What’s in a genre anyway?

I’ve been listening to the two new country songs from Beyoncê. You might have heard she’s gone country but maybe you don’t believe it, or maybe you already know all about it.

My reaction is that her new songs are not country so much as impressively genre-destroying. They’re also hugely listenable.

Beyoncé announced the release of two new songs in a hilarious Super Bowl ad. Here she’s trying to break the Verizon network by announcing she’s running for “Beyoncé of the United States.”

In case you haven’t followed the latest Beyoncé twists and turns, in a very funny Super Bowl ad for Verizon, she kept trying and failing to break the phone company’s network—until the last line when she commands, “…drop the new music.”

And at that instant she did just that. That’s how marketing works these days.

Beyoncé announces a country album

The new songs caught an Oklahoma country radio station off guard when listeners sent in requests. This was a country station, they explained, we don’t play Beyoncé. Hoo boy, you can guess what happened next. Within hours they were playing the songs.

TEXAS HOLD ‘EM is a bouncy bit of fun that opens with a banjo played by one of my faves, Rhiannon Giddens, then moves into some line-dance whooping, and a call to get onto the floor. But this is Beyoncê, so she dives deeper, and acknowledges the partying is partly a desperate and temporary escape from reality.

16 CARRIAGES is less subtle—an abbreviated heartfelt biography about her journey from childhood in Houston. It’s gorgeous and affecting singing and storytelling.

The two songs are promoted as being part of her country album coming out next month. But there’s something I find much more significant than either the appealing tunes or the novelty of Beyoncé doing country music. What i hear is a full-frontal, and welcome, assault on categorizing music.

Genre madness

First there’s her voice—so distinctive and not a sound that fits the country mold. There are country music themes of tough times and of dancing in a honkey-tonk, but the background singers and the steel slide guitar sound more like what’s more commonly labeled Americana or Roots.

If that terminology seems nerdy and silly, it is. When we put people in boxes we cut ourselves off from experiencing a fuller and more fulfilling world. Our drive to categorize has gotten ridiculous, and I’m about to prove it by opening up my playlist and listing some of the genres that come attached to the songs I’ve downloaded:

• Ambient
• Blues
• Blues-Rock
• Blues/R&B
• Classical
• Classical Crossover
• Contemporary Celtic
• Country
• Contemporary Country
• Contemporary Jazz
• Country & Folk
• Downtempo
• Drinking Songs
• Folk
• Folk-Rock
• Neo-Soul
• Jazz
• Pop Latino
• Prog-Rock/Art Rock
• R&B
• R&B/Soul
• Soul
• Traditional Country

Or my favorite:

• Unclassifiable

This year’s Grammy Awards broadcast showed what happens when we just listen to a song rather than try to name it. My social media feeds exploded that night with raves over Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs’ collaboration on her song Fast Car. Chapman’s 1988 song is tagged as Folk (uh, really?); Combs’ 2023 cover as Country. So what genre was their duet? Who cares? It was beautiful.

Tracy Chapman and Luke Combs in their stunning performance at The Grammys of her 1988 song Fast Car.

Beyoncé fans know this isn’t her first rodeo when it comes to shaking things up. It is, however, an especially in-your-face step, and one specifically aimed at revealing the African-American roots of styles like bluegrass and country.

Exhibit A in the case for the intent behind Beyoncé’s assault is her recruiting of Rhiannon Giddens.

Giddens, who played viola as well as fiddle on TEXAS HOLD ‘EM, has for years been showing and telling how musical diversity makes us all richer.

Blowin’ up the categories

In the keynote address to the 2017 International Bluegrass Music Association Gideon’s, who is biracial, described growing up in North Carolina watching Roy Clark play banjo on TV’s Hee-Haw then studying opera at Oberlin. She played with the Carolina Chocolate Drops, whose albums have been categorized in one case as Pop, another as Blues, another as Singer Songwriter. Her solo albums have been sorted into the Americana genre.

In that 2017 speech she said cultural and musical stereotypes “left out people like me—who come from both sides of the track—except, in so many areas of the South, there is no track. There’s just people living and influencing each other in spite of what they are told to feel and do.”

I saw Rhiannon Giddens perform at the Grand Theatre in Frankfort, Kentucky, in 2018.

Musicians do collaborate ad cross lines to create new forms—bluegrass, jazz, hip-hop. Still, she blames musical genres for dividing and excluding people.

In 1920 recording entrepreneurs discovered “race music” would sell, so they recorded African-Americans playing blues. Two years later they discovered the same with hillbilly music, so added white recording sessions on different days. The two would never meet–at least not in the recording studio. Until producer Sam Phillips found a guy who could bring the two together. It took Elvis to sell Black music to a wider audience.

Admittedly, we do need some way of organizing our lives. We need words to describe what we like, what we don’t like, what we love, and love less. But naming something can also turn to calcification that can at least limit us, and at worst, divide us.

Beyoncé doesn’t see that kind of nuance as her problem. She’s just blowin’ up stuff up that needs blown’ up. And you can dance to it.