NEW YORK – Beyonce has gone country, sure. But that is only the half of it.

For months, the American superstar, who made her name in R&B and pop, has been telegraphing her version of country music and style.

There was the “disco” cowboy hat at her Renaissance World Tour in 2023, and her “western” look at the Grammys in February, complete with a white Stetson and black studded jacket.

Then, on the night of the Super Bowl, the 42-year-old released two new songs and sent one of them, Texas Hold ’Em – with plucked banjos and lines about Texas and hoedowns – to country radio stations, sparking an industry debate about the defensive moat that has long surrounded Nashville’s musical institutions.

On March 29, Beyonce finally released her new album Cowboy Carter, which became Spotify’s most-streamed album in a single day in 2024, and marked the most first-day streams for a country album by a female artiste in the history of Amazon Music.

And the country bona fides were certainly there. Singer-songwriter Dolly Parton provides a cameo introduction to Beyonce’s version of Jolene, Parton’s 1972 classic about a woman confronting a romantic rival. Singer and guitarist Willie Nelson pops in twice as a grizzled DJ.

Yet Cowboy Carter is far broader than simply a country album. Beyonce does a version of The Beatles’ Blackbird and, on the track Ya Ya, draws from Nancy Sinatra and The Beach Boys’ Good Vibrations. Desert Eagle is glistening funk, and the upbeat Bodyguard would not be out of place on a modern rock radio station.

The album’s range suggests a broad essay on contemporary pop music, and on the nature of genre itself.

That theory is made clear on the partly spoken track Spaghettii, featuring the pioneering but long-absent black country singer Linda Martell, who in 1970 released an album called Color Me Country.

“Genres are a funny little concept, aren’t they? Yes, they are,” Martell, 82, says. “In theory, they have a simple definition that’s easy to understand. But in practice, well, some may feel confined.”

Beyonce herself indicated this when she recently posted a note on Instagram saying: “This ain’t a country album. This is a Beyonce album.”

On April 1, she received the Innovator Award at the 2024 iHeartRadio Music Awards, taking the stage to accept her trophy from fellow music icon Stevie Wonder.

The theme of simultaneously celebrating and transforming country music extends to the album’s cover art, featuring Beyonce seated sideways on a white horse, dressed in red-white-and-blue rodeo gear and hoisting an American flag.

Guests on the album include Miley Cyrus on the song II Most Wanted, and Post Malone on Levii’s Jeans. The extra I’s underscore that Cowboy Carter is officially “Act II” of what Beyonce has said will be a three-album cycle, which began with Renaissance in 2022.

That motif repeats throughout the album’s 27-song track list. The Beatles cover – where she is joined by a quartet of young black female country singers – Tanner Adell, Brittney Spencer, Reyna Roberts and Tiera Kennedy – is rendered as Blackbiird.

Midway through the track Daughter, Beyonce even flexes some opera skills, singing a bit of Caro Mio Ben, a popular 18th-century Italian aria.

In a statement, she described the sonic texture of the album, differentiating it from the synthesised process behind most contemporary pop albums, including her own.

“With artificial intelligence and digital filters and programming, I wanted to go back to real instruments, and I used very old ones,” she said.

“I didn’t want some layers of instruments like strings, especially guitars, and organs perfectly in tune. I kept some songs raw and leaned into folk.”

As with Renaissance, the audio for Cowboy Carter was leaked online shortly before its planned release, with some fans urging others not to listen early.

Back when Beyonce released her self-titled “visual album” without warning in 2013, establishing the “surprise drop” as an industry trope, it was partly meant to protect the album from leaks, which had become a threat to first-week sales numbers.

For these last two albums, Beyonce has embraced a more conventional marketing plan, announcing her album weeks ahead of time and preparing deluxe physical editions.

In the end, the leaks meant little to Renaissance, which went straight to No. 1. And, regardless of the new album’s fate at country radio – where Texas Hold ’Em has so far made it only as high as No. 33 – the commercial potential for Cowboy Carter seems vast, given Beyonce’s recent success.

In 2023, she won her 32nd Grammy Award, more than any artiste in history. Her Renaissance tour sold US$580 million (S$782 million) in tickets, second only to pop star Taylor Swift.

A related concert film, Renaissance: A Film By Beyonce (2023), offered a rare look behind the scenes of her creative process and was a hit in cinemas.

As the release of Cowboy Carter neared, Beyonce wrote on Instagram that the album was more than five years in the making, and that “it was born out of an experience that I had years ago where I did not feel welcomed, and it was very clear that I wasn’t”.

Fans zeroed in on her appearance at the Country Music Association Awards in 2016, where she performed her song Daddy Lessons with The Chicks and drew backlash online.

“The criticisms I faced when I first entered this genre forced me to propel past the limitations that were put on me,” Beyonce said.

The new album, she added, “is a result of challenging myself, and taking my time to bend and blend genres together to create this body of work”. NYTIMES