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In this week’s video, I talk about Beyonce. Kind of a lot, honestly. The Grammys were last night, and Queen Bey’s long-awaited and much-lauded genre-bending country album Cowboy Carter won both Best Country Album and Album of the Year. It’s a pretty big deal, for a few reasons: Nashville snubbed her, nominating her for exactly zero Country Music Awards; though she’d won 35 Grammys before last night, she’d never won the top honor, Album of the Year (despite making both Renaissance and Lemonade); the last time a Black woman won this award was when Lauryn Hill took it home 26 years ago; and last but not even remotely least, no Black artist has ever won Best Country Album.
And before you say Black people don’t make country music, first consider that Beyonce dedicated her win to Linda Martell, a pioneering figure in country music, who joined her on Cowboy Carter and was the first Black woman to play the Grand Ole Opry in 1969. Then take a look at this 2019 Time article, “Black Artists Helped Build Country Music… and Then It Left Them Behind.” The piece covers award-winning documentarian Ken Burns’s 2019 series Country Music, which takes a deep dive into the genre and devotes a great deal of coverage to the Black artists who were instrumental in its development, detailing how “commercial decisions by white industry executives led to their exclusion from the genre for decades.” That exclusion, while obviously not over, has at long last had its stranglehold broken by Beyonce and other artists who joined her on the album, such as Shaboozey and Tanner Adell.
“Genres are a funny little concept, aren’t they?” says Ms. Martell on Cowboy Carter, opening the track “SPAGHETTII.” “In theory, they have a simple definition that’s easy to understand,” she goes on. “But in practice, well, some may feel confined…” Beyonce is an artist who won’t be confined by genre: she’s made music that could qualify as pop, R&B, hip-hop, blues, dance, and now country.
One way we can think of a discipline is as an academic genre. It’s a way of approaching a subject, a way of defining and encountering truth. And it’s easy for scholars and practitioners of particular disciplines to end up with tunnel vision, forget there are other perspectives, and perhaps even become defensive of their discipline, the way country music has — pardon the pun — circled the wagons against Beyonce. Sometimes ugly reasons play a role in this disciplinary defensiveness, just as they did for Cowboy Carter.
But look what happens when blending genres works: Cowboy Carter is a masterpiece, integrating several different flavors of country music with pop, R&B, soul, hip-hop, and even opera.
Interdisciplinary study requires openness and courage. It requires more, not less, intellectual rigor, because the conventions, community, and assumptions sometimes available in a discipline can’t be relied on. Beyonce wasn’t a country artist making a country album; she was defying genre, and that meant her work had to be better than anyone else’s to get the same respect. Similarly, an interdisciplinarian has to not only do the scholarly work of research, analysis, and writing (or otherwise presenting their findings), but must do the extra work of integrating disciplines, and then convincing strict disciplinarians to respect that synthesis.
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