Beyoncé’s ‘Cowboy Carter’ transmits joy, honours legends and challenges a segregated industry
Today's episode is about Beyoncé's new album, Cowboy Carter. Beyoncé’s country-inspired album has caused a stir because the country music scene has long been white dominated, with a history of segregation that has erased its Black roots and gatekept it from Black artists.
Don’t Call Me Resilient · Husein Haveliwala, Ateqah Khaki, Krish Dineshkumar, Vinita Srivastava, Jennifer Moroz
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Show Notes
The release of Beyoncé’s new album, Cowboy Carter, was a much awaited event for a lot of us. There was much anticipation about this being a country album — and a lot of talk about the resistance some radio stations had and still have to that idea. That’s because country music is considered "white music," even though its Black historical roots are well documented. But Cowboy Carter is about so much more than country music. It honours other Black musical legends — and challenges the segregation we still see and hear in the music industry today. Vinita is joined by two experts to talk about it all. Alexis McGee is an Assistant Professor of Writing Studies at the University of British Columbia and author of "From Blues to Beyoncé: A Century of Black Women’s Generational Sonic Rhetorics." And Jada Watson is Assistant Professor of Digital Humanities at the School of Information Studies at the University of Ottawa. Her current research, called SongData, uses music industry data to examine representation in the country music industry.