"A Lot of Taking Up Space" - The Beyoncé History Master Class

Cowboy Carter in DC, and reclaiming Americana in the Trump Era

I got Cowboy Carter tour tickets for DC in early February, semi-joking at the time that Beyoncé was the only reason to keep going amidst early Trump rampages. Six months later, that lame aside had morphed into a grim talisman, the kind of thing you mutter as you turn off NPR on the way to camp drop-off because the kids already worried over breakfast about people being bombed in Ukraine and you’re now trying to protect them from hearing about the children missing from a flooded summer camp in Texas. At least there’s still Beyoncé. At least there’s still Beyoncé.

The week leading up to this 4th of July was rough. Watching Trump’s megabill pass, anticipating the havoc it will wreak and the vulnerable people it will grind down. The final closure of USAID, abandoning millions of people, decades of life-saving work and strategically built goodwill. More ICE round-ups in Home Depot parking lots, schools, and clusters of street vendors. The Supreme Court’s decisions around birthright citizenship and nationwide injunctions, trans health care, and immigration. And then, horrifically, the catastrophic Texas floods: the despair of parents frantically searching for their kids in muddy rubble, the terror of whole families swept away by surging waters, the grim understanding that as climate change intensifies (and the Trump administration keeps eliminating funding that would mitigate its impacts), there will only be more, and more intense, disasters.

Pre-concert, in between barbecues with friends in various stages of trying to survive another week in their government or fed-adjacent jobs, I came across writer Aatish Taseer’s observations on American historical memory from his cross-country road trip:

“What is particular to America is the wish for history not to matter, for it to be devoid of consequence. In Mexico, in India, in Germany and Japan, people know they live in the aftermath of what those who went before them wrought. Here, in certain communities - African-American, Jewish, Indigenous and Asian - history feels real, but the country as a whole projects an innocence that feels false. “Americans, unhappily, have the most remarkable ability to alchemize all bitter truths into an innocuous but piquant confection,” writes James Baldwin in “Notes of a Native Son” (1955), “and to transform their moral contradictions ... into a proud decoration, such as are given for heroism on the field of battle.” Baldwin feels that such a response in the face of violence has to be a posture, an outright lie or a willful evasiveness. It’s what makes him want to rob his white countrymen of “the jewel of [their] naïveté,” to grab them by the lapels and drag them kicking and screaming before the mirror of history and have them look and see what they truly are. “Not everything that is faced can be changed,” Baldwin tells us in a 1962 essay, “but nothing can be changed until it is faced.”

Yet, having grown up in a society robbed of its illusions, I always marveled at America’s need to not merely be prosperous and powerful, but good. If and when the day comes (and it may already have) that America lets go of that belief in itself as a moral force in the world, many will breathe a collective sigh of relief, but just as many will mourn the loss of a fiction that gave this country its tremendous capacity for self-improvement and the sense of perfectibility that drew me here, away from the weariness of societies laden with history.”

Cowboy Carter, both the album and the tour, is about history - the history of Black artists’ contributions to country music and the American experiment, how their work was deliberately pushed out of the official narratives, and now is being marched in past the sputtering gatekeepers. It’s about raucously retaking and filling that space, asserting your right to claim and own your history as you build the future.

Beyoncé is performing narrative reclamation as ecstatic celebration, with a clear-eyed glare at those who tried to keep her and others down and out. Her love and critique of America are two sides of the same coin, both fueled by fiercely claiming her inalienable rights - to be present, to pursue joy, to achieve excellence.

THIS makes me proud to be an American

In an early Cowboy Carter set break Beyoncé shows a compilation video of blurred-out but recognizable talking heads like Megyn Kelly lecturing from their cable news perches. It’s a clear nod to the backlash from the white country music world Beyoncé experienced, first after her glorious 2016 “Daddy Lessons” performance with the Dixie Chicks and again around Cowboy Carter’s snubbing by Nashville’s self-appointed gatekeepers.

Beyoncé then emerges from the stage at a Lucite podium, performing “America Has a Problem” as a mock press conference with back-up dancers clad in newspaper headlines. Her daughter Blue Ivy emerges mid-song to ecstatic audience screams, performing legacy Destiny’s Child choreography as Beyoncé smiles proudly at the next generation fiercely dancing, assured of their place and space, lifted up by a comparatively deeper knowledge of their history than what she had at the same age.

Throughout Cowboy Carter Beyoncé doesn’t deign to engage with bad-faith critics on their terms, but neither does she give them a pass. She exposes them merely by replaying their petty nonsense, raising an elegant eyebrow - “There’s a lot of talkin' going on/While I sing my song” - and storming past their cheap talk with a spectacle that shows. The. Work. Three+ hours of virtuoso country, disco, R&B, rap, rock, and even opera singing in gorgeous, honeyed voice, draped in spectacular Americana-coded furs, sequins, leather, and LED lights, banging out hours of intense choreography that snarled with power and dazzled with elegance, unbothered by the swampy humidity and heat.

But she also shows the work of the generations that came before her, getting a football stadium stomping along to 1960s Black musicians like Linda Martell, cheering for images of sit-ins from the Civil Rights Movement, and confronted by a giant Statue of Liberty, its mouth covered by a bandana that serves both as historical cowboy reference and warning nod at our current, perilous era. History is pulsing and alive today, she says. History can’t be separated from what’s happening right in front of us.

With Cowboy Carter, Beyoncé is cementing her supernova star power as the latest in a long line of genre-bending, game-changing Black Americans who were denied their propers. It’s a spectacle and a labor of love that utterly, puts her bad-faith critics in their proper, petty place. Try to deny me? she seems to say. Let’s see how foolish you look when you deny history.

The strain of American memory that Taseer describes - a denial of the past, a refusal to learn or even be curious about what happened or what is happening - has metastasized across swaths of our country into celebrating the willfully-blind. We don’t follow up with the obvious questions when someone denies the existence of inconvenient facts, or refuses to answer basic questions by attacking the reporter or citizen asking. We sigh with irritation at the gadfly who reminds us what’s been excluded from an official narrative, calling them woke or a buzzkill.

The harms of ICE family separations, of the Big Shitty Bill, dismantling huge swaths of everything from FEMA to our national park rangers, are happening right in front of us, in real time - but because it’s so hard to shame the shameless, we stop trying. Confronting the present day, to say nothing of history, is exhausting, and often feels futile. There’s always been a slice of America that sees that natural, human curiosity and empathy as an impediment to otherwise inevitable progress. What’s newer is their ability to weaponize shamelessness at scale - to overwhelm our systems with news that makes the bad guys’ victory feel inevitable, and to get us to self-deport our outrage and bias for action.

Has America given up our need to be good, as Taseer implies? If you were reading the news last week, it sure felt like that. The millionaire politicians swearing they would never touch Medicare, only to be meekly dragged over what was once a third rail of US politics. The ninety private jets clogging a sinking Venice for the Bezos wedding. The Diddy verdict, the exhaustion of this stage of #MeToo backlash, and the numbing proof of (infinite resources + misogyny)internet = impunity. As the news coalesced into narrative, Fourth of July 2025 felt like the history books would write it as a victory lap for the bad guys.

It was, in a word, exhausting.

But then Beyoncé stomped out, draped in the Stars and Stripes. Steely-eyed, surveying her sweaty, ecstatic rainbow of a crowd costumed in our own homages to American history - Stetsons and chaps, pageant sashes, cowboy boots - she reminded us that this land is hers and ours. That our iconography is iconic because of the history with which it’s imbued - what we’ve been raised with, and what we’re just now learning that we really should have known all along.

She demanded we look. That we listen. That we learn. She brought everything on that stage - her decades of work, her sweat and grit, her education, her children - and dared us to say we still feel exhausted. And, strengthened by our shared history, she demanded that we dance, sing, celebrate, and love even harder.

On the shuttle bus back to DC, a sweaty, giddy woman sitting behind me exclaimed “I don’t care that it’s the middle of the night, Beyoncé got me wanting to work!” Yes, she does. We don’t get to be tired. We don’t get to say it’s too hard. We don’t get to ignore our history, or be blind to our present. Time to do the work.

“Not everything that is faced can be changed, but nothing can be changed until it is faced.” - James Baldwin

“Nothin' really ends
For things to stay the same, they have to change again
Hello, my old friend
You change your name, but not the ways you play pretend
American Requiem
Them big ideas (yeah), are buried here (yeah)
Amen.”