Already and this is the Daily ARS. This is the Daily OS. Oh now it makes sense.
Good morning, and welcome to the Daily OS. It's Friday, the twenty ninth of March. I'm Emma Gillespie. I'm the editor of the Daily OS.
I'm Lucy Tassel, I'm the fact checker.
That's right, a different cast today, where the cat's away the mice will play. Happy good Friday, A good Friday indeed, because we're here to talk about Beyonce's new album dropping today, the twenty ninth of March, and Lucy, you're joining me to talk all things Beyonce's foray into country music, why some country fans aren't as excited as we are about the new album and what it all means and where
it's all come from. Yance has made history again or for her new song Texas Hold'em the song his debut in the number one spot.
And I just don't country music, beyoncew afied, I want country music to go backwards, not forward.
That's right. M It's not just a good Friday, it's the best Friday. But first, what's making headlines?
The Australian government has announced an inquiry into the nation's live music industry will go ahead. It comes after Splendor in the Grass confirmed the festival will not be going ahead this year, just a week after tickets went on sale. It follows a series of music festival cancelations due to high costs and low ticket sales. Chair of the Communications and Arts Committee, Brian Mitchell said the industry is facing
considerable operational challenges, particularly after COVID. The inquiry we'll look into what's preventing the industry from growing and the potential for more government funding to ensure future festivals can go ahead.
Many young Australians and low income households are now spending around a quarter of their income on groceries, according to a survey of over thirteen thousand people conducted by the Australian Competition and Consumer Commission, the a Triple C. It also found people are opting for frozen food over fresh produce. The survey is part of the A Triple C's inquiry into supermarkets and will continue to gather data until the second of April.
Jetstar has announced it'll begin flights from Singapore directly to Broom in Western Australia in an effort to encourage regional tourism. The airline is expected to run two return flights per week in a service supported by the WA government's Aviation Fund. Flights will run from the twenty fifth of June to late October in a seasonal service and will pick up
again in April twenty twenty five. WA Tourism Minister Rita Safiotti said the new route offers an entirely new gateway for tourists into the state.
And in some good news, a sixty four year old man has become the first person to swim from Newcastle to Sydney unassisted. Dean Summers swam for over thirty one hours, enduring stings from swarms of blue bottled jellyfish. Newcastle is about one hundred and seventy k's north of Sydney, or two and a half hour drive. He said. The swim aims to showcase our own coastal largely pristine waters.
Now any opportunity to talk about pop culture, but stay with us. We promise there is a smart take on this one today, very smart. Last month, Beyonce dropped to pretty country singles during the Super Bowl or shortly after the Super Bowl. We got Texas hold him.
Saints Texas hold them as are cut down, Down Down Now.
And sixteen carriages.
Sixteen characters driving away dreams.
Or two great songs. We loved them. But fast forward a couple of weeks and Beyonce ended up saying she hopes that quote years from now, the mention of an artist's race as it relates to releasing genres of music will be irrelevant. So pretty interesting comment to make as you're beginning to make country music. Where could this have come from? So lucy.
We're going to get into how we got to a place where Beyonce was making a statement of that nature, But first I wanted to touch on this relationship between politics and country music. It's not the first time we've seen an artist kind of caught up in a political debate about the genre, but interestingly, that's tended to happen in the opposite direction when an artist who is known as a country musician leaves the genre and transitions into making different kinds of music exactly.
Well, we've seen Miss Taylor Swift move towards pop around the same time as she took her first political stances in the mid twenty tens, and actually just last year, Maren Morris, who's a huge country star, recently said she was actually moving away from country music. She wanted to leave the quote toxic parts of the industry behind her, and she's someone who is quite political.
But back to Beyonce Lucy, who, as you mentioned, has made this shift towards country music, a move that's managed to really stir up controversy about the genre and what it means in its identity. The title of this new album, Cowboy Carter reference of course, to Beyonce's marriage name yea about what you would call it, her marital surname, her married name Sean Carter, akaj Z, Queen Bee, Beyonce Knowles,
whoever she is to you, the undisputed FACTSA. She reigns from Houston, Texas, a state in America's South where country music has thrived for decades. So it shouldn't really be that surprising that this is an artist who wanted to make music that sounded like the music she grew up with.
Right and yet people were surprised.
Only eight of the one hundred and fifty stations that report to Billboard's Country Airplay chart reported having play Texas hold them in its first day, and none said they had put her other single sixteen carriages on the air.
The lefties in the entertainment industry just won't leave any area alone, right, They just have to seize control over every aspect, don't they.
I think a few of us probably saw at least one of those grubs on our Instagram feeds some viral conservative news moments that maybe took us by surprise, but it's opened up a bigger conversation about this political identity that is associated with country music. Then there was this backlash to that backlash, people talking about how black people are really integral to the history of the Jean of country music. What do they mean? Can you explain a bit of the history to us?
Well, you wouldn't necessarily know that this is true were you to look at a country chart. You know, if we list country music stars all day, we're going to be here for hours before we name a non white person.
Right.
There's one really amazing black country artist that I can think of off the top of my head. Her name's Mickey Geiton, and she's had to really fight for legitimacy. When you think of country music, what kind of instruments do you think of?
I'm thinking banjos, fiddles, maybe even a violin, strings, stomping barns.
Well, the banjo was actually developed by enslaved people in America who'd been brought over, generally from West Africa during the hundreds of years of the Atlantic slave trade. So per the Smithsonian Museum, from the earliest references in the seventeenth century and throughout the eighteen thirties, the banjo was exclusively known as an African American tradition with a African heritage.
I thought it was Irish. I think, you know, maybe that's because of like Mumford and Sons, who are British.
Wow, well, there's still a European influence, right, because it's kind of melding traditional West African instruments with European instruments like guitars that had been developed specifically in Europe. The banjo is kind of a physical representation of the country genre, right, Like it's this melting pot. It comes out of all these different strands and influences over these hundreds of years. Really reflects the nature of American history in the South.
You've got enslaved people forced to come to America, you have people coming from Europe seeking a better life. You have people already established from that first wave of colonization. All of these people have their own musical traditions and their own musical instruments, and their own stories that kind of come together in this mixed up genre of country.
How do we get from the idea of country music being so richly diverse to being a place where today we know it's a genre dominated by white artists, a place where a global superstar like Beyonce exploring their country heritage becomes this huge political issue.
I want to shout out an article I read. It's by a musician and self described armchair historian called Rhiannon Giddons, who is the one who actually plays the banjo on Texas Hold'em Wow So good trivia, great trivia, great person. So she draws this connection in this article between the beginning of music being recorded and the selling of those recordings and the disenfranchisement of non white people from country.
So in the nineteen twenties, that's when recorded music and the sale of recorded music becomes like a viable economic proposition. That is a time when there are many many places that black people in America are barred from legally or otherwise just not welcome. So music became incredibly segregated, and country music ends up being a genre that is more dominated by white artists just at an inflection point in music recording history.
I'm thinking about the history and the story of someone like Elvis in this who very famously he was a very palatable white artist of the day.
Yeah. I mean the story of rock and roll is like a hyper condensed version of the story of country where it's like very explicitly black and white. Literally of like this was an art form by one group of people and then another group of people just skimmed off the top and made money off that basically, So.
Jumping forward to the twenty first century, I want to talk about how that history of segregation has kind of impacted the country world that we see today. I have one specific event in mind, and it's back when Beyonce actually first dipped her toe into country music. Song Daddy Lessons of the absolutely iconic album Lemonade.
Great album, so Daddy Lessons really really country song. Lemonade is probably her most political album. I think she's responding to the first wave of Black Lives Matter protests. It's coming out in twenty sixteen, in the lead up to Trump's election. Music videos to accompany that album really had some very strong political statements and the response to it, which,
in my opinion, it's an incredibly country song. But a source told the Associated Press at the time that the Grammys, so the music industry awards, didn't consider that song country enough to be nominated in country categories.
She actually performed that song Daddy Lessons at the Country Music Awards with the Chicks then the Dixie Chicks, very iconic country music group. What happened at that performance.
That's a lightning rod moment, you know, for those who don't know, the Chicks basically had to disappear off the face of the earth for a couple of years in the early two thousands. I mean, it's hard to overstate how big of a deal this was. So lead singer Natalie Mains on stage said the group were unhappy with America's upcoming war in Iraq. This is two thousand and three, and she also said that she was not proud that then President George W. Bush was from Texas like she is, like Beyonce is.
So she basically came out and said, I'm not proud that our president is from the place I call home. I'm not proud of what our country is doing, and I disagree with this conflict in Iraq. It was a really really big deal. Like if you've ever heard the bridge to this song and wondered why so angry or upset, this is what that was talking about. So the Chicks got death threats, people burning their CDs, country radio stations
refused to play their songs. This is a version of kind of when Taylor Swift began to upset country music by talking about politics or kind of becoming more of a publicly facing ally. This reaction to the Chicks was in tense. Basically, a lot of people never forgave them. So for Beyonce to say, not only am I coming to your awards show, I'm going to perform with your most controversial act, that was pretty major.
So interestingly, last week, in a post promoting Cowboy Carter, Beyonce said, quote, this album has been over five years in the making. It was born out of an experience I had years ago where I did not feel welcomed and it was very clear that I wasn't. But because of that experience, I did a deeper dive into the history of country music and studied our rich musical archive.
So people have read this. Certainly, I read this as referring to that performance at the CMAS, and I think it's interesting that at the end of that post she says, this ain't a country album, this is a Beyonce album, and that almost feels like she's trying to get ahead of the idea that she's trying to court country music's approval. She's just like, this is what I'm doing, and Beyonce, I can do what I want, and I want to dive into the country music archive.
Which I think art is subjective and art is fluid, and whether you're a musician or any other kind of artist, I think to say that your music transcends one genre makes perfect sense. So we've got this context for the controversy, the inspiration maybe for Cowboy Carter, Beyonce as the country artist and all that that means. But in terms of the success of these new releases, it's not as though
any of this controversy has slowed her down. Beyonce became the first black woman to have a number one song on the country charts with Texas Hold Them. So, like I said, it hasn't slowed her down, Lucy, does that tell us anything about the genre. Do you think that maybe country music has welcomed her more than these headlines suggest.
I wish I could say that, but I just don't think so. And the reason why is about how the charts work. So for about ten years give or take, the Billboard Charts in the US, so that's the organization that manages the music charts has included streaming and YouTube plays. So that to me says more about the fact that the hive, the Beyonce fans are you know, pressing plays. Certainly Texas hold them has been on very high rotation
in the TDA office. Oh yeah, all of those Spotify streams are adding up to boost her up the charts. I don't necessarily think that it means that country music radio stations are like, oh my god, amazing, so excited for this established artist to jump into our precious genre. I think probably it has more to do. I mean, it can't solely be streams, because streams and YouTube plays only make up us certain percentage of the chart calculations. But I just don't know that that necessarily says country
music has welcomed Beyonce with open arms. And you know, the charts historically have not been very kind to black female country artists, and in fact, interestingly, that's something that Beyonce seems to be referencing on this album. So one of the tracks on this album is called the Linda Martel Show. Do you know who Linda Martel is? I didn't. I had to look her up.
Okay, I'm relieved that you said that.
Who is she? Well? I discovered she was the first black country pop star. So Linda Martel broke out in the late sixties and she had a moderately successful album called Color Me Country, but it never charted as high as Beyonce, you know, not even number ten, not even number twenty. And her career was really cut short by racism. So in twenty twenty, she told magazine Rolling Stone that when she played one of her first shows, she started
singing and quote, they'd shout out names. You felt pretty awful. After her first album came out, her label basically stopped promoting her in favor of their white artists. If you feel like listening to any of her songs, I would say San Francisco is a lonely town or the wedding Cake were the ones that I liked.
The track listers you mentioned Beyonce dropped in advance of Cowboy Carter. There are a lot of tracks on this album, whether or not all of those will be full tracks or interludes. I'm sure there is another track that caught your eye. I think I can guess.
Well, yes, I mean there was a track called Joline, and obviously I freaked out, like so Dolly Till We Die Dolly Parton actually a couple of weeks ago said that Beyonce had recorded a cover of her song Joline. So frankly, if one of country music's greatest ever songwriters and performers gave Beyonce the go ahead to cover her most iconic song, who cares what anyone else thinks? Okay, she has a jolly button steal of approval. That's all that matters to me.
Well, Lucy, I'm sure the listeners are unclear about how you feel about Beyonce. Lucy, thank you so much for breaking all of that down for us today a fascinating introduction to the history of country music. If you learn something from today's episode, please feel free to send it on to someone who you think might enjoy it or leave us a review and make sure you are following The Daily os so there's an episode waiting for you
every weekday mornings. We'll be back on Monday, but until then, have a fabulous Easter.
My name is Lily Maddon and I'm a proud Adunda bunge Lung Chalcotin woman from Gadigl Country. The Daily oz acknowledges that this podcast is recorded on the lands of the Gadighl people and pays respect to all Aboriginal and Torrestrate island and nations. We pay our respects to the first peoples of these countries, both past and present,