Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter: The Western visuals, decoded

Of all of the pop stars at the moment working in America, Beyoncé is undoubtedly essentially the most visually subtle. Every new album comes with a lush, rigorously staged set of photos, dense with allusions and Easter eggs, that act as an elaboration and a commentary on the themes of the album.

In the Lemonade period round 2016, Beyoncé made herself right into a goddess of many identities: the Christian Virgin Mary, the Roman Venus, the Yoruba Oshun. With 2022’s Renaissance, she turned a disco diva celebrating the pleasures of the dance flooring as a protected area for queer Black pleasure.

Now, in Cowboy Carter, the country-inflected album she dropped on the finish of March, Beyoncé has reinvented herself in maybe essentially the most tough transformation of all. She’s remodeled herself from American goddess into goddess of America.

Let’s decode the imagery of Cowboy Carter collectively.

Sweetheart of the rodeo

The album cowl for Cowboy Carter sees Beyoncé sitting sidesaddle on a white horse, in pink, white, and blue leathers. In one hand she’s holding the horse’s reins, and within the different, the American flag. Together, her upraised arms and her head and neck create a type of W form.

“It’s such an awkward and specific gesture,” says Sonya Abrego, a design historian specializing within the historical past of American vogue. “I really don’t think Beyoncé and her team did that accidentally.”

Abrego sees Beyoncé’s pose as echoing the posture of a girl in an illustrated map referred to as “Evolution of the Cowboy,” created by artist Jo Mora in 1933. The full illustration charts the way in which cowboy gear and strategies modified over time, together with a rundown of the totally different cowboy archetypes of varied territories. In the middle prime of the chart, although, we see a girl in a cowboy hat and driving leathers, standing together with her arms upraised in order that, collectively together with her head and neck, they create a W form. Behind her, a legend reads “sweetheart of the rodeo.” Flowers blossom within the air the place she gestures; she is the bountiful supply of the rodeo and all that it signifies.

Columbia by way of Wikimedia Commons

The sweetheart of the rodeo has appeared on album covers. The Byrds used her on the duvet of their 1968 album, tellingly titled Sweetheart of the Rodeo. It was often called one of many first country-rock albums, a crossover nation album from a band that, like Beyoncé, constructed their identify on a distinct style.

The horse of a distinct colour

The horse Beyoncé is driving on the duvet of Cowboy Carter appears white, nevertheless it’s not simply any white horse. It’s a Lipizzaner, a breed that’s normally born with a brown or black coat that grows in grey after which white over time. This transition is frequent amongst grey horses, nevertheless it’s a telling alternative right here — particularly given the themes of the album, with its name-check to Linda Martell, the primary solo Black girl nation artist to play the Grand Ole Opry.

The title Cowboy Carter, too, nods to the whitewashed work of Black artists within the historical past of nation music. The Carter Family was one in all nation’s weightiest acts, they usually developed their distinctive sound underneath the affect of Black musician Lesley Riddle. Riddle taught them his progressive fashion of guitar selecting, and he bought the Carters entrance to Black areas, like church buildings, to assist them collect songs from Black communities that went on to assist kind the idea of the white nation songbook.

Cowboy Carter is a historical past lesson on the Black musicians who helped construct nation music and whose contributions had been swiftly whitewashed. It’s becoming, then, that Beyoncé experience a horse that was black at its beginning however is now thought of white.

The All-American lady

Beyoncé/Blair Cardwell by way of Instagram

On the official album cowl, Beyoncé’s sporting the colours of the American flag on her physique and holding the American flag. On the vinyl cowl, she’s standing in a Statue of Liberty pose with a Miss America sash round her torso and her hair in pink, white, and blue beads. She’s taking part in with one of many frequent visible motifs of nation music, which is Americana kitsch.

In nation and Western music, the West acts as a synecdoche for America itself: Western iconography is American iconography as a result of the West is America.

“If you go around the world and ask people for a symbol of the United States, it’s the cowboy that people say,” says Josh Garrett-Davis, H. Russell Smith Foundation curator of Western American historical past on the Huntington.

The cowboy turning into a logo of America isn’t an accident, Garrett-Davis factors out. In 1893, historian Frederick Jackson Turner posited the frontier thesis, claiming that the distinctive American character was tough and impartial and that it got here from the nation’s fixed motion westward. Theodore Roosevelt, a rich East Coaster who wanted so as to add some grit to his picture, picked up on the concepts and started to make a lot of his time in North Dakota.

“All these indicated that just a touch of sort of wildness on the Western frontier could kind of give America its character and refresh,” says Garrett-Davis. “It’s in a sense masculinizing because they were worried that, in the Industrial Age, the country was becoming too feminized.”

The heroic fable of the cowboy was additionally a deeply white supremacist concept. “They erase the fact that a good portion of the working cowboys in the American West were Indigenous, Mexican, and African American,” says Garrett-Davis. “This was a fiction that was created using these icons of the cowboy, but not really the truth of what cowboy life was like. Cowboys were migrant agricultural laborers in terrible conditions being underpaid.”

By inserting her Black feminine physique within the poses and costumes of Western Americana, Beyoncé disrupts that mythology. She evokes the lineage of the erased folks of colour who got here earlier than her — within the West, in nation as a style — and he or she insists on her proper to be there now.

Whatever else occurs, Beyoncé is all the time a goddess

Let’s return to the vinyl cowl, with Beyoncé standing within the pose of the Statue of Liberty, changing the statue’s torch with a boss-man cigar and the statue’s crown with beaded braids. It’s price remembering that the statue can also be a goddess — she’s the Roman goddess Libertas, or Liberty. Beyoncé is pulling from the Lemonade playbook right here to evoke a classical goddess whereas preserving the main points particularly Beyoncé. She’s additionally added a contact of masculine swagger with that cigar, reminding us all that earlier than she was a goddess, Beyoncé topped herself King B.

On the pageant queen sash round her torso, Beyoncé’s identify seems to be misspelled: Beyincé. The obvious error references a painful household episode. Beyoncé’s identify comes from her mom, Tina Knowles, born Celestine Beyoncé. On her beginning certificates, although, Tina’s final identify was misspelled as “Beyincé.”

On a latest podcast, Tina says she requested her mom why she didn’t get the beginning certificates corrected. “And she said, ‘I did one time. The first time, and I was told, ‘Be happy that you’re getting a birth certificate,’ because, at one time, Black people didn’t get birth certificates,” she added.

In the identical picture the place she re-establishes herself as a goddess, Beyoncé references a second the place the very infrastructure of America appeared designed to inflict humiliation on her household due to their Blackness. The play between these two concepts is a part of the play of this complete album: inserting Black folks again within the heart of a style and aesthetic that erased them, and making the second lovely.