Well, now we’re in a pickle.
On her eighth solo record, Cowboy Carter, Beyoncé sang about the Grammys’ constant, stubborn refusal to award her album of the year.
“AOTY, I ain’t win,” she sang. “Take that s— on the chin.“
But now she has won, for the album that contains that very lyric. Will she have to go back and re-record it? At the very least, we expect a rewrite on the tour she just announced., external
Joking aside, this victory was long, long overdue.
In 2017, Adele even flirted with the idea of handing back her album of the year trophy, saying the music on her album, 25, couldn’t compare to Beyoncé’s “monumental… beautiful and soul-bearing” Lemonade.
Eyebrows were raised again in 2023, when Harry Styles’ fun, but conceptually flimsy, Harry’s House bested Beyoncé’s Renaissance – a meticulous exploration of how oppressed black and queer musicians found salvation through house music.
In the end, it took Beyoncé to approach a genre that conservative Grammy voters could understand – country – in order to secure a victory.
But that’s not to downplay the scale of her achievement. Cowboy Carter is a masterpiece that weaves hundreds of musical threads into a thesis about America’s cultural past, and the futility of gatekeeping musical genres along racial lines.
The arguments it makes are both timely and urgent, without suffocating the songs.
As the second part of a planned trilogy, this surely won’t be Beyoncé’s last trip to the podium.
