Why Beyoncé’s ‘Cowboy Carter’ Deserved Its AOTY Grammy Win

When Captain Sheila Kelliher Berkoh introduced Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter because the winner of album of the 12 months on the 67th Annual Grammy Awards (Feb. 2), the rapturous status ovation that swept throughout Crypto.com Enviornment perceived to say something: In the end. 

After 5 earlier bids during the last decade and a part (counting a nod as a featured artist on Girl Gaga’s The Popularity Monster), Beyoncé in the end took house album of the 12 months for the second one history-making access in her still-unfurling trilogy that commenced with 2022’s Grammy-winning Renaissance. As Queen Bey embraced her eldest daughter, Blue Ivy Carter (already a Grammy winner in her personal proper), and started to make her option to the degree, the room had a good time. Girl Gaga and Billie Eilish wept, Cynthia Erivo leapt up and down, Taylor Swift shared a toast with Jay-Z, Olivia Rodrigo cheered and GloRilla screamed until she rattling close to couldn’t anymore. In the end, the First Girl of Tune – as dubbed via one Clive Davis – had in the end received the trade’s maximum coveted prize. 

Together with her victory, Beyoncé no longer best prolonged her lead because the most-awarded artist in Grammy historical past (35 wins), however she additionally joined Natalie Cole (Unforgettable With Love, 1992), Whitney Houston (The Bodyguard, 1994) and Lauryn Hill (The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, 1999) as simply the fourth Black girl to ever win album of the 12 months as a lead artist. It’s that nugget of historical past, coupled together with her litany of egregious Basic Box snubs that made this second this kind of candy one to witness. 

However let’s watch out to not let “past due” narratives totally obfuscate the inventive benefit of Cowboy Carter. Main as much as final evening’s rite, many publications – together with Billboard – predicted that Cowboy Carter would take house most sensible honors. Throughout social media and a few of the ones items, narrative began to construct {that a} Cowboy Carter victory can be like Leonardo DiCaprio successful for The Revenant or Martin Scorsese successful for The Departed – or like Beck successful for Morning Section in 2015, the 12 months of Bey’s first hotly-contested album of the 12 months loss. After being handed over for what many imagine to be their absolute best efforts, acclaimed artists who constantly produce the most efficient paintings of their respective industries in the end earn the best possible honors of their box. In the similar approach that DiCaprio is an actor’s actor and Scorsese is a director’s director, Beyoncé is an artist’s artist. That a lot used to be transparent when the 2023 Grammys become a Bey pseudo-meet-and-greet, and the room’s ecstatic response to her victory final evening used to be any other reminder. So far as many are involved, Cowboy Carter’s win is identical to a life-time success award; a mea culpa of varieties for snubs of years previous. 

There’s not anything inherently unsuitable with that framing, but it surely does belie the truth that Cowboy Carter would have deserved to win whether or not it used to be Bey’s first album of the 12 months nod or her 10th. Lower than two years after flipping the dance-pop international on its head with Renaissance, a document that illuminated the Black queer roots of dance tune and tradition, Beyoncé strutted into but any other new style and made it totally her personal, whilst venerating a few of its most useful (and overpassed) pioneers. 

She opened the album with “Ameriican Requiem,” a Buffalo Springfield-nodding excursion de power that served as a musical funeral for no longer simply probably the most proscribing visions of The united states, but in addition the overwhelmingly white nation tune established order that unfairly made themselves the gatekeepers of who can lay declare to nation tune, aesthetics and id. Over the 26 next tracks, she assumed and illustrated other Western motifs and characters (the sheriff, the damsel in misery, the outlaw, and so on.), finishing with “Amen,” an anthem of hope for a brand new, countless imaginative and prescient of The united states that interpolates the album opener. 

Cowboy Carter reaped a whopping 11 nominations throughout a number of other genres, some degree she emphasised with the bright three-track run of “Jolene,” “Daughter” and “Spaghettii.” Together with her reimagining of Dolly Parton’s vintage, Beyoncé became the rustic icon’s desperation right into a fierce figuring out of self esteem that concurrently aligned her current musical and lyrical logo with Parton’s song, whilst additionally serving as a callback to the “Becky” persona that haunted 2016’s Lemonade, which infamously misplaced album of the 12 months to Adele’s chart-conquering 25. “Jolene” offers option to “Daughter,” a definitely surprising take at the nation homicide ballad that reveals Beyoncé ripping via an operatic rendition of “Caro Mi Ben” within the authentic Italian sooner than recruiting Linda Martell, the primary Black girl to play the Grand Ole Opry, and Shaboozey, the person who would come to be the voice at the back of the longest-running solo Billboard Sizzling 100 No. 1 unmarried in historical past (“A Bar Track”),  for “Spaghettii.” Nominated for absolute best melodic rap efficiency final evening, “Spaghettii” mines the cross-cultural historical past of spaghetti westerns to create a folk-inflected lure heater assisted via a Brazilian funk pattern (O Mandrake’s “Aquecimento das Danadas”). And that’s simply the primary part of the LP! 

There’s additionally “Alliigator Tears,” on which Bey is outwardly making a song at once to the Recording Academy. “You assert transfer a mountain/ And I’ll throw on my boots/ You assert forestall the river from runnin’/ I’ll construct a dam or two/ You assert alternate religions/ Now, I spend Sundays with you/ Somethin’ ’bout the ones tears of yours/ How does it really feel to be adored?” she posits within the refrain. After all, there’s additionally the emerging recent Black nation ability she highlighted around the album (Tanner Adell, Brittney Spencer, Willie Jones, Reyna Roberts and Tiera Kennedy), and let’s no longer omit her Jersey membership turn of Patsy Cline’s seminal “I Fall to Items” both. We don’t even must get into the historical chart achievements of the technology or the cultural affect it had throughout style and trade – Cowboy Carter is worthy sufficient based totally only on its 27 beautiful songs. 

No longer a unmarried one of the vital different nominees for album of the 12 months boasts the archival ambition, intensity of analysis, braveness, experimentation, soul and sheer scope of Cowboy Carter. The album is nearer to a grasp’s thesis than a normal pop album, but it surely’s additionally relentlessly a laugh. Whether or not she’s going complete Western camp on “Tyrant,” crafting a friendship anthem for the ages along Miley Cyrus on “II Maximum Sought after” or blazing via a crash direction in rock ‘n’ roll historical past on “Ya Ya,” Cowboy Carter is a blast. The document gained some flak for its period and other people making an allowance for it a “chore” to sit down via as a result of how heady it could actually get at sure issues; Cowboy Carter, in some circles, was one thing to be revered, however no longer loved. Actually, Beyoncé crafted the album with such a lot verve that there truly isn’t some way for Cowboy Carter not to be without equal hoedown. Is it Beyoncé’s absolute best album? Relying at the day, perhaps. Is it irritating that the Recording Academy couldn’t praise her for making paradigm-shifting tune in her house style of R&B? Unequivocally. However none of that makes Cowboy Carter underserving of its victory within the 2025 album of the 12 months race. 

There’s a reason why the album accumulated two different wins final evening, identical to how The Departed and The Revenant received further Oscars out of doors of Scorsese and DiCaprio. Their victories will have been not on time, however they nonetheless triumphed for superb and deserving paintings. Pity wins the ones weren’t. Sure, this win is a vindication of her previous losses, a tribute to her towering profession, and a nod to the Black girls sooner than her who had been denied time and time once more, however above all, it’s a win for Cowboy Carter in particular – and that’s an important takeaway from final evening.