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    Beyoncé’s ‘Cowboy Carter’ Spends a Second Week at No. 1

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    “Cowboy Carter” tops the Billboard 200 for a second week, boosted by physical sales of her album on CD and vinyl.Beyoncé’s “Cowboy Carter” holds at No. 1 for a second week on the Billboard album chart, fending off new releases from J. Cole and the K-pop group Tomorrow X Together.“Cowboy Carter” stays at the top of the Billboard 200 with the equivalent of 125,500 sales in the United States, according to the tracking service Luminate. That total includes 133 million streams and 20,500 copies sold as a complete package. It is the first time Beyoncé has repeated at No. 1 since her self-titled “visual album” in 2013, which notched three consecutive times at the top and was initially available only as a download from iTunes.As in its opening week, Beyoncé’s total was helped by sales of physical copies of her album on CD and vinyl, which for the album’s first two weeks were available only through her website. Since then, retailers have started stocking “Cowboy Carter,” and — as she did with “Renaissance,” her last album, in 2022 — Beyoncé herself showed up for an in-store promo in Los Angeles, where fans could buy autographed LPs. (They quickly appeared on eBay for $2,000 and up.)“Might Delete Later,” a surprise release by the rapper J. Cole, comes in at second place with the equivalent of 115,000 sales, largely from streaming. The album got some attention for a diss track, “7 Minute Drill,” targeting Kendrick Lamar, which J. Cole promptly apologized for and removed from streaming versions of the album.Tomorrow X Together, a five-man South Korean group, opens at No. 3 with “Minisode 3: Tomorrow,” a seven-track mini album, which had 107,500 sales and was offered in 17 collectible CD editions. Also this week, Future and Metro Boomin’s joint album “We Don’t Trust You,” released three weeks ago, falls to No. 4 (a sequel, “We Still Don’t Trust You,” came out on Friday), and Morgan Wallen’s “One Thing at a Time” is No. 5. More

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      Wyatt Flores, a Rising Country Artist, Has a Superpower: Tapping Emotions

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      The 22-year-old singer and songwriter makes music that touches listeners deeply. But his own trauma — coupled with his rapid rise — has thrown some bumps in the road.In early February, the singer and songwriter Wyatt Flores relaxed on a green room couch in Nashville before headlining the 1,200-capacity Brooklyn Bowl for the first time. The show had sold out nearly instantly, thanks in part to “Life Lessons,” his seven-song EP filled with raw, emotional country songs that added fuel to the “blowup” — his word for the last year of his career and life.Flores, now 22, had been playing professionally since age 16 and releasing music since 2021 when his song “Please Don’t Go” caught fire on social media in early 2023. The spare track, written by Flores as a plea to a loved one not to take their life, features a simple fingerpicked guitar arrangement, centering the song on his raw vocals. His emotion resonated with fans, helping Flores stand out among the young, stripped-down singer-songwriters that country music is rapidly embracing.“I’ve always talked about mental health, and that’s what that song is,” Flores said, “so I made a video explaining it — me sitting there in the studio doing a little acoustic of it. Next thing you know, it just started spinning. I could not believe it. I went from doing lives on TikTok at 2 in the morning, and there’d be 24 people in there. Next thing I know, I’ve got a thousand, then 1,500.”Suddenly, he found himself included in discussions about the future of country music. The rise left Flores, who had always struggled with anxiety, in a constant state of near panic.Less than a week after the Nashville show, he broke down during a gig in Kansas City, Mo., telling the crowd in a lengthy address that he felt numb despite his musical dreams coming true. The next day, his managers made the call to pull him off the road.“I had to focus on being me, and finding things that I love, and putting myself back into my own skin, honestly,” he said in March, chatting once again on a backstage couch — this one in a tiny green room at Wooly’s, a rock bar in the heart of Des Moines, Iowa. Downstairs, fans at the sold-out venue were filing in for his first club show back. During his break, Flores cut his long hair, and was now wearing it in a mop covering his eyes.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Beyoncé, ‘Cowboy Carter’ and Filling in History’s Gaps

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      Subscribe to Popcast!Apple Podcasts | Spotify | Amazon MusicLast month, Beyoncé released “Cowboy Carter,” an album that tackles the whole of American music, using country, roots and Americana as jumping off points for explorations of race and power and the implicit politics that come with them. It is currently the No. 1 album in the country, with the biggest debut week of the year so far.On the heels of “Renaissance,” her 2022 album that served as a primer and commentary on the history of queer Black dance music, “Cowboy Carter” takes a parallel approach, unearthing and underscoring the Black history and influence behind genres that have, especially since the mid-20th century, been whitewashed.On this week’s Popcast, a conversation about what Beyoncé is attempting to achieve on “Cowboy Carter,” the way the album has been received and where she is likely to turn next.Guests:Marcus K. Dowling, country music reporter at The TennesseanJulianne Escobedo Shepherd, who writes about music for Pitchfork and othersConnect With Popcast. Become a part of the Popcast community: Join the show’s Facebook group and Discord channel. We want to hear from you! Tune in, and tell us what you think at popcast@nytimes.com. Follow our host, Jon Caramanica, on Twitter: @joncaramanica. More

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      Beyoncé’s ‘Cowboy Carter’ Opens at No. 1 With the Year’s Biggest Sales

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      The pop superstar’s new album also reigns on Billboard’s Top Country Albums chart, the first time a Black woman has led that tally in its 60-year history.Beyoncé’s genre-bending “Cowboy Carter” has become her eighth No. 1 album, opening with the biggest sales of any release so far this year.“Cowboy Carter,” billed as “Act II” of a trilogy that began with Beyoncé’s dance-oriented album “Renaissance” almost two years ago, had been expected by fans, and the music industry at large, as primarily a country project. And indeed it features banjos, lyrics about hoedowns and a remake of Dolly Parton’s classic “Jolene.” But Beyoncé’s new release turned out to be a much broader take on modern pop music, with a kaleidoscopic array of references to the Beatles, Nancy Sinatra, Chuck Berry, rap and mellow rock, and critics praised it as a bold vision and a challenge to the historical segregation of pop genres.“Cowboy Carter” arrives with the equivalent of 407,000 sales in the United States, and in addition to topping the all-genre Billboard 200 chart it is also No. 1 on the magazine’s Top Country Albums chart, the first time a Black woman has led that tally in its 60-year history. Each of Beyoncé’s eight solo studio LPs, going back to “Dangerously in Love” in 2003, has hit No. 1 on the Billboard 200.Of its composite total sales figure, “Cowboy Carter” sold 168,000 copies as a complete album, including 62,000 on vinyl versions sold through Beyoncé’s website. The 27-track full album also racked up 300 million streams, according to the tracking service Luminate — a blockbuster number, but less than Future and Metro Boomin had for their new joint release, “We Don’t Trust You,” which opened at No. 1 last week with 324 million clicks. (That album falls to No. 2 this week, with its overall numbers down 48 percent from the opening.)As impressive as Beyoncé’s numbers were, they may not hold for long as the year’s biggest, with Taylor Swift’s latest, “The Tortured Poets Department,” set for release next week.Also this week, Morgan Wallen’s “One Thing at a Time” is No. 3, Ariana Grande’s “Eternal Sunshine” is No. 4 and “Hope on the Street Vol. 1,” a six-track release by J-Hope of the K-pop giants BTS, opens at No. 5. More

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      Morgan Wallen Arrested, Accused of Throwing a Chair From a Bar Roof

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      The country superstar faces charges of reckless endangerment and disorderly conduct after the incident in Nashville on Sunday night.The country singer Morgan Wallen was arrested early Monday in Nashville on charges of reckless endangerment and disorderly conduct, after he was accused of throwing a chair from the roof of a downtown bar, according to reports.Mr. Wallen, 30, a superstar who had last year’s most popular album, and who had just opened his latest tour with two shows at a stadium in Indianapolis, was arrested and booked by police in Nashville, according to court records.WTVF, a CBS television affiliate in Nashville, reported that Mr. Wallen is accused of throwing a chair from the sixth story of Chief’s, an establishment on lower Broadway — an area of the city full of honky-tonks and concert venues — that had just been opened by another country star, Eric Church. The chair hit the ground near where some police officers were standing, and staff members at the restaurant told officers that Mr. Wallen had been responsible, the station reported, citing the police.Mr. Wallen was arrested on three counts of reckless endangerment, a felony; and one count of disorderly conduct, a misdemeanor. He was released early Monday and has a court date set for May 3.In a statement, Worrick Robinson, a lawyer for Mr. Wallen, said: “Morgan Wallen was arrested in downtown Nashville for reckless endangerment and disorderly conduct. He is cooperating fully with authorities.”In 2021, Mr. Wallen, then a rising star, was rebuked by the music industry, and his contract was temporarily “suspended” by his record label, after a video clip surfaced showing the singer casually using a racial slur among friends.Mr. Wallen apologized for that incident and his career recovered with little apparent effect. “Dangerous: The Double Album,” which had just come out, was a smash hit that remained high on the charts for well over a year, and his latest, “One Thing at a Time,” was another blockbuster, logging a total of 19 weeks at No. 1. More

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      Alice Randall Made Country History. Black Women Are Helping Tell Hers.

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      In “My Black Country,” the musician and author who cracked a Nashville color barrier is telling her story — and hearing her songs reimagined.The country singer Rissi Palmer could not understand why Alice Randall was emailing her.By fall 2020, when Palmer received the message, Randall was a Nashville institution, not only the first Black woman to write a chart-topping country hit but also a novelist whose books undermined entrenched racial hierarchies. Palmer herself was no slouch: “Country Girl,” her 2007 anthem of rural camaraderie, had been the first song by a Black woman to infiltrate country’s charts in two decades. She had just started “Color Me Country,” a podcast exploring the genre’s nonwhite roots and branches.But 11 years earlier, Palmer had fled Nashville, hamstrung by contract disputes, with “my tail between my legs,” she recalled recently in a video interview from her North Carolina kitchen.Randall, however, was very interested in Palmer — and her history. Working as a writer-in-residence at Vanderbilt University, she had urged the school’s Heard Libraries to acquire Palmer’s archives: notebooks, sketches, a dress worn during her Grand Ole Opry debut.“I’ve been in this business since I was 19. I made the charts when I was 26. I’ve had these items the whole time,” said Palmer, 42. “No one has ever called me and said they had value, until Alice. There are more important people, but she saw value in me.”Randall also saw something of herself — and a glimpse of gradual progress — in Palmer. After breaking a Nashville color barrier when her treatise about being an overworked mother, “XXX’s and OOO’s (An American Girl),” became a 1994 hit for Trisha Yearwood, Randall quit writing country songs.In her book “My Black Country,” which shares its name with her new compilation, Randall posits a sharp rejoinder to the standard country origin story.Arielle Gray for The New York TimesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      Beyoncé’s ‘Cowboy Carter’ Is a Vivid Mission Statement. Let’s Discuss.

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      The pop superstar teased a move to country, then tackled so much more. Three critics and a reporter explore her new album’s inspirations, sounds and stakes.BEN SISARIO I don’t usually say this about news releases, but since Beyoncé says so little about the making of her art, the “Cowboy Carter” announcement was intriguing for noting that “each song is its own version of a reimagined Western film,” and that Beyoncé screened movies while she recorded, including “Urban Cowboy,” “The Hateful Eight,” even “Space Cowboys” (?!).My first reaction to hearing the album was surprised gawking at its range of genre and sound, after she head faked us all into perhaps more limited expectations of “country.” (Of course we should have known better.) Viewed only as a genre-hopping exercise, “Cowboy Carter” might be a confusing jumble. But the film frame puts narrative and character at the center of her message, and with that everything came into clearer focus for me.As a heroine, Beyoncé makes a big, bold statement of her quest in “Ameriican Requiem,” taking on nothing less than American history. She finds villains in Jolene and (ahem) the Grammys. Songs like “II Most Wanted” and “Levii’s Jeans” could be plot-break montages while our conquering cowgirl hangs with some sidekicks she meets along the way. By the final reel she’s recapitulating her complaints and declaring herself the victorious leader of a grand resistance (“We’ll be the ones to purify our fathers’ sins”).SALAMISHAH TILLET I’ve listened to the album so many times now — on a plane, in a spin class, and, as I think she intended, while I drove on the highway (sadly, 280, not the 405). Yes, Ben, she has gone big here! But, instead of longing for some lost past, she is taking on “History” — musical and American — with, as we say in academia, a big “H,” or those big narratives about identity, belonging and discrimination.I almost missed those lyrics, “Whole lotta red in that white and blue, ha/History can’t be erased, oh-oh/You lookin’ for a new America” because I was too busy Proud Marying, jerking and twerking to “Ya Ya.” I think that might be the point — it is as if she saying, “The times are so desperate, I am going to use all the vocal gifts and genres at my disposal to bring the country together and show you how good I am at doing them (again)!”Beyoncé onstage with the Chicks performing “Daddy Lessons” at the 2016 Country Music Association Awards.Image Group LA/ABC, via Getty ImagesWe are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      ‘Cowboy Carter’ Review: Beyoncé’s Country Is America. Every Bit of It.

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      On the bold, sprawling “Cowboy Carter,” the superstar plays fast and loose — and twangy — with genre.The first song on “Cowboy Carter,” Beyoncé’s not-exactly-country album, makes a pre-emptive strike. “It’s a lot of talking going on while I sing my song,” she observes in “Ameriican Requiem” over guitar strums and electric sitar, adding, “It’s a lot of chatter in here.”That’s an acknowledgment that a pop superstar’s job now extends well beyond creating and performing songs. In the era of streaming and social media, Beyoncé knows that her every public appearance and utterance will be scrutinized, commented on, cross-referenced, circulated as clickbait and hot-taked in both good faith and bad. Every phrase and image are potential memes and hyperlinks.It’s a challenge she has engaged head-on since she released her visual album “Beyoncé” in 2013. For the last decade, even as her tours have filled stadiums, she has set herself goals outside of generating hits. Beyoncé has deliberately made each of her recent albums not only a musical performance but also an argument: about power, style, history, family, ambition, sexuality, bending rules. They’re albums meant to be discussed and footnoted, not just listened to.“Cowboy Carter” is an overstuffed album, 27 tracks maxing out the 79-minute capacity of a CD and stretching across two LPs. It flaunts spoken-word co-signs from Willie Nelson and Dolly Parton that interrupt its flow; it includes some fragmentary, minute-long songs. Its sprawl is its own statement of confidence: that even half-finished experiments are worth attention.The “Cowboy Carter” album cover is an opening salvo, brandishing western and American symbols: Beyoncé holding an American flag while riding a white horse sidesaddle, with platinum-blond hair proudly streaming. In a red-white-and-blue outfit, high-heeled boots and a pageant sash that reads “Cowboy Carter,” she’s a beauty queen and a white-hatted heroine claiming her nation — her country, in both senses. The politics of her new songs are vague and glancing, but the music insists that every style is her American birthright. As a pop star it is: Pop has always breached stylistic boundaries, constantly exploiting subcultures to annex whatever might make a song catchier.Beyoncé grew up in Texas, where country music has long mingled with styles from jazz to blues to hip-hop — and where, in fact, early cowboys were enslaved Black men. Beyoncé met a racial backlash when she performed “Daddy Lessons,” a country song from her 2016 album “Lemonade” about gun-toting self-defense, with the (then-Dixie) Chicks at the 2016 Country Music Association Awards. Presumably that’s what she alluded to when she wrote on Instagram that there was “an experience that I had years ago where I did not feel welcomed.”We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More

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      A Guide to Beyoncé’s Guests on ‘Cowboy Carter’: Linda Martell, Shaboozey and More

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      A guide to key guests and behind-the-scenes figures on the star’s eighth studio album.A new Beyoncé release isn’t just an album — it’s a sprawling collective effort where the supporting cast and behind the scenes crew can reveal a lot about the scope of the star’s vision. For “Cowboy Carter,” in addition to household names like Willie Nelson, Dolly Parton, Miley Cyrus and Post Malone (and a brief cameo from her daughter Rumi), she’s looped in a slew of collaborators new and old. Here’s a guide to some of the most significant figures you’ll see in the credits.Rhiannon Giddens in London last year. The musician and scholar contributes banjo, viola and gravitas to “Cowboy Carter.”Serena Brown for The New York TimesRhiannon GiddensRihannon Giddens plays on the “Cowboy Carter” single “Texas Hold ’Em,” but beyond the banjo and viola she contributed to the track, she lends the whole project a special kind of historical weight. During the past two decades, Giddens has led a new wave of folk artists helping to shed light on the foundational role that Black musicians played in the creation of American roots music. A scholar of the banjo as much as a practitioner, she’s made it her mission to educate audiences about its history as an African-descended instrument that was once, as she put it in 2017 when she won a MacArthur Genius Grant, “an absolute emblem of the African American in the South.”Trained as an opera singer, Giddens rose to prominence in the early 2000s as a member of the Carolina Chocolate Drops — with Dom Flemons, Justin Robinson and Sule Greg Wilson — a Grammy-winning group that celebrated and updated the legacy of Black string bands with help from an older mentor, the fiddler Joe Thompson. In 2023, she released “You’re the One,” her first album of all original material. Last year, Giddens also won a Pulitzer Prize for “Omar,” an opera she co-wrote with the composer Michael Abels based on the life of a West African Muslim scholar who was captured and sold as a slave in America.Raphael SaadiqRaphael Saadiq’s name has been a mark of quality in R&B for more than 30 years. Saadiq, who wrote, produced and played various instruments on Beyoncé’s latest, first found fame in the late ’80s with the trio Tony! Toni! Toné! and went on to score a Top 20 solo hit with “Ask of You” in 1995. He became an in-demand producer and worked with a wide array of artists including D’Angelo — whose two biggest hits, “Lady” and “Untitled (How Does It Feel)” are Saadiq co-writes — as well as Whitney Houston, Erykah Badu and Bilal. He’s been in Beyoncé’s orbit for years, having produced her team-up with Stevie Wonder on a 2005 Luther Vandross tribute album, helped produce her sister Solange’s acclaimed 2016 effort “A Seat at the Table,” and appeared on “Renaissance” as a producer, writer and performer.We are having trouble retrieving the article content.Please enable JavaScript in your browser settings.Thank you for your patience while we verify access. If you are in Reader mode please exit and log into your Times account, or subscribe for all of The Times.Thank you for your patience while we verify access.Already a subscriber? Log in.Want all of The Times? Subscribe. More