Beyoncé’s 2024 album Cowboy Carter was supposed to be the biggest phenomenon in country music in 2024. But after taking a step back from all the bluster, it’s easy to conclude that Cowboy Carter’s impact was marginal at best.
Similar to Zach Bryan, it’s hard to understate how massive Sam Barber has become. That’s not all that’s similar about Zach Bryan. You listen to ‘Restless Mind,’ and you could easily be convinced it’s a Zach Bryan album.
A joke is a joke, and not meant to be taken seriously. And one would hope that we’re finally moving past the era when a predatory media isn’t preoccupied with taking opportunistic pull quotes out-of-context.
At a time when actual country performers are inspiring pop stars more than ever, it should be those country performers represented in the country categories, not the pop and hip-hop stars they’re inspiring.
The Grammy Awards are supposed to be the one place where the critically-acclaimed, criminally-overlooked, and lifers of a respective genre get the recognition they deserve from a non-profit that puts the art first.
‘Tis the season for ludicrous and obsequious puff pieces to hit the internet as power publicists are sent into hyperdrive attempting to garner Grammy nominations and wins for their deep-pocketed clients.
“There’s so many wonderful country artists that, I guess probably the country music field, they probably thought, well, we can’t really leave out some of the ones that spend their whole life doing that,” Parton says.
Through numerous Tik-Tok accounts, a PushPlay subsidiary called WtrCoolr pushed the idea that Dolly Parton was Shaboozey’s godmother, fully knowing it was a lie. It was also a lie that many people on Tik-Tok fell for.
It’s not Beyoncé, but Shaboozey who has seeded the song of the summer with “A Bar (Tipsy),” and released the album that has shown the resonance and stickiness “Cowboy Carter” failed to.
The two Kelce brothers host a podcast together called New Heights, and have the internet all agog after Jason Kelce (the brother NOT having intercourse with Taylor Swift) twisted off on country music during the latest episode.
The idea was to explain the groundbreaking, genre shattering nature of how this song came about. But instead of exposing the genius behind it, the breakdown was an inadvertent self-own by Shaboozey.
It was supposed to be one of the biggest events in music in 2024, if not one of the biggest in music in the last many years. Most definitely it was going to be the defining moment in country music in 2024, if not in country history.
Alright. So it goes without saying that this really isn’t a “good” song, and that it’s not especially “country” either, aside from a few tokenary and surface inferences. But regardless, according to Billboard, it’s the #1 song in country.
Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter is not a country album. It was never meant to be considered a country album. When the first songs were released, they were not labeled as country songs, and were not sent to country radio.