our love was stronger than your pride

the graced discography of Beyoncé Giselle Knowles Carter

If we’re going to heal, let it be glorious

—Warsan Shire on Beyoncé’s Lemonade

My writing soundtrack has been a deep dive into the musical catalog of Beyoncé, and while I was expecting to find certified bops, no one had prepared me for the incredible artistic acts of redemption, forgiveness, and reconciliation that define Beyoncé’s recent albums.

Redemption is a theme that is common to dramatic, narrative art like a play, a movie or a novel (c.f. Dostoevsky’s Crime & Punishment), but what makes art about redemption and forgiveness so powerful at this current cultural moment is that we seem to be, as a culture, lacking the mechanisms of contrition, redemption, and forgiveness. We see a lot of crime and we see a lot of punishment, but what about the healing? The American legal system does not reward honesty or contrition or any of the necessary seeking to make amends and heal together that is the foundation of a relationship. Which is the foundation of community. We cannot dialogue, we cannot encounter. We snipe, we score points, we dunk on our opponents. We cannot cooperate. And this bleeds into our personal lives: we settle scores, we limit ourselves to echo chambers, relationships are contractual: I get what I need out of them, and if I don’t get what I need, I drop ‘em.

when two people have loved each other

see how it is like a

scar between their bodies,

stronger, darker, and proud;

how the black cord makes of them a single fabric

that nothing can tear or mend.

—Jane Hirshfield, For What Binds Us

We live in worlds of “me.” How do we love difference? How do we encounter an other that is actually an other? How do we embrace, accept, and forgive?

Wee talk a lot about how our cultural proud flesh is breaking down, how the ties that bind us are weak, but I think perhaps we don’t understand how to remake them. And I think Beyoncé does.

“My torturer became my remedy,” as Beyoncé puts it.

Too often, the voices bemoaning the sudden disruption in cultural gentility are the voices of power that have never had to suffer the cruelties outside of the circle of those who benefit from the status quo. Do we really want peace? If so, we will have to let go of the status quo and hear from those who are afflicted by it. To have a peaceable society means not that the oppressed shut up and go back to being oppressed, it means that the oppressed and the oppressor finally come into communion. In order to do that, the oppressor has to face the music of grace, which they can only hear in the voice of the oppressed—the cry of the poor, which the Lord hears.

Catholic art, I imagine, is the sort of art that shows us how that music of grace operates in our lives. It’s not always pretty. Catholic art can be art by Catholics (I’m not even going to name the Southern mid-century short-story writer whose name is invoked like an amen to this cause) or art by non-Catholics (Jane Austen or Beyoncé), but the common denominator is: does this piece of art tell us something about the workings of grace in human lives? Does this art tell us something like East of Eden’s timshel (interpreted so beautifully in the Mumford and Sons song): that human beings have extraordinary power to choose the good, always, even after a lifetime of corruption? That the stoniest heart can be softened by the music of grace, can choose to love rather than to give a tit for a tat?

Art is essential: it reminds us of the human spirit’s beauty and creativity, of our innate dignity and worth as human beings made in God’s image and likeness, and that this dignity has its highest expression in our ability to choose the good no matter what injustices we bear and how many forces conspire to convince us our dignity is somehow contingent or less than another’s. Love is, in fact, preferable to vengeance. This is what so many Catholics in the twentieth century started calling “the Catholic imagination” — an incarnate, sacramental imagination of grace, which explores the gloriousness of our healing rather than the petty power of our destruction.

By that metric, the pop music that most thoroughly embodies that Catholic imagination is Beyoncé Giselle Knowles Carter’s Lemonade (2016) and Cowboy Carter (2023).

Cowboy Carter

Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter is “not a country album, it’s a Beyoncé album,” as the singer’s promotional messaging said. From the sweeping choral opening of “American Requiiem,” it’s clear that this is both a very country album and cannot be confined to that: it’s a rock opera, a genré-bending everything, and also a memorial in honor of big ideas and big souls who are buried here.

Beyoncé shared that Cowboy Carter, the “act ii” of her three-part album series¹was “born out of an experience that I had years ago where I did not feel welcomed…and it was very clear that I wasn’t.”

Pop culture detectives have surmised that Beyoncé is referring to her appearance at the 2016 Country Music Awards with The Chicks. A brief reminder that this award ceremony was on November 2—six days before Trump was elected—and The Chicks hadn’t yet dropped “Dixie” from their names.

If you’ve forgotten about The Dixie Chicks, that’s understandable! They were blacklisted from country music after they criticized George W. Bush’s invasion of Iraq in 2003. At a concert in London, Maines said: “We do not want this war, this violence, and we’re ashamed that the President of the United States is from Texas,” which sounds eminently reasonable in the warm light of history, but was crossing a thin red line in 2003 America. Country radio stations cut all the Chicks’ songs from their playlists.

Beyoncé, arguably the biggest pop star in the world in 2016, released a visual album Lemonade in April which is one of the most beautiful pieces of art ever made, but we’ll get to that later. What you need to know now is that Natalie Maines, the Chicks’ front woman, also thought Lemonade was one of the most beautiful pieces of art ever made and watched it “at least once a day.” She and the band began covering Daddy Lessons, a song on the second half of Lemonade that is a full country, banjo-twanging ballad about intergenerational trauma.

So when the Country Music Awards called Beyoncé and said: we want you to perform this at the show in November, Beyoncé (history’s number-one team player) said she would do it if the Chicks came with her.

Now what Beyoncé knew at that time that you may have forgotten is that after The Chicks were blackballed in 2003, they swore never to play for country audiences again. But, as Maines said—you make an exception for Beyoncé. Why? Because, Maines said, working with Beyoncé was the greatest week of her professional life.

Beyoncé, whose mother is from Louisiana, includes a full-ass second-line parade in the set. It’s great music. Although the performance had the highest rating in CMA history, the vibes in the building, Maines and others said, were chilly. As was the Twitter response. It’s an episode that got eclipsed by the more controversial election a few days later. But Beyoncé, of course, did not forget it.

“Because of that experience, I did a deeper dive into the history of Country music and studied our rich musical archive,” she said. Country music is Black music—it’s from Black culture, was built by Black musicians, and Beyoncé is reclaiming that history buried in our American cultural graveyard, in a blaze of glory.

So she made Cowboy Carter, in which she reimagines Jolene to fit her famously protective personality, she sings a lullaby to her son in which she assures him that he will one day shine on his own two feet, but she will always be the projector casting light for his film and protecting him. She sings love songs, more songs about intergenerational family trauma, and has a three-hander version of “Blackbiird,” which Paul McCartney wrote in honor of the Black women of the Civil Rights Movement and intended for Black women to sing.

On her 2016 visual album, Lemonade, Beyoncé interpolates the words of Somali-British poet Warsan Shire into her song Love Drought: “If we’re going to heal, let it be glorious,” she says.

And I can’t help but think this is a theme of so much of Beyoncé’s recent work: to gloriously heal. What you can hear on Cowboy Carter is the sound of a community. Beyoncé (recently proclaimed one of the “most thankful artists” according to a very silly-looking marketing survey²) is a champion of others—she famously uses her spotlight to shine on her collaborators. Her Homecoming concert—which she performed as a headliner both weekends at Coachella in 2018—is truly an amazing performance, done in the style of an HBCU homecoming celebration. It’s Beyoncé’s tribute to Black higher education and its culture, headlining one of the biggest music festivals in the country. The Netflix documentary is highly recommended, as you see her preparing to give a concert in a desert less than a year after giving birth. To twins.³

Cowboy Carter, like Homecoming, is a celebration of a community and a culture. It’s an act of reclamation on a communal level. It retrieves a history that is often ignored or actively erased. A quick look at Beyoncé’s Instagram comments will show you how kindly some country listeners have taken to the idea that a Black woman is claiming this genre, no permission needed, because was, in fact, a creation of her culture to begin with.

Lemonade (2016)

Cowboy Carter is an act of cultural healing: reclaiming a piece of history that has been stolen or whitewashed, but Lemonade is about the intimate healing in families, between spouses, between lovers, between men and women. It’s one of the most deeply romantic pieces of art about what it means to love someone. What real, committed About what faithfulness means. About infidelity, rage, and forgiveness.

What's worst, lookin' jealous or crazy?
Jealous or crazy? (Crazy)
Or like being walked all over lately, walked all over lately
I'd rather be crazy

Hold Up seems like a very angry song—in the visual album, Beyoncé is skipping around the neighborhood, smashing anything with a baseball bat as she sings the song—and, on one hand, it is. Very angry. But it’s also very much rooted in her love for her husband “Hold up, they don’t love like I love you,” “We were made for each other/so I find you and hold you down.” It’s a reminder both of what he’s too blind to see and also a reminder that she deserves better. It’s a voice calling him to contrition. “What a shame/you let this good love go to waste.”

The way Beyoncé talks about female sexuality and desire on the album is beautiful. It can be funny, miffed, hilarious, joyful, romantic, thirsty, but it is always beautiful.

One of the strange developments of modernity is that young women have been taught that sex and sexuality are something outside of themselves that has nothing to do with them, it’s the purview of men, and to come close to it is to somehow dirty yourself.

This is, of course, nonsense. Sex is a life-giving force deeply rooted inside of each human being, a desire to hold, to love, to join, to create that originates inside of each of us. Patriarchy convinces women that their desire for love is somehow dirty or shameful.⁴ Beyoncé’s desire for her husband, even when he’s absolutely fumbling the bag is a source of her strength. Common wisdom says that a weak woman stays and a strong woman goes, but Beyoncé is her husband’s equal and partner (And keep your money/I’ve got my own, she sings in Don’t Hurt Yourself (ft. Jack White—lyrical mic drop). The structural injustices that keep women from leaving abusive men, trapped in what Emmanuel Mounier would call a state of submission below the dignity of the human person, don’t apply to her. She is free to go.⁵ She considers it (Sandcastles), but she doesn’t want to. She wants to be with the man she loves. She wants to choose the good: that is the ultimate freedom. That sort of love will overcome even the scars in her husband’s past that has led him to treat her with such disregard. She wants to love with the love of God: that accepts the beloved, forgives flaws, and is endlessly faithful. Mounier would say this is the prerogative of the saint, the sort of heroic love each human person was truly made for.

Throughout the album, Beyoncé explores the same theme of marriage that Tolstoy explores with Kitty and Levin in Anna Karenina: that when you hurt the one you love, you hurt yourself.

“[Levin] felt now that he was not simply close to [Kitty], but that he did not know where he ended and she began. He felt this from the agonizing sensation of division that he experienced at that instant. He was offended for the first instant, but the very same second he felt that he could not be offended by her, that she was himself. He felt for the first moment as a man feels when, having suddenly received a violent blow from behind, he turns round, angry and eager to avenge himself, to look for his antagonist, and finds that it is he himself who has accidentally struck himself, that there is no one to be angry with, and that he must put up with and try to soothe the pain. …

Like a man half-awake in an agony of pain, he wanted to tear out, to fling away the aching place, and coming to his senses, he felt that the aching place was himself.

Anna Karenina, Part 5, Chapter 14

The album digs deep into anger until she gets to the wounds underneath her own relationship wounds, to the wounds of generations, of family (Daddy Lessons), and the wounds of enslavement (Freedom, ft. Kendrick Lamar — notable for the rosary reference in the rap verse).

The final chapter on the album, Redemption, features another Warsan Shire poem:

"Grandmother, the alchemist

You spun gold out of this hard life

Conjured beauty from the things left behind

Found healing where it did not live

Discovered the antidote in your own kitchen

Broke the curse with your own two hands

You passed these instructions to your daughter

Who then passed it down to her daughter…"

Then Jay-Z’s grandmother delivers the album’s thesis: “I was served lemons, but I made lemonade.”

“Our love was stronger than your pride,” Beyoncé sings in All Night, which seems like the album closer, but it ends with Formation, which is just a bedazzling gobsmacker of a song. Can you imagine singing the lilting ballad All Night and then breaking into the Formation bridge, assuring your beloved you’ll take him to Red Lobster after a night of making love if he brings you joy in said lovemaking? That is goofy, unhinged, unselfconscious joy—kind of like being in love.

See how it is like a scar between their bodies, stronger, darker, and proud.

At Beyoncé’s performance of Love Drought and Sandcastles at the 2017 Grammy’s, as the set ends and her applause begins, the camera cuts to Beyoncé’s husband with their daughter. Her daughter is watching her mother in total awe. Her mother, who is performing this set while pregnant with twins, has a golden headpiece like a halo on a medieval saint. She has life inside of her—she is bearing life, making life, giving life. She has just performed two songs about the desolation of being alienated from the one you need more than anyone else in the world. And you can see that, from this bright moment, her daughter has received a lemonade recipe from her mother.

She has seen what you can make when you have the inner strength to make lemons into lemonade. To love with proud flesh between you. To hold on tightly and heal gloriously, to make the beauty that will save the world.

1. The first act, Renaissance (2022), is a magnum opus of disco ball fever dream of club music and electronic dance music, and would it surprise you to learn that I am not super familiar with either the drag ballroom or Bushwick warehouse scene? I have never been to a rave or done ketamine! If I had known that these activities would have prepared me to better understand and appreciate a Beyoncé album, I might have invested more leisure time and energy into dropping molly at the club in my twenties. Sadly, that ship has sailed.

2. Broken clocks are right twice a day, etc.

3. As Beyoncé says, “I’m not bossy, I’m the boss.” Undeniable.

4. That to be a woman means to desire, to love, to be overwhelmed by another, to give birth, to generate, to bear fruit, to give life. Catholics love to talk about spiritual motherhood, as though spiritual and physical motherhood were somehow distinct or able to be separated. What feminism in the time of capitalism gets wrong is not that motherhood is the burden, it’s that the world we live in makes it so. The injustice of patriarchy is not that it relegates women to be mothers, but that it denies mothers decision-making power in how society ought to be organized. Women are supposed to slot into a system that is sterile, designed to exploit and maximize profits rather than give life to the world. Mothers are the most powerful force in the world. The problem with our world is that mothers are not in positions of power and authority. The injustice of capitalism is not that it sees women as nurturers, but that it alienates men from their desire to nurture, to steward, to raise up the next generation. We are all made to bear life into the world. It would be nice to have a world that made it easier to do that.

5. Although Beyoncé is wealthy enough to be “financially independent,” she does interpolate in this song the words of Malcolm X that contextualize her political identity even in a private relationship: “The most disrespected woman in America is the black woman. The most unprotected person in America is the black woman. The most neglected person in America is the black woman.”