 Beyonce recently released a country album, "Cowboy Carter." You can scream out “Beyonce isn’t country music!” until you’re blue in the face. You’d be right, of course. Blue, too, but at least right. The issue here, however, is that you’d also be right if you yelled that same screed about 95% of the “country” music that’s been released this century. There are rare gems, like Luke Combs, but even he has demonstrated that “country” music is really just pop music, as his biggest song is a cover of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car.” And, hey, that’s always been a fantastic song. I like it, you like it, the world liked it, which is why the song was nominated for three Grammy’s and the album went multi-platinum. So when Beyonce decided to ruin Dolly Parton’s legendary song “Jolene,” it was the rule, not the exception. Music in general, like movies and television, exists in this weird area outside of typical market forces. For instance, if McDonald’s puts out a crappy sandwich and it doesn’t do well, it instantly goes away and they reverse course and push their Big Mac harder. The country music industry doesn’t work like this. When they put out a crappy sandwich no one likes, they just put out another 500 crappy sandwiches that same year. The end result is that you’re programmed, slowly but surely, to accept that the nonsense you’re listening to on the radio is what constitutes country music now. So while you might insist that the initial crappy sandwich is crappy, you’ve now been conditioned to the point where you’re singing along to the least crappy sandwich of the bunch. Music doesn’t work on the principles of supply and demand. Profiteers will inundate and saturate the entire market with watered-down nonsense to the point you accept the closest approximation of the music you like as genuine music. There’s nothing organic about it. It’s a controlled genre where big-wigs manipulate the market and consumer tastes. Think about it this way: If all McDonald’s ever put out were crappy sandwiches, eventually people would eat them because it’s McDonald’s. This is all by design, of course, and it certainly didn’t start with Beyonce. It probably started back in the ‘50s when blood-sucking corporations sprang up like weeds and took advantage of rock and country music to profit. It really expanded in the 2000s when the idea of a full-piece country “band” became an archaic relic only suitable for touring concerts, while studios used mixed e-tracks with snaps on the downbeat to mass-produce cookie-cutter music for a high-turnaround and profits. The music industry hasn’t had any soul probably since “soul” was a popular genre. Parton’s original “Jolene” was a soulful plea to a woman deemed much more attractive. “I’m begging of you, please don’t take my man.” The song spoke to something very true about human relationships, in that men can be easily lured into relations by attractive women, and attractive women often know they have this power. It’s such a classic song because it’s entirely relatable no matter where you might fall on that aesthetic spectrum. Beyonce’s changed version of the song, which says, “I’m warning you, don’t come for my man,” speaks more to a hip-hop/rap world, where threats of violence are almost a prerequisite for any song that gets put out. Some may find that to be a bit of an over-reaction, but it’s just an observation about the stark contrast between sweet realism and current-year aggression. “I’m begging you” implies a tearful plea from a woman who truly doesn’t want to lose her man. “I’m warning you,” on the other hand, implies some threat of violence should the woman even consider such an act. And this isn’t outside of the scope of country music entirely, mind you. Many may remember that “Earl has to die” in the Dixie Chicks’ song “Goodbye Earl,” or that Miranda Lambert was going to blast someone with her shotgun and set the house on fire. These songs, of course, were about abusive men. “Jolene” is more about a woman who may–but hasn’t yet–ultimately sleep with a taken man. Not exactly the same. Though it’s important to point out that these themes have found a place in country music before. There are a few funny things I can’t help but notice about Beyonce’s version of “Jolene.” For starters, it’s basically a rewrite. Here’s the first verse of the new version:
Okay (lol). Here’s Dolly’s version:
To Dolly’s version first: From purely a songwriting perspective, Dolly’s version is incredibly strong. I’ve always said, as a songwriter myself, that the difficulty of writing a good song is that you’re basically fitting a novel’s worth of imagination into a few short lines. Parton’s use of adjectives here to create modifiers and qualifiers and attributes is just flippin’ fantastic. They’re not just locks of auburn hair; they’re “flaming” locks. “Your smile is like a breath of spring” tells an entire story in eight simple words. You can play that out in your mind and get a true image of what Jolene must look like and understand why Dolly–who’s not chopped liver herself!–would be jealous. In Beyonce’s version, it’s asymmetrical, first off, and illustrates horrid writing form. You can’t rhyme on C and C in a six-line structure? That’s either lazy or uncreatively lazy. Plus there’s literally nothing that exists here that qualifies or modifies or illustrates anything about this other woman, save the fact that she’s (a) “another woman,” and (b) she used part of Dolly’s first line from the original and called her beautiful beyond compare. But what weight does that hold? It’s simply a short thrust to get into the heart of her song, which is a threat to a woman. Dolly’s song really expounded on why the woman was a threat. Beyonce’s song is basically saying, “B*tch, don’t be a threat or you’ll catch these hands!”  Beyonce's husband, rapper and music producer Jay-Z. The funniest thing to me, however, is that Beyonce’s man is Jay-Z, who looks like a homeless painter with a medical condition that causes him to retain too much water. Beyonce is wildly successful, and this song will undoubtedly be a hit that you end up hearing all over commercials and playing in the background of the Dollar Store when you stop in to get some paper plates. Though because music is a machine and not a living, breathing organic organism, it enables this sort of subpar-effort disrespect. I’m not joking when I say it’s crazy that Beyonce’s song is asymmetrical and doesn’t even rhyme. Guy Clark, one of the best songwriters in history, has a brilliant take on this in his song “Homeless:”
 Donald Sutherland in Invasion of the Body Snatchers It’s true. It doesn’t always rhyme. But at least it has to be symmetrical! Work/hurt/shirt/sometimes with control/go/unfolds/rhyme. Notice how that’s symmetry? AAC/AAC (or “B”; it doesn’t matter). For me, I’m not even angry about it. Hell, I don’t even really care at this point. Country music has long been a relic of the past, and what takes its place today is some body-snatched nonsense that I imagine Donald Sutherland would point at while screaming. Every time I turn on the radio and country music is playing, it’s some nonsense that sounds the same - canned-audio pop bereft of any and all emotion. Beyonce’s turn at a “country” song is just the latest slap in the face. After all, don’t forget that they paraded Taylor Swift around as “country” for a decade.
Before 2027, they’ll put an electronic banjo track over “Boyz in da Hood” and it will go to #1 and stay there for months. That’s just where “country” music is at today.
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