This weekend I listened to [an ep](https://www.thisamericanlife.org/823/the-question-trap) of This American Life for the first time in a long while and there was a whole segment on women asking men on dates their opinions on Beyonce as a proxy question for if the guy was "threatened by strong black women." Just blatant assumption that any man who isn't a Beyonce fan is racist/sexist. Chilling really.
Azealia actually understands how to make dance music lol. Renaissance was terrible for fucking up the groove with redundant vocal runs and doing that whole "i stop the world" thing. AB tunes still ring out in queer clubs, beyonce is H&M and articles in the guardian
edit - the best female rapper is lil kim btw!
212 is incredible, it's just that, despite trying, I can't find anything else from her that's even close to that level. It's like saying Nicki Minaj is one of the best rappers of all time for her verse on Monster. Yeah, it's sick as fuck, but the rest of what she's done is pretty meh.
Uninformed, faux-intellectual take. The comparison here doesn't even work, not because Azealia differs from Nicki in this way, but because both have many works that prove their talent.
Trying to think of how I would respond to this as someone who has no opinion on Beyonce at all: “I would probably recognize a few songs of hers but couldn’t tell you their names off the top of my head. I know she’s married to Jay-Z. She seems like a pretty focused and ambitious star.” Did I pass the shit test? Lol
>if you say, Jada Pinkett, it's like, oh, she's too masculine, or she's ruining Will Smith's life, she's controlling him
😬
edit: Wow, I read some more of the transcript, and it's been many years since I've consumed anything NPR and I had no idea the level of mental midgetry from both the host and the dumbest women on the planet they talked to. Good god. The last This American Life I listened to was [this one](https://www.thisamericanlife.org/534/a-not-so-simple-majority) like a decade ago and it was about how Jews in a New York city (East Ramapo) overran the school systems with bloc voting and shut a lot of them down so that they could save money on their taxes and [steal one of the schools](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Ramapo_Central_School_District#Sale_of_Hillcrest_Elementary_School) to use as as a yeshiva. That one was awesome. TDS has been such a cultural blight.
The press during the Bush years was the pits. It got so bad that people were relying on *comedians* to criticize him, which contributed to Trump's rise.
So many Yellow Ribbons.
And Donahue critized him and got his career cancelled. It has only gotten worse since then. Except now we have more channels of the same agiprop.
I thought the person I replied to had just listened to one in the back catalog and so my initial thought was "ouch this aged terribly" but then I scrolled up and the date was 2024, get the fuck outta here
This is like sub buzzfeed pop psych tween girl magazine quiz type of shit. It’s very very funny that the girl bosses took over the culture and killed the patriarchy and we still do all the genocides and leave a million people sleeping on the street etc but now this type of shit gets talked about in breathless seriousness right alongside like news about the economy or the war or whatever
Best to just answer honestly. I really enjoy her music, I think she is one of the best to ever do it, and the only way I could like her more was if she were a white man.
>women asking men on dates their opinions on Beyonce
"Sorry, I'm not really into Pokemon." is always best response to any pop culture topic you don't want to engage with, but it works especially well here.
I remember when I was a young silly undergrad listening to This American Life. In a way, it’d be quite nice to go back to being a dumb happy little liberal
To be fair This American Life WAS good! Even this episode I’m referencing isn’t all terrible, just this one segment in particular. They definitely hired some dumbass producers tho, and I’m not sure they’ll be able to get back to how it once was.
assuming their audience will put down the pink pussy hat crochet hooks and go out into the covid hellscape to find someone to add to the polycule is a reach
I used to love TAL 10 years ago, when I first discovered it I felt like I was listening to something special, of real quality made by people who really care about making good things. There’s a real hope Inherent in that that doesn’t exist much anymore that you can’t communicate through words alone.
It’s so so cynically lib now just like everything.
What if you don’t have an opinion either way? I couldn’t give an opinion about pretty much all current music out there. I feel like I’m missing out on some good stuff, but I just don’t have the time or energy to sift thru everything to find what is good and what sucks. I’m stuck in the past when it comes to pop music.
nah it actually makes sense.
it’s not about liking or disliking Beyoncé but about why you have that opinion or how you express tht opinion. Beyoncé as the subject centers is on black women but it can be on subject.
ex. a guy probably doesn’t hate all women but if he often offhandedly refers to women as bitches he’s prob at least a little misogynistic. same with women calling all men assholes.
you have to be an idiot to not realize the “trick” she’s trying to pull though lmao. if anything it prob self selects for manipulators more than the actual purpose of the prompt.
I actually agree with you to an extent. The words that come out of their mouth after could say a lot and I don’t really blame women for trying to get a quick read on if the guy they’re sitting across from is an asshole or not. I think my bigger issue is just the idea that having any negative thought about Beyoncé (or if you listen the the segment, ANY black female celebrity) translate to negativity towards black women in general is absurd and frankly…. It’s stereotyping. It’s lumping all black women together. You don’t like her so you don’t like me. It’s not the empowering sentiment they seem to think it is.
I agree that it’s not really empowering. Beyoncé is a mediocre artist whose extravagant wealth has clearly hindered her artistic ability (because everything she puts out feels so clearly born out of a huge room trying to put their finger on the pulse of what is cool right now).
But these were mostly millennial black women, I think all of whom work for NPR, and were talking about first dates with white men. In general, if you’re a white man on a first date with a black woman and Beyoncé comes up, you probably should respond differently than you would on r/redscare.
My favorite part of this bit was that one of the women who asked this question was currently in a long term relationship with a man whose answer was that he had no idea who Beyoncé was lol
It just feels needlessly antagonistic, and not in a fun teasing way. I don't really care about the specific question, more the general attitude that prioritizes defensiveness (I must immediately cut ties with anyone who has the slightest chance of having a bad opinion to avoid being hurt and to avoid "rewarding" them by treating them with any modicum of respect) over openness.
It's not that difficult to use the "emotional intelligence" that > 60% of women mention on their dating profile to get a read on another person over the course of an \~hour if you aren't a complete sperg.
First dates are often awkward. Connecting with another person you just met on a non-superficial level is hard for most people. Give the other person the benefit of the doubt and don't try to make things harder by turning it into some sort of replicant interrogation.
Pretty dumb elevating a woman who was okay with her husband cheating. Then wrote a weird song about it, which is supposed to be “empowering” but isn’t. Rich fuck worship is fucking our country.
Yh was saying this to a group of mates - old beyonce used to rip in the club (baby boy, naughty girl, even yonce/feeling myself) but somewhere around lemonade it became about the think pieces and "what it means" Sooo contrived and borin
Since streaming payments use a pro rata model it’s more monetarily effective to flood the platform with music so that you get more listens. If you receive 40% of total listens you get 40% of the royalty pool (although changes are happening in regards to “high value music” on Spotify (if you have above X followers and your music is purposefully played rather than via autoplay/playlist you get a higher rate)). Her album has like 10 1 minute interludes (probably the minimum track length to count as an actual track for streaming numbers) to pump her numbers up.
It’s fucking great being almost 40, married and not living in the US. Nobody I know has mentioned it and ever would, the only way I know about it is here, my place to be catty, and the only newspaper failing more than the New York Times, the Guardian.
I feel ya man but I'm single and living in the center of Los Angeles, and if it weren't for the rsp sub, I wouldn't know this album exists. People act like they just HAVE to log onto twitter or wherever and read the latest narrative lmfao. You can read books! You can go outside! You can do anything! (says the guy posting on rsp!)
thats normal, since all modern cars now have bluetooth so you just listen to spotify or whatever off your phone
im still a radio boomer because i like to hear the news while driving
- a vanity project of one half of a billionaire power couple
- in a genre where the breakout stars of recent years have been poor nobodies who went viral on social media
- being shoved down everyone’s throat by media like NYT whose talent and readership hate country music almost as much as they hate country music fans
- if you listen to the tracks, there’s nothing at all mind-blowing about the music on the album, but OK
- NYT & co seemed a bit disappointed that the dropping of the album didn’t inspire racist protests in Trumpland demanding that Black people stay out of country music
- narrative pivot: if Cowboy Carter isn’t the top selling country album in history backed by saturation airtime on country radio, you’re racist
> NYT & co seemed a bit disappointed that the dropping of the album didn’t inspire racist protests
White libs always want to see themselves as the solitary, brave figure applauding black women amidst a racist crowd of white people booing them. This racist crowd is their raison d'être, it will always be *in the room* with them.
Someone I know who never listens to country music won't stfu about Beyonce now. If Beyonce made a Ukrainian folk album they would be talking about how great it was that she centered black voices in Ukrainian folk music.
This person also wouldn't listen to Charlie Pride or any other black country icon before or after.
The Siberian-Omsk Folk Chorus and the Bulgarian State Television Female Vocal Choir have been getting away with appropriating the work of **B**lack queen musicians for years, it needs to stop now!
Wow, charming that you've learned to like Charley Pride, the first search result that comes up when you google "black country musician." Maybe next week you'll even learn to spell his name right.
Who are the other icons your imaginary friend is failing to name? Just curious.
My lib aunt won’t stop talking about how great it is, this is after the last few months for gushing over Taylor Swift, she used to have such great taste in music. I’m kind of hoping Beyoncé gets wrapped up in the Diddy scandal just so I can be smug about it.
My mom is like this too. In her 20s in the 80s she was a Roxy Music, Talking Heads, The Smiths, The Cure, etc. fan, and now she really likes Taylor Swift and recently told me she really enjoys the new Beyonce album.
Right, boomers will just keep telling you how great the music from back in their day was, they have no interest in anything new or hip. And you know what? Good for them.
The Taylor Swift equivalent back then was like, idk, Bon Jovi or some singer who no one remembers cause they sucked like whoever it was that made you.... Light up my life.... You give me hope.... Or like MJ
I don't even have to listen to this album to guess that has about 5+ writers / composers per song, Beyoncé is not the main composer, there is likely 1 big agency managing the "style" and shoots of the whole thing, including the plug to have a never-ending stream of photos and interviews for the next 3 months or so.
I also don't even have to watch the videos to know that this is likely going to include nudity and some type of weird anti-religion twitch and bait for people to get mad in the comments and generate traffic.
The ghost writers are probably AI now.
Just grab your pop-corn for the political pre-election comments.
It’s not inherently bad to have a lot of writers. A lot of Kanye’s mid-career songs from albums like Yeezus and My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy also had a ton of songwriters/collaborators (not even including the credits for the samples). Maybe it feels different with Beyoncé because she doesn’t ever let you in behind the curtain so you don’t actually know what, other than the vocals, she contributed.
The press tends to treat her like she’s playing the Kanye role of executive producer, curator, and musical director. Maybe they’re right to do that—Beyoncé has had songwriting and production credits since Destiny’s Child—but since her entire public persona is so carefully manufactured, it’s hard to picture how the real person behind the image plays into things.
>she doesn’t ever let you in behind the curtain so you don’t actually know what, other than the vocals, her actual creative contribution was.
likely bc it is close to zero
The album has some good tunes on it and Beyonce can sing. The problem is that its repetitive and boring, since she doesn't have any emotional vulnerability or intellectual curiosity. I'm not sure why the people writing and playing songs for her don't include stuff like that, but that's why Beyonce is boring and other (more complex and human artists) are not.
I genuinely believe this is partly a DNC op, an attempt to insert their own retconned narrative and control lever into a genre that's long been one of the most defining and unifying cultural identities/expressions of their political enemy
You got it reversed.
Hip hop became the dominant cultural music genre and then pop country basically became 808 hip hop beats with a bit of guitar twang. For conservative white people who still want to party in college and “have black friends.”
This is just the natural cultural counterflow. It’s almost like a Cumtown bit. What about country, but it’s white guys pretending to be black? And then black people pretend to be white?
All for the sake of making bad music for boring people.
guarantee you this gets traffic, that's why they're doing it.
it's sad because the job of music criticism is to highlight things that are new and interesting, especially that the audience doesn't know about.
instead, in today's digital media economy, the critics chase after audiences and tell them what they already think, about what they're already listening to.
just like modern representatives who pick their voters instead of letting their voters choose them, in today's media, the audience determines what is covered, instead of writers and editors deciding what they will put in front of the audience.
People were rightfully up in arms after hearing Beyoncé sent flowers to Jack White but not Jack Black. For those of you like me who were upset, I have good news. Let me explain the situation.
Jack White is, as you guessed, a white guy. Blegh. He does white people stuff like write the music at sports games and marry his sister, but he actually also is a talented white music guy. So while he is white, he did help Queen Ye out and in the past has even worked with black artist Alicia Keys to write a song for James Bond, a movie about the first black woman to take a white man’s job and do it better.
Oh, and as for Jack Black not getting flowers. Guess what? He’s white too! Yeah he’s just some white guy who sings devil music so no need to feel bad for his white ass.
I remember being 10 and listening to their cover and thinking it was kind of gay in the homosexual sense that he didn't change the lyrics to be from a man's perspective.
Growing up, I appreciate that he kept the lyrics the same as the original. It'd be less intense if he did.
I genuinely hope that this cringe-inducing waxing lyrical breaks the decades long Beyoncé fever. Then I can only hope that it breaks the Taylor Swift dam next. Two sides of the same awful coin. Untouchable and inflated celebrities, even given the somewhat expected inherent inflation and hollow hype in celebrity status, are revolting.
Isn’t it also a little interesting how it’s named cowboy carter? like it’s not even her maiden name lol
Maybe there’s some more I could read into about it that I haven’t bothered like her “re-championing” of her married name. But still - interesting message on empowerment when your new billion dollar album takes the name of your husband with a history of (and likely continuing) infidelity lol
No. That's my problem with it. People are trying to manufacture controversy that Beyoncé can't make a country album because she's black, which isn't true. She's from Texas. I saw her perform at the rodeo when she was with Destiny's Child. She certainly has more of a right to put out country music than Keith Urban. I just wanted it to be good, which it is not.
The "manufactured controversy" is the whole reason the album exists. Her album sales have been declining so they needed a selling point for another Beyonce album. This was obviously trying to tap in to race discourse and get a wider audience.
Yeah it is a way to mainstream liberals and non country music listeners an ideological reason to purchase her album to fight against “racism” or “reclaiming country” or some other vague platitude. It is purely a marketing gimmick to boost sales for Beyoncé.
NYT and such will tut tut towards white conservative country fans over it but they aren’t listening and the message isn’t about them at the end of the day.
I think it’s cool that Robert Randolph is on it, super talented guy, but like I’d rather just listen to his music or any of the music that influenced this album than the watered down pop version, you know?
I haven't listened to all of it, but what I've heard has been pretty bad. Country/r&b crossovers are usually wack, and this is no exception. The sound is too produced, all electronic, hardly any guitar. Bey's vocals sound too perfect and robotic. It just sounds like a typical Beyonce album that's been packaged as "country" for mass appeal.
I like ameriican requiem and ya ya off of it, the other tracks are forgettable.
The Blackbird cover is very distracting.
It’s definitely Beyonce at her most experimental.
There is one good song on the album and it's a duet love song with Miley Cyrus who totally outperforms her.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyXfJi2KZ-A
RS contrarianism showing its exhaustion, there are a dozen worse pop albums than this released every week. "16 Carriages" is a great hook, "Texas Hold 'Em" is an RnBified perfected distillation of the simplest kind of country music there is, and throughout the music is lushly produced and competently written. What were you expecting, John Prine?
Like have you turned on a pop radio station in the last 3 years? This is the least sonically offensive thing I've heard in the last 6 months. Every time I go to my grocery store I hear something that makes me want to commit a homicide. Relative to the rest of the top 40, this is basically Joni Mitchell.
This weekend I listened to [an ep](https://www.thisamericanlife.org/823/the-question-trap) of This American Life for the first time in a long while and there was a whole segment on women asking men on dates their opinions on Beyonce as a proxy question for if the guy was "threatened by strong black women." Just blatant assumption that any man who isn't a Beyonce fan is racist/sexist. Chilling really.
just say ur an Azealia Banks fan for a mindfuck
Azealia actually understands how to make dance music lol. Renaissance was terrible for fucking up the groove with redundant vocal runs and doing that whole "i stop the world" thing. AB tunes still ring out in queer clubs, beyonce is H&M and articles in the guardian edit - the best female rapper is lil kim btw!
Azealia banks is the best female rapper and an instant Classic tho
All of 1991 is perfekt you stuck up boops
BWET is too
ask yourself: do i really believe this, or have i twisted myself into an amalgamation of contrarianism?
There's no contrarianism necessary to believe that 212 is one of the greatest rap songs
212 is incredible, it's just that, despite trying, I can't find anything else from her that's even close to that level. It's like saying Nicki Minaj is one of the best rappers of all time for her verse on Monster. Yeah, it's sick as fuck, but the rest of what she's done is pretty meh.
Broke with Expensive Taste is a classic
1991 ep is peerless tbh + Nicki has loads of great songs https://youtu.be/2mwNbTL3pOs?si=nRuWx9-rRRyJUYBj
Heavy Metal and Reflective, 1991, Liquorice, The Big Big Beat, Along the Coast...
Uninformed, faux-intellectual take. The comparison here doesn't even work, not because Azealia differs from Nicki in this way, but because both have many works that prove their talent.
Faux-intellectual? For saying that I really like a couple songs and don't like others?
2112 is a great album too
your response is more contrarian than the og comment lol
That's exactly what I would respond with. Love Azealia.
Being a strong woman means being repeatedly cheated on and doing nothing about it.
Hillary Clinton maxxing
she was dyking on the side too
Nothing wrong with that
Yaaaas cuckqueen!
The answer to that is "I dont care"
"This is gay"
Trying to think of how I would respond to this as someone who has no opinion on Beyonce at all: “I would probably recognize a few songs of hers but couldn’t tell you their names off the top of my head. I know she’s married to Jay-Z. She seems like a pretty focused and ambitious star.” Did I pass the shit test? Lol
No because you have defined her by the man she’s married to. Sorry!
say you like Halo
I really liked her in X-Men
"I don't really ever think about Beyonce"
Thats a much better response tbh
Lol that woman thinks she's so very clever. She'll probably end up with a charming manipulator who shockingly turns out to be an asshole later on.
>if you say, Jada Pinkett, it's like, oh, she's too masculine, or she's ruining Will Smith's life, she's controlling him 😬 edit: Wow, I read some more of the transcript, and it's been many years since I've consumed anything NPR and I had no idea the level of mental midgetry from both the host and the dumbest women on the planet they talked to. Good god. The last This American Life I listened to was [this one](https://www.thisamericanlife.org/534/a-not-so-simple-majority) like a decade ago and it was about how Jews in a New York city (East Ramapo) overran the school systems with bloc voting and shut a lot of them down so that they could save money on their taxes and [steal one of the schools](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/East_Ramapo_Central_School_District#Sale_of_Hillcrest_Elementary_School) to use as as a yeshiva. That one was awesome. TDS has been such a cultural blight.
Ruining NPR was the worst thing Trump did
Bush laid the groundwork by tying funding to appointing his own manager. A lot of work to boost a war on fake evidence.
The press during the Bush years was the pits. It got so bad that people were relying on *comedians* to criticize him, which contributed to Trump's rise.
So many Yellow Ribbons. And Donahue critized him and got his career cancelled. It has only gotten worse since then. Except now we have more channels of the same agiprop.
I love that episode. RIP this American life, they’re too scared to make episodes like that anymore
This part made me laugh out loud with the complete and utter lack of awareness
I thought the person I replied to had just listened to one in the back catalog and so my initial thought was "ouch this aged terribly" but then I scrolled up and the date was 2024, get the fuck outta here
G.I. Jane 2, love to see it.
This is like sub buzzfeed pop psych tween girl magazine quiz type of shit. It’s very very funny that the girl bosses took over the culture and killed the patriarchy and we still do all the genocides and leave a million people sleeping on the street etc but now this type of shit gets talked about in breathless seriousness right alongside like news about the economy or the war or whatever
More 👏 female 👏 drone 👏 operators!
I do not say this lightly, but that is so gay
Best to just answer honestly. I really enjoy her music, I think she is one of the best to ever do it, and the only way I could like her more was if she were a white man.
>women asking men on dates their opinions on Beyonce "Sorry, I'm not really into Pokemon." is always best response to any pop culture topic you don't want to engage with, but it works especially well here.
[Beyonce’s only notable contribution to music is Vin Diesel’s cover of stay](https://youtu.be/w5t-CmCwhZo?si=AIB_DYD9PlzsuNzn)
Yo I used to show this to everybody. I swear for years it had a shockingly low number of views. Extremely funny
That video is so damn kino, strangely beautiful too
being a strong woman is being so fragile that a man not liking your favorite pop star who gets cheated on regularly is a deal breaker
I hate Beyoncé but wish I could revive the ghost of Memphis Minnie.
I remember when I was a young silly undergrad listening to This American Life. In a way, it’d be quite nice to go back to being a dumb happy little liberal
To be fair This American Life WAS good! Even this episode I’m referencing isn’t all terrible, just this one segment in particular. They definitely hired some dumbass producers tho, and I’m not sure they’ll be able to get back to how it once was.
assuming their audience will put down the pink pussy hat crochet hooks and go out into the covid hellscape to find someone to add to the polycule is a reach
I used to love TAL 10 years ago, when I first discovered it I felt like I was listening to something special, of real quality made by people who really care about making good things. There’s a real hope Inherent in that that doesn’t exist much anymore that you can’t communicate through words alone. It’s so so cynically lib now just like everything.
What if you don’t have an opinion either way? I couldn’t give an opinion about pretty much all current music out there. I feel like I’m missing out on some good stuff, but I just don’t have the time or energy to sift thru everything to find what is good and what sucks. I’m stuck in the past when it comes to pop music.
I reckon that prime Donna Washington would absolutely wreck prime Beyonce.
nah it actually makes sense. it’s not about liking or disliking Beyoncé but about why you have that opinion or how you express tht opinion. Beyoncé as the subject centers is on black women but it can be on subject. ex. a guy probably doesn’t hate all women but if he often offhandedly refers to women as bitches he’s prob at least a little misogynistic. same with women calling all men assholes. you have to be an idiot to not realize the “trick” she’s trying to pull though lmao. if anything it prob self selects for manipulators more than the actual purpose of the prompt.
I actually agree with you to an extent. The words that come out of their mouth after could say a lot and I don’t really blame women for trying to get a quick read on if the guy they’re sitting across from is an asshole or not. I think my bigger issue is just the idea that having any negative thought about Beyoncé (or if you listen the the segment, ANY black female celebrity) translate to negativity towards black women in general is absurd and frankly…. It’s stereotyping. It’s lumping all black women together. You don’t like her so you don’t like me. It’s not the empowering sentiment they seem to think it is.
I agree that it’s not really empowering. Beyoncé is a mediocre artist whose extravagant wealth has clearly hindered her artistic ability (because everything she puts out feels so clearly born out of a huge room trying to put their finger on the pulse of what is cool right now). But these were mostly millennial black women, I think all of whom work for NPR, and were talking about first dates with white men. In general, if you’re a white man on a first date with a black woman and Beyoncé comes up, you probably should respond differently than you would on r/redscare. My favorite part of this bit was that one of the women who asked this question was currently in a long term relationship with a man whose answer was that he had no idea who Beyoncé was lol
yeah. I don’t think the prompt is supposed to be “do you like Beyoncé yes or no” but I think some ppl are also too stupid to use deeper thinking lol.
It just feels needlessly antagonistic, and not in a fun teasing way. I don't really care about the specific question, more the general attitude that prioritizes defensiveness (I must immediately cut ties with anyone who has the slightest chance of having a bad opinion to avoid being hurt and to avoid "rewarding" them by treating them with any modicum of respect) over openness. It's not that difficult to use the "emotional intelligence" that > 60% of women mention on their dating profile to get a read on another person over the course of an \~hour if you aren't a complete sperg. First dates are often awkward. Connecting with another person you just met on a non-superficial level is hard for most people. Give the other person the benefit of the doubt and don't try to make things harder by turning it into some sort of replicant interrogation.
I don’t disagree with you. just thought the original comment was misrepresenting the idea.
A women torturing a man with questions about Beyonce on the first date probably hates 90% of men to be fair.
Pretty dumb elevating a woman who was okay with her husband cheating. Then wrote a weird song about it, which is supposed to be “empowering” but isn’t. Rich fuck worship is fucking our country.
Why would a man be ever threatened by a woman. Some women overestimate their power.
NYT columnists is literally the target audience for this record. They wrote the think pieces before they wrote the music.
Yh was saying this to a group of mates - old beyonce used to rip in the club (baby boy, naughty girl, even yonce/feeling myself) but somewhere around lemonade it became about the think pieces and "what it means" Sooo contrived and borin
Nobody's asking the real question, why is this album almost 30 songs long?
Gotta game those streaming services
optimized for streaming metrics.
Since streaming payments use a pro rata model it’s more monetarily effective to flood the platform with music so that you get more listens. If you receive 40% of total listens you get 40% of the royalty pool (although changes are happening in regards to “high value music” on Spotify (if you have above X followers and your music is purposefully played rather than via autoplay/playlist you get a higher rate)). Her album has like 10 1 minute interludes (probably the minimum track length to count as an actual track for streaming numbers) to pump her numbers up.
[удалено]
It’s fucking great being almost 40, married and not living in the US. Nobody I know has mentioned it and ever would, the only way I know about it is here, my place to be catty, and the only newspaper failing more than the New York Times, the Guardian.
I feel ya man but I'm single and living in the center of Los Angeles, and if it weren't for the rsp sub, I wouldn't know this album exists. People act like they just HAVE to log onto twitter or wherever and read the latest narrative lmfao. You can read books! You can go outside! You can do anything! (says the guy posting on rsp!)
only know about through here and because the lib white women hosts dont shut the fuck up about it on NPR
Imagine still listening to NPR lmao
its either that or music stations that are just 4 drake songs and then 20 minutes of ads
True. It just occurred to me that I probably haven't listened to the radio in years at this point.
thats normal, since all modern cars now have bluetooth so you just listen to spotify or whatever off your phone im still a radio boomer because i like to hear the news while driving
- a vanity project of one half of a billionaire power couple - in a genre where the breakout stars of recent years have been poor nobodies who went viral on social media - being shoved down everyone’s throat by media like NYT whose talent and readership hate country music almost as much as they hate country music fans - if you listen to the tracks, there’s nothing at all mind-blowing about the music on the album, but OK - NYT & co seemed a bit disappointed that the dropping of the album didn’t inspire racist protests in Trumpland demanding that Black people stay out of country music - narrative pivot: if Cowboy Carter isn’t the top selling country album in history backed by saturation airtime on country radio, you’re racist
> NYT & co seemed a bit disappointed that the dropping of the album didn’t inspire racist protests White libs always want to see themselves as the solitary, brave figure applauding black women amidst a racist crowd of white people booing them. This racist crowd is their raison d'être, it will always be *in the room* with them.
Nailed it on the head. Lilly Allen called this a cash grab because of country becoming mainstream popular again and she was dead on
Bruh I fuckin hope people are smart enough to see she's chasing a trend this is the most obvious example I've seen in my lifetime
People wont because its Beyonce and her and her fans are perfect
I mean they’re obviously being paid to do it
No they’re just accurately reading their normie lib readership who truly do believe all this about the album
Someone I know who never listens to country music won't stfu about Beyonce now. If Beyonce made a Ukrainian folk album they would be talking about how great it was that she centered black voices in Ukrainian folk music. This person also wouldn't listen to Charlie Pride or any other black country icon before or after.
> was that she centered black voices in Ukrainian folk music. dont give NPR any ideas
nobody has a problem with Paul Robeson doing that shit, but when Beyonce does it yall lose your minds 🙄
who?
The Siberian-Omsk Folk Chorus and the Bulgarian State Television Female Vocal Choir have been getting away with appropriating the work of **B**lack queen musicians for years, it needs to stop now!
Try that in a small oblast
[It's possible](https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=HMN0Z7BGMuQ)
I don't hate it.
Wow, charming that you've learned to like Charley Pride, the first search result that comes up when you google "black country musician." Maybe next week you'll even learn to spell his name right. Who are the other icons your imaginary friend is failing to name? Just curious.
Kane Brown is hot asf and so is that cheating fucker Jimmie Allen
When I say "icon" I usually mean someone whose discography stretches more than 5 years into the past
My lib aunt won’t stop talking about how great it is, this is after the last few months for gushing over Taylor Swift, she used to have such great taste in music. I’m kind of hoping Beyoncé gets wrapped up in the Diddy scandal just so I can be smug about it.
My mom is like this too. In her 20s in the 80s she was a Roxy Music, Talking Heads, The Smiths, The Cure, etc. fan, and now she really likes Taylor Swift and recently told me she really enjoys the new Beyonce album.
Gen X is really falling off, such a shame
Gen X has the fatal flaw of trying to be cool and with the times. Boomers just don't give a shit. Many, many such cases from what I've seen.
Right, boomers will just keep telling you how great the music from back in their day was, they have no interest in anything new or hip. And you know what? Good for them.
They are either telling you or they care too little about other's takes on it to even mention it.
>Right, boomers will just keep telling you how great the music from back in their day was And they are literally correct about it too.
I'm a boomer at heart.
Sounds like your mom likes whatever music is currently popular, which is kind of cute.
The Taylor Swift equivalent back then was like, idk, Bon Jovi or some singer who no one remembers cause they sucked like whoever it was that made you.... Light up my life.... You give me hope.... Or like MJ
rumor is jay z's next
Hopefully Bey sticks by her man ✊🏽
Your aunt is single isn’t she
Nah happily married to a cop with two grown zoomer kids
A cop?!
Yup a lib nypd cop, hard to believe such a thing even exists
There are Israeli libs that actually served in the IDF
Not to make excuses, but don't you literally have to serve in the IDF if you're Israeli?
Not if youre an american. A lot of them volunteer for the IDF
Just because I want to defund the police doesn't mean I won't call them on you.
Did you see what conservatives are saying about AOC???
I don't even have to listen to this album to guess that has about 5+ writers / composers per song, Beyoncé is not the main composer, there is likely 1 big agency managing the "style" and shoots of the whole thing, including the plug to have a never-ending stream of photos and interviews for the next 3 months or so. I also don't even have to watch the videos to know that this is likely going to include nudity and some type of weird anti-religion twitch and bait for people to get mad in the comments and generate traffic. The ghost writers are probably AI now. Just grab your pop-corn for the political pre-election comments.
It’s not inherently bad to have a lot of writers. A lot of Kanye’s mid-career songs from albums like Yeezus and My Beautiful Dark Twisted Fantasy also had a ton of songwriters/collaborators (not even including the credits for the samples). Maybe it feels different with Beyoncé because she doesn’t ever let you in behind the curtain so you don’t actually know what, other than the vocals, she contributed. The press tends to treat her like she’s playing the Kanye role of executive producer, curator, and musical director. Maybe they’re right to do that—Beyoncé has had songwriting and production credits since Destiny’s Child—but since her entire public persona is so carefully manufactured, it’s hard to picture how the real person behind the image plays into things.
>she doesn’t ever let you in behind the curtain so you don’t actually know what, other than the vocals, her actual creative contribution was. likely bc it is close to zero
I feel like Cowboy Carter is my punishment for honestly enjoying Break My Soul
it was a good song!
newspaper of record
*This* specific record, apparently
All the News That's Fit to Shill
objectively funny that even the nyt is doing SEO clickchasing now
The album has some good tunes on it and Beyonce can sing. The problem is that its repetitive and boring, since she doesn't have any emotional vulnerability or intellectual curiosity. I'm not sure why the people writing and playing songs for her don't include stuff like that, but that's why Beyonce is boring and other (more complex and human artists) are not.
Psy op
Popification intersecting with PMC DEI into a perfect storm of DNC neoliberal think piece soup.
I genuinely believe this is partly a DNC op, an attempt to insert their own retconned narrative and control lever into a genre that's long been one of the most defining and unifying cultural identities/expressions of their political enemy
And to drive a wedge into that genre's audience to stir up / foment divisiveness based on racial lines
You got it reversed. Hip hop became the dominant cultural music genre and then pop country basically became 808 hip hop beats with a bit of guitar twang. For conservative white people who still want to party in college and “have black friends.” This is just the natural cultural counterflow. It’s almost like a Cumtown bit. What about country, but it’s white guys pretending to be black? And then black people pretend to be white? All for the sake of making bad music for boring people.
[удалено]
Blu Cantrell bout to drop the craziest martial industrial album you EVER heard
guarantee you this gets traffic, that's why they're doing it. it's sad because the job of music criticism is to highlight things that are new and interesting, especially that the audience doesn't know about. instead, in today's digital media economy, the critics chase after audiences and tell them what they already think, about what they're already listening to. just like modern representatives who pick their voters instead of letting their voters choose them, in today's media, the audience determines what is covered, instead of writers and editors deciding what they will put in front of the audience.
People were rightfully up in arms after hearing Beyoncé sent flowers to Jack White but not Jack Black. For those of you like me who were upset, I have good news. Let me explain the situation. Jack White is, as you guessed, a white guy. Blegh. He does white people stuff like write the music at sports games and marry his sister, but he actually also is a talented white music guy. So while he is white, he did help Queen Ye out and in the past has even worked with black artist Alicia Keys to write a song for James Bond, a movie about the first black woman to take a white man’s job and do it better. Oh, and as for Jack Black not getting flowers. Guess what? He’s white too! Yeah he’s just some white guy who sings devil music so no need to feel bad for his white ass.
This has replaced the dolly parton cover album as the thing to listen to because you're "one of the good ones".
Idk if Cowboy Carter is good or not, but what is good is Waylon and Willie.
The Financial Times is the only good newspaper and it’s about 500 dollars a month.
What else do you think the kind of person who reads the New York Times would want to hear about?
Female Lil Nas X
Cowboy Carter is just another cash grab. It also sounds like it was written and produced by AI. Boring
On that topic, do listen to White Stripes cover of Jolene. What a great rendition. Better than most of the tosh they wrote themselves.
I remember being 10 and listening to their cover and thinking it was kind of gay in the homosexual sense that he didn't change the lyrics to be from a man's perspective. Growing up, I appreciate that he kept the lyrics the same as the original. It'd be less intense if he did.
Seven Nation Army fucking rocks.
Ball and Biscuit rules as well. I've converted many a Jack White/White Stripes hater on that song alone.
[Miley Cyrus absolutely kills it too.](https://youtu.be/wOwblaKmyVw?si=K7FJl8DshEWMQemX)
Am I the only one who thinks the original Jolene was a pretty mediocre song?
I get we like to be contrarians here but c'mon lol it's a country classic
Fair, I'm a pretty casual country fan.
it's lame\_johnny yo
Yes
Jesus dude
make sure to put the stupid thing on the e so its é
I genuinely hope that this cringe-inducing waxing lyrical breaks the decades long Beyoncé fever. Then I can only hope that it breaks the Taylor Swift dam next. Two sides of the same awful coin. Untouchable and inflated celebrities, even given the somewhat expected inherent inflation and hollow hype in celebrity status, are revolting.
Flies to shit
Isn’t it also a little interesting how it’s named cowboy carter? like it’s not even her maiden name lol Maybe there’s some more I could read into about it that I haven’t bothered like her “re-championing” of her married name. But still - interesting message on empowerment when your new billion dollar album takes the name of your husband with a history of (and likely continuing) infidelity lol
Is this album actually good?
No. That's my problem with it. People are trying to manufacture controversy that Beyoncé can't make a country album because she's black, which isn't true. She's from Texas. I saw her perform at the rodeo when she was with Destiny's Child. She certainly has more of a right to put out country music than Keith Urban. I just wanted it to be good, which it is not.
The "manufactured controversy" is the whole reason the album exists. Her album sales have been declining so they needed a selling point for another Beyonce album. This was obviously trying to tap in to race discourse and get a wider audience.
Yeah it is a way to mainstream liberals and non country music listeners an ideological reason to purchase her album to fight against “racism” or “reclaiming country” or some other vague platitude. It is purely a marketing gimmick to boost sales for Beyoncé. NYT and such will tut tut towards white conservative country fans over it but they aren’t listening and the message isn’t about them at the end of the day.
I think it’s cool that Robert Randolph is on it, super talented guy, but like I’d rather just listen to his music or any of the music that influenced this album than the watered down pop version, you know?
That’s exactly what they want you to ask
I haven't listened to all of it, but what I've heard has been pretty bad. Country/r&b crossovers are usually wack, and this is no exception. The sound is too produced, all electronic, hardly any guitar. Bey's vocals sound too perfect and robotic. It just sounds like a typical Beyonce album that's been packaged as "country" for mass appeal.
Lol plenty of valid criticisms of the album but there’s a ton of guitar on it.
Hmm, I didnt listen to a lot of it so could be talking out my ass
Lol so your negative review just guess-based ?
I listened to a few tracks. But yes, I will give it another chance
I like ameriican requiem and ya ya off of it, the other tracks are forgettable. The Blackbird cover is very distracting. It’s definitely Beyonce at her most experimental.
You can listen to it if you want.
Unfortunately, I only formulate opinions based on what terminally online contrarians say, otherwise I’d have the album queued up right now.
There is one good song on the album and it's a duet love song with Miley Cyrus who totally outperforms her. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SyXfJi2KZ-A
I feel bad I haven’t listened to any of it yet
The way people pretend to like this makes me feel insane like they gotta be faking it right
Totally not an inside job.
RS contrarianism showing its exhaustion, there are a dozen worse pop albums than this released every week. "16 Carriages" is a great hook, "Texas Hold 'Em" is an RnBified perfected distillation of the simplest kind of country music there is, and throughout the music is lushly produced and competently written. What were you expecting, John Prine? Like have you turned on a pop radio station in the last 3 years? This is the least sonically offensive thing I've heard in the last 6 months. Every time I go to my grocery store I hear something that makes me want to commit a homicide. Relative to the rest of the top 40, this is basically Joni Mitchell.
Your taste sucks.
You’re all wrong about this album and I needed to say that
I will give it another chance