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Beyoncé’s country album drowns out the Black music history it claims to celebrate | Yasmin Williams

For all her declarations of being authentically country, Cowboy Carter arrives on the back of booming business for the genre and is all about the star, not the roots music supposedly at the project’s heart

It prompted a racist backlash from parts of the country establishment, as well as outrage at Beyoncé giving a platform to the Chicks, who had been in exile from the industry since singer Natalie Maines criticised George W Bush’s handling of the Iraq war in 2002. But in practice, well, some may feel confined.” As Giddens put it in a recent article for the Guardian: “Tradition is shaped according to the inner logic of specific communities through long processes of creative engagement … Genre, on the other hand, is a product of capitalism, and people with access to power create it, control it and maintain it in order to commoditise art.” Despite Cowboy Carter’s use of funk, psychedelia and even Jersey club, Beyoncé’s flagrant leaning on country aesthetics to establish this album as being markedly different from her previous records suggests an artist conforming to the standards of the latter category in order to cash in on the growing popularity of country music. Photograph: Scott Dudelson/Getty ImagesWhat other reason is there to include guest spots from Post Malone and Miley Cyrus – both white artists who piggybacked on hip-hop aesthetics to gain success and relevance before later criticising the genre?

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