Influence of the ‘culture shaper’ is a potential goldmine for the jeans brand, but effect won’t last forever, say observers

“Denim on denim on denim on denim,” sings Beyoncé on Levii’s Jeans, one of the standout tracks of her new album, Cowboy Carter. And it appears fans are taking the statement to heart.

In the week after the album’s release, the clothing company Levi Strauss & Co noted a 20% rise in footfall at stores across the US and a 20% increase in its share price . In the UK, John Lewis report that searches for “women’s Levi’s jeans” were up 263% since the record was announced.

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The Texan superstar’s eighth album is a thrilling 27-track journey through and beyond America’s roots music, and it feels like a genuine feast

Ever since Beyoncé – to quote the lady herself – “changed the game with that digital drop” via her self-titled fifth album , released without warning in 2013, she’s become the fixed point around which popular culture oscillates. Bandwidth-swallowing think pieces, detailed decoding of every lyric, plus an increasingly vexed right-wing America have kept her name on everyone’s lips. She wasn’t exactly a cult concern before, but the last decade has seen her move beyond mere superstar status, aided by 2016’s internet sleuth-facilitating infidelity opus Lemonade and 2022’s liberated, post-lockdown dance party, Renaissance .

That last album was billed teasingly as Act I, and now arrives the second part of a mooted trilogy. While Renaissance , with its celebration of the oft-ignored influence of Black queer dance pioneers, facilitated a healthy amount of debate, you could cobble together a hefty book on the discourse that’s already swirling around Cowboy Carter . Inspired by a less than welcome reaction to the Texan’s performance of her country single Daddy Lessons at the 2016 Country Music Awards – where she was dismissed as a “pop artist”, seemingly code for “Black woman” – it’s an album that takes country music by its plaid shirt collar, holds up its (mainly) male, pale and stale status to the light and sets it on fire.

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In this week’s newsletter: Ms Knowles-Carter and Oppenheimer lead the charge of lengthy runtimes in pop culture, but there’s something to be said for brevity

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Have you listened to Cowboy Carter yet? No, but I mean all of it? All 27 tracks? All 78 minutes and 21 seconds? Don’t be ashamed if you haven’t. Beyoncé’s sprawling paean to country music is a formidable piece of work, created by a boatload’s worth of talent (seriously, check out how long those album credits are ), full of luscious layered textures and inventive production, and dabbling in everything from acoustic, finger-picked folk to zydeco . It’s probably not one to gobble up in a single sitting.

Beyoncé’s hardly an outlier in this regard – Drake’s albums regularly nudge past the 80-minute mark, and Morgan Wallen’s 2023 chart topper One Thing at a Time was a preposterous 111 minutes long. And excess is hardly specific to music. So much of popular culture tends towards the lengthy these days, from films (including the current Oscar best picture winner ) that require at least one mid-screening loo break to get through, to TV episodes that regularly nudge past the hour mark (or two hours in the case of Stranger Things), to podcast episodes that take multiple commutes to get through.

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A new take, like Beyoncé’s cover of Dolly Parton’s Jolene, only expands the work. So why do people love complaining?

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As my loved ones, acquaintances, colleagues and strangers who’ve stood in line with me all know, I am not opposed to complaining. I am a complaining-friendly person, especially about small inconsequential things. If you complain, I’ll find something to contribute. I’ve used this very column mainly to whinge about things. But in a shocking twist, today I am here to complain about others complaining. Every time a show/movie/song people love is rebooted or covered, I must watch the complaints roll in. It always makes some people extremely upset, for reasons I usually can’t really understand, like watching a dog barking at a pile of clothes.

There are absolutely valid reasons not to like reboot culture. An avalanche of remakes has necessarily meant less original content is being made and, to be clear, I think that’s bad. I want originality, fresh perspectives, and I want those ideas encouraged and financed. But the complaints aren’t about media control issues, they are about people’s nostalgia and love for a piece of work making them think it is sacrosanct and shouldn’t be touched. They think a new take on it will somehow tarnish its legacy. Or sometimes they just don’t want a new version that acknowledges the existence of women and people who aren’t white .

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For all her declarations of being authentically country, Cowboy Carter arrives on the back of booming business for the genre and is all about the star, not the roots music supposedly at the project’s heart

On the first track of Beyoncé ’s new album, she seems to state the impetus behind the project: “They used to say I spoke too country / Then the rejection came, said I wasn’t country ’nough.” That rejection was an unnamed experience in which she has said she “did not feel welcomed”, assumed to be her performance of her song Daddy Lessons with the Chicks at the 2016 Country Music awards. It prompted a racist backlash from parts of the country establishment, as well as outrage at Beyoncé giving a platform to the Chicks, who had been in exile from the industry since singer Natalie Maines criticised George W Bush’s handling of the Iraq war in 2002.

Cowboy Carter is Beyoncé’s 27-track response. On the album’s cover, she is on a horse, holding an American flag, draped in US flag apparel, with her long blond tresses flowing and a cowboy hat atop her head. In the few details she has shared about the album, she said she “did a deeper dive into the history of country music and studied our rich musical archive”. As she became the first Black female artist to have a US country No 1 and top the Billboard Hot 100 with a country song and debate over her place in the genre reigned, no greater a country luminary than Dolly Parton lent her support. Later it was revealed that she and outlaw legend Willie Nelson were to feature on the album, cementing its country bona fides.

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Some physical editions lack up to five tracks that come with the digital download, say fans

Fans of Beyoncé have complained after vinyl and CD editions of her album Cowboy Carter were delivered apparently with tracks that featured on the digital release missing.

Beyoncé’s eighth studio album – the second in a planned trilogy that began with her 2022 record Renaissance – was released on Friday and pre-orders for physical editions began to arrive the same day.

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Beyoncé’s new album Cowboy Carter takes her into a genre that is ‘typically a white thing’

Where Beyoncé leads, we must follow – even if that’s nights on the western range, rattlesnakes, whisky and all manner of heartbreak and loss. The Houston-raised pop superstar has expanded her formidable range with the release on Friday of Cowboy Carter .

Where her last album, Renaissance , took us to Chicago for 90s house music, the latest release moves in on Nashville, incorporating blues, soul, rock, R&B and folk, and has reignited a debate over how the country genre treats artists of colour.

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Celebrities from Anita Baker to Hailey Bieber – and even a politician – posted on social media, and Uber and Lyft offered deals

Celebrities, companies and a US politician have celebrated the release of Beyoncé’s highly anticipated new album, Cowboy Carter,on 29 March.

Beyoncé’s eighth studio album, the second in her rumored Renaissance trilogy, is a genre blend of country, pop, funk and more across 27 tracks.

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Penned by Paul McCartney as tribute to the civil rights movement, and featuring Black female country artists, it makes perfect sense for the superstar to feature it on Cowboy Carter

Written by Paul McCartney for the Beatles’ 1968 double album The Beatles (AKA “the White Album”) Blackbird isn’t the most obvious song to turn up 55 years later (retitled Blackbiird) on the new Beyoncé album. However, it makes perfect sense for the superstar to cover it on her so-called “country album”, Cowboy Carter . Where casual listeners could be forgiven for thinking Blackbird is a song about a small winged visitor to the garden – the Fab Four’s delicately lovely original does, after all, begin “blackbird singing in the dead of night …” and include birdsong – the song is actually steeped in the civil rights movement and female emancipation, themes that resonate deeply with Beyoncé.

McCartney penned it as a tribute to the Little Rock Nine, a group of students who had faced racial discrimination after starting at the all-white Little Rock high school in 1957. The incident attracted national attention because it was a test case of Brown v Board of Education, a supreme court ruling that said segregation in such schools was unconstitutional. Arkanas governor Orval Faubus didn’t agree and sent in the national guard to stop the students entering the premises. However, after federal troops were then brought in to escort them in, the fledgling civil rights movement had nine early heroes and the attention of the world – including McCartney.

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