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LINDSAY ZOLADZ Welcome to the Smoke Hour, everyone. Wesley, I’m with you on the divergent listening experiences of “Renaissance” and “Cowboy Carter.” Roughly one billion performs later, “Renaissance” doesn’t have a “skip” second for me. “Cowboy Carter” is, as Pareles put it in his assessment, “a bumpier experience.” A minimum of till it isn’t: From “Ya Ya” on, it shifts gears into the fluid, relentless stream she achieved on “Renaissance” — or to make use of a Beatles reference, that the Fab 4 obtain on Aspect 2 of “Abbey Street.” There’s so much right here. I’m unsure all of it really works, however a few of it’s elegant, and regardless it appears poised to increase Beyoncé’s inconceivable second imperial section till the promised Act III. Giddy up and bow down.
SISARIO A weak spot within the cinema-auteur principle is that there’s actually just one character in Beyoncé’s story, and that’s her. It’s extra like an ultra-dramatic monologue.
ZOLADZ I wish to zoom in on “Jolene,” which to me sums up a lot about this album’s unruly ambition, its inevitable limitations and its irreverent, endlessly remixed strategy to American musical historical past. Beyoncé’s “Jolene” isn’t a canopy a lot as an impassioned piece of fan fiction, rewriting Dolly Parton’s ballad of anguished jealousy right into a cocksure taunt: “Jolene, I’m warning you, don’t come for my man.”
This inversion of energy makes the tune much less weak and emotionally efficient than Parton’s unique, however it additionally gestures towards a dynamic that Parton glosses over in her introduction to Beyoncé’s take, when she compares her auburn-haired “Jolene” to the infamous Becky with the nice hair Beyoncé known as out on “Lemonade”: “Only a hair of a unique coloration,” Parton says, “however it hurts simply the identical.” Does it, although? Beyoncé’s lyric has a racial implication that Parton’s doesn’t.
A much more fascinating and profitable tune is “Daughter.” Right here is the pathos that’s lacking from her “Jolene” — so deeply felt that Beyoncé has to borrow from opera to reveal the scope of her sorrow and yearning for vengeance. “Daughter” is a bloody, modern-day homicide ballad within the revisionist spirit of SZA’s “Kill Invoice,” however it’s additionally the flip aspect of “Daddy Classes,” the countrified tune off “Lemonade” that in some sense kicked off the “Cowboy Carter” experiment. “Daddy Classes” was each affectionate towards and significant of that flawed fictionalized Daddy, however right here Beyoncé laments their similarities: “If you happen to cross me, I’m similar to my father, I’m colder than Titanic water.”
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