Get the latest gossip
The Guide #133: Why is Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter so long?
In this week’s newsletter: Ms Knowles-Carter and Oppenheimer lead the charge of lengthy runtimes in pop culture, but there’s something to be said for brevity
Beyoncé’s sprawling paean to country music is a formidable piece of work, created by a boatload’s worth of talent (seriously, check out how long those album credits are), full of luscious layered textures and inventive production, and dabbling in everything from acoustic, finger-picked folk to zydeco. Beyoncé’s hardly an outlier in this regard – Drake’s albums regularly nudge past the 80-minute mark, and Morgan Wallen’s 2023 chart topper One Thing at a Time was a preposterous 111 minutes long. And my favourite movie of recent months is the Oscar nominee for best animated film Robot Dreams, which managed to tell an epic story of loss and loneliness in 80s New York in just over that desired 90 minute benchmark.
Or read this on The Guardian
