This is not a COWBOY CARTER review

Relatedly, this ain't Texas.

I don’t have anything to say about COWBOY CARTER itself that Tressie McMillan Cottom didn’t say perfectly, so this truly isn’t an album review. This was never going to be the album for me that RENAISSANCE was, simply because disco/house is my genre in a way that country never will be. But I was happy for y’all. Most of y’all. The fervent overanalyzing of the album cover and track list was definitely doing a lot—like, I really thought we left racial analogies about Lipizzaner stallions in the ‘90s with Gene Hackman and Denzel. But I was content to be the cheese that stood alone on this one.

(I somehow feel the need to list my Beyoncé bonafides for y’all, but honestly, I’ll just let my 2020 Halloween costume and the hundreds I happily paid for RENAISSANCE floor seats in New Orleans speak for themselves.)

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Until some of y’all started to make it weird. The fervor of this album started to take on a pointedly political tenor. And that makes sense, for a bunch of reasons. First, Beyoncé’s Instagram caption makes explicit reference to the racist reaction to her 2016 CMA appearance with the Chicks. Well, explicit for her, since it was as characteristically allusive as Beyoncé herself is elusive. Second, the mere fact of being a Black woman politicizes her taking on this genre, just as it politicizes her doing most things. As she did in 2016, Bey is getting a lot of racist pushback for daring to call herself singing country, for covering white musicians’ songs, and for being in the game at all. That wouldn’t happen in the same way if she were anybody else.

But just because she has been politicized does not mean that she’s being political.

And it definitely doesn’t mean she should get credit for being political, when she has strenuously avoided being political about most things. Still, the Hive is all too happy to fill in the blanks that Beyoncé leaves out there.

In this economy, it’s not enough to appreciate art or entertainment on its own merits. Some very loud members of the audience seem to want a moral justification for why they enjoy or dislike something. COWBOY CARTER can’t just be a banger—it also has to be a victory for Black women, Black Southerners, Black Girl Magic but also Black Girl Anger, Tracey Chapman probably, and Houston definitely. That kind of moral defensiveness combined with stan energy makes conversations about culture very reductive very quickly. Being a stan effectively strangles your ability and even your willingness to actively engage with something. It sands down all the texture and complication of whoever you’re stanning, so that they become a monument to your devotion to them, rather than a human person.

With all due respect, this type of nonsense is not due any respect.

But either Beyoncé is just a musician, and therefore can’t be expected to be political; or she is a politicized public figure who we can praise and criticize for her actions and stances. Either she has political power, or she doesn’t. If you’re going to talk about this album as an instance of “coalition-building,” then you also have to engage with Beyoncé’s deep and abiding love affair with the capitalism that crushes real coalitions. If you’re going to praise Taylor Swift’s feminism, you must also reckon with her environmental destruction. Cloaking your fave in social justice kudos in order to deflect any criticism—about their art and about them as a person—simply doesn’t work.

A couple of dangerous things are going on at once. Flattening activism into performance and image crafting—an aesthetic value—in order to justify your fandom is dangerous. Using that flattened version of activism to deflect any criticism of your fave is dangerous. And refusing to acknowledge where your fave falls short on actual activism is dangerous. This energy has a chilling effect on cultural discourse, which is bad enough. But it also stifles political discourse.

Despite what the loudest cynics in the room argue, politics is not just aesthetics. It’s not just having the right demographic or rhetorical qualities in the right positions. It’s not just being able to say “My Vice President wraps her hair at night.” Politics is about power, and how that power is used, weaponized, or manipulated. Politics is about the state craft that goes into calling for a six-week ceasefire in Gaza, not the image craft of America’s first woman of color Veep calling for said ceasefire on the Edmund Pettus Bridge. It’s about how we as a country sustain an entire billionaire class and point to it as aspirational, rather than systemic moral bankruptcy.

Y’all silly-billyin.

All this type of behavior does is dilute our ability to actually hold the powerful accountable to us and the values that their fans insist they hold. And “fans” isn’t even a descriptor we should be using when it comes to politics, but it’s an unfortunately apt one. We’re ceding our role in anything resembling democracy when we treat politicians like our favourite celebrities, just as we’re muddying the meaning of politics when we ascribe it to anything our aggressively apolitical celeb faves do that we like.

More often than not, celebrity political postures boil down, not to “we should be able to move as freely as we like,” but to “I should be able to move as freely as I want.” So they get all the benefits of a collective movement, with none of the accountability. It’s a pretty sweet gig, actually, because too many of us are too quick to accept and brandish the optics of a political “act” rather than engaging with its merits. And, as my friend Q said during one of our recent conversations/ overlapping rants, “nobody can sell liberation like Beyoncé.”