Review

Culture

Music

Race

12 April 2024

6 min read

Beyoncé’s breaking barriers

Cowboy Carter sees the star crack her whip in the temple of the music industry.

Krish Kandiah

Krish is a social entrepreneur partnering across civil society, faith communities, government and philanthropy. He founded The Sanctuary Foundation.

Side by side, two rodeo riders on horses trot toward the camera. One is Beyonce, the other a cowboy

Beyoncé at the Houston Rodeo.

Beyoncé.com

I sometimes wake up in a cold sweat with flashbacks of one terrible swimming lesson at school. I had accidentally forgotten to forget my kit, so was forced to face not only the freezing water, but the spouting of ignorant prejudice from my teacher.

“Kandiah, you’re useless,” he said, as I heaved myself out of the pool at the end of the lesson. “Although I guess it’s not your fault you can’t float like the white children. Your bones are heavier. Look at the Olympics – you never see black and Asian swimmers, do you?”

I opened and closed my mouth a few times, like the fish out of water I suppose I was, but inside I was seething.

Being told I couldn’t do something made me all the more determined to do it. Back in I jumped.

Last week, in another splash aimed at proving people wrong, Beyoncé’s magnificent album “Cowboy Carter” became the first album by a black woman to top the country charts.

On her Instagram feed she said: “the criticisms I faced when I first entered this genre forced me to propel past the limitations that were put on me.”

It was a brave move. Back in 2016, she had received heated and hate-filled reactions when she performed her song Daddy Issues at the 50th Country Music Association Awards with the country music group Chicks, formerly known as the Dixie Chicks. Many country music fans were outraged, calling it an act of cultural appropriation. One response on social media put it starkly: “SHE DOES NOT BELONG!!”.

But as a Texan who had been brought up around country music, Beyoncé disagreed. She would spend the next five years planning her response. Cowboy Carter proves her country credentials beyond all doubt. It’s not only about the music. It also does three important things that show the world what can be done when faced with barriers of prejudice and ignorance.

She honours the past

The album is clearly an act of tribute to trailblazing country artists before her. Beyoncé included notable guest appearances and feature tracks and took the unusual step of sending flowers to all who had inspired her.

Beyoncé sent flowers to Mickey Guyton, the first black female artist to be nominated for a Grammy Award in the Country category. She also sent flowers to K. Michelle and featured Tanner Adell, Brittney Spencer and Reyna Roberts on the Cowboy Carter track Blackbird, a song that Paul McCartney wrote as a response to the case of the Little Rock Nine, a group of African-American schoolchildren initially barred from attending a previously racially segregated school in Arkansas. It took the direct intervention of then President Dwight Eisenhower in 1957 to make it possible for these children to attend their school. She also included guest appearances from country music royalty Dolly Parton and Linda Martell, who both introduce songs on the album. Dolly’s introduction to Beyoncé’s reworking of Jolene is particularly poignant: “Hey Queen B it’s Dolly P”.

The song Jolene sticks faithfully to the guitar riff from the original, but the words and the tone of this song are completely different. Dolly’s original Jolene was begging another woman not to take her man from her. But Beyoncé will have none of that. She is full of threat and menace:

“I’m warnin’ you, don’t come for my man… don’t take the chance because you think you can.”

As Beyoncé pays her dues to the greats that have gone before, she also offers a very different picture. She can recognise the past, and yet not be imprisoned by it. She can appreciate those who have laid the foundations for a new era, unbound by cruel stereotypes.

She challenges the present

We don’t have to look far to see the way that western society is splintering. It is becoming harder to find common ground, harder to move from one tribe to another. Beyoncé’s album is political in that it is deliberately breaking down a wall and smashing a division. She refuses to accept that there are no-go areas for people of colour. The album feels like Beyoncé’s famous baseball bat from Lemonade, but this time it isn’t smashing cars, but preconceptions and prejudices instead.

There’s anger in this record. The first song is “American Requiem” and includes the line:

“They used to say I spoke ‘too country’./ And the reaction came,/ said I wasn’t country ’nough / If that ain’t country / I don’t know what is?”

Full of confidence and rage she asks over a bed of country music guitar chords:

“Can you hear me? / Can you stand me?”

Beyoncé does not disguise the ironies. The fresh anger and challenge weaves into classic forms and tropes of country music. The artist that some wanted to exclude from the genre tops the charts. The pop icon becomes an iconoclast. The smashing of divisions makes way for the building of something new.

She opens a door for the future

It is within living memory of many that black people were prohibited from sitting at the front of a public bus or drinking from the same water fountain as white people. Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter is not just a smash hit it is a smash down of the boundaries of genre that had excluded her and others. With this boundary smashed the opportunity is opened for others too.

For example, there was a recent stand-out performance at the Grammy awards watched by millions around the world – the duet between the country star Luke Combs and Tracy Chapman. Luke, a young white man, is part of a new generation of country singers with a huge following. The legendary black artist Tracy Chapman recently turned 60. The joyful performance was particularly touching as the two of them looked genuinely delighted to be singing together. The video went viral and lead to a huge uplift in Chapman’s sales. The song Fast Car rocketed to the top of the charts some 36 years after it was first released.

Cowboy Carter is Beyoncé using her voice and talent to push back against prejudice and push forward to a new era. She is cracking her whip in the temple of the music industry. She is driving out those who have commandeered the space that rightly belongs to those from any and all backgrounds. She is righteously angry at the injustice. She is declaring that country music be reclaimed as a meeting place for all nations to enjoy.

When Jesus unleashed the whip against the tables of the moneychangers in the temple who were excluding the non-Jews the space rightly belonged to, he fiercely declared: “My father’s house is to be a house of prayer for all the nations.” He was not only breaking the barriers of the past but ushering in a new future, a future where everyone could gather together before God on equal footing. Jesus would eventually die on a cross to ensure this free access to God was available to everyone - wherever they were from, whatever they had done and whatever they looked like.

I welcome this album by Beyoncé in that spirit of challenging prejudices, breaking down barriers, and clearing the decks for a new future equally available to all.

If only I could have whipped myself into shape, I believe I could have been the Cowboy Carter of the swimming world forty years ago.

Beyoncé in her own words

“Ain’t got time to waste, I got art to make/ I got love to create on this holy night/ They won’t dim my light, all these years I fight.”

16 Carriages

“Say a prayer for what has been / We'll be the ones that purify our father's sins / American Requiem / Them old ideas (yeah) / Are buried here (yeah) / Amen (amen)

Amen

Review

Books

Culture

Economics

Politics

8 April 2025

5 min read

Abundance and the attempt to build a better world

Is this policy the antidote to the zero-sum game of politics?

Josh Richards

Josh is a curate in London, and is completing a PhD in theology.

Construction worker climb a steel framework.

Josue Isai Ramos Figueroa on Unsplash.

What do you do when more money won’t solve a government’s problems? Abundance: How We Build A Better Future, the new book by Ezra Klein and Derek Thompson is an extended polemic against a form of government—particularly as practiced by US liberals—that stymies policy delivery. However technocratic that sounds (and the book often is), it forces readers to confront deeper questions about the nature of politics.

At the heart of the book is a critique of what the authors, drawing on the film Everything Everywhere All At Once, call 'Everything Bagel Liberalism'. In the film topping are added to bagel to the point that it becomes a blackhole. So too, Klein and Thompson suggest, with so much well-intended policy, in which in seeking to tick every possible box and satisfy a range of regulators it becomes a delivery blackhole and little is actually done. The authors ask whether parties of the left are focused on measuring spending to the exclusion of measuring what gets built.

The first chapter gives a good sense of their approach.  It tells a familiar story about the way in which so many are being priced out of cities because of a lack of affordable housing. However, in doing so, it highlights a surprising harm: that geographical proximity remains an important enabler of technological innovation so a lack of affordable housing in cities means a loss of creativity.

The diagnosis is perhaps even more surprising coming from American liberals. Special interests—including those seeking to protect the value of their own houses—weaponize interlocking sets of well-intentioned legislation to prevent homes being built. Subsequent chapters apply that similar logic—regulation and a lack of focus resulting in inaction—to infrastructure, government capacity, scientific research and the implementation of new inventions.

The book's strength is that it is not particularly detailed in its policy proposals. Klein and Thompson instead offer abundance as a lens through which policy development can be viewed: what do we need more of and how do we get it? This lens can be applied from within a wide range of ideological frameworks. It is not itself a worldview but a challenge that any politics should be obsessed with effective delivery not simply desiring the correct end-state.

The book is unapologetically focused on America and the failures of progressive governance, particularly in California. (One of this book's peculiar legacies will be to leave many who have never been there perpetually invested in California's struggles to build high-speed rail.) Nevertheless, the approach already has its advocates in the UK - for example, the Centre for British Progress which set out its stall last week, and it is not hard to see how an agenda here that could be seized by a less hesitant Starmer government.

Any plausible political analysis must hold together the reality of scarcity and abundance. Losing sight of either unmoors us from the actual world we find ourselves in.

Indeed, perhaps the book might feel more realistic if it had other countries in mind. Reviewing Abundance, Columbia economist Adam Tooze describes the book as painful to read, characterising it as a manifesto for the Harris presidency that never was. Indeed, according to the authors, the book was originally scheduled for release in summer 2024 to influence the Democratic platform leading up to the 2024 elections. Instead, it appears in 2025 amid Trump's assault on institutions, Tooze's Columbia among them.

In an interview on Pod Save America, the authors argued that the book is still relevant, offering a framework with which Democrats can oppose Trump. Thompson described the Trumpian view of politics as fundamentally shaped by scarcity. He suggests that behind 47th president's policies—most notably the tariff agenda—is the conviction that every interaction is zero-sum; for you to gain, I must lose.  On this analysis, the way to oppose a politics that pits groups against one another over limited resources—housing, trade, jobs—is to figure out how the government can provide more and argue for it. In its critique and its hopefulness, Abundance offers those who believe in institutions a way to navigate—even work with the grain of—the anti-institutional temperament of contemporary politics.

There might be something to this messaging, but scarcity plays an unmissable role in Klein and Thompson's argument. Remember that they characterise what they oppose as "Everything Bagel Liberalism", policy that tries to achieve every outcome and loses focus in doing so. They may conceive scarcity differently to Trump, but their book is a warning policy cannot deliver as much as we think. It is a call for us to oppose, to compete against those special interests—whether they be residents’ associations wanting to hold up house prices or politicians wanting to cut research grants—whose policy priorities overload the bagel.

At heart, the book is a reminder that ultimately the salient scarcity in politics is not housing or trade or even money. It is time. Abundance cautions governments that unfocussed policy yields the time entrusted to them by the governed.

Humans cannot lead politics completely beyond its zero-sum logic. The world is so often a violent competition over resources and government must restrain that violence while avoiding being co-opted as a means of exploitation. And yet, politics is also—even primarily—an avenue through which communities answer a primal summons to be fruitful, abundant.

Ultimately, any plausible political analysis must hold together the reality of scarcity and abundance. Losing sight of either unmoors us from the actual world we find ourselves in. Yes, there is so much broken and warped to reckon with, and we must grapple too with our finitude’s bluntness, but so too is creation replete with goodness, among them our capacity to invent and deliver what we need together.

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