compensating for false promises, so perfect as to be monotonous. In the end the distraught daughter isn’t permitted to take the fall for the father’s sins, and she learns to watch him suffer, and everyone becomes more terrifying, more interesting.