“Nothin’ really ends / For things to stay the same they have to change again,” Beyonce sings on Act ll: Cowboy Carter, the opening lines of the opening track, Ameriican Requiem. “Them big ideas, yeah, are buried here / Amen.” In some ways, it is a mission statement for the epic 78-minute, 27-track release – or at the very least, functions like a film’s title card to introduce yet another blockbuster album. In the days leading up to Cowboy Carter, the superstar said this “ain’t a Country album” but “a ‘Beyonce’ album” – positioning herself in opposition to country music’s rigid power structures and emphasising her ability to work with the style with her latest genre-defying opus. A capital-C country album it is not – and of course it isn’t. Beyonce is an eclecticist, known for her elastic vocal performances: In a moment, choosing to belt close to godliness and, in another, moving with marked ease into a fractured run, inheriting histories through the vowels she stresses, the handclaps she introduces and the genres she …

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