Is Beyoncé out of tune with America?

‘I ain’t no regular singer’, declares Beyoncé on Cowboy Carter, her critically acclaimed country-and-western album, released earlier this year. ‘Now come get everythin’ you came for.’

On Christmas Day, she will perform tracks from the album during halftime of the National Football League game between her hometown team, Houston Texans, and the Baltimore Ravens. It will be broadcast live on Netflix and available to the streaming service’s 280million subscribers.

Those tuning in for Beyoncé’s half-time show will get a better deal than those fans who showed up to the Democrats’ rally in her native Texas in October, to watch her endorse Kamala Harris for the presidency. They got nothin’ of what they came for. They were short-changed by a brief speech in which Beyoncé (largely) mouthed the platitudes found on the lips of Oprah Winfrey and Michelle Obama throughout Harris’s campaign.

Beyoncé was far from the only superstar to throw her weight behind Harris. At the Las Vegas rally, J-Lo returned to being Jenny from the block, riffing on her Latino roots, while ramping up the accent. In Michigan, Lizzo, then with sexual- and racial-harassment allegations hanging over her, was there supporting Harris. While in Milwaukee, support came from Cardi B, uncharacteristically dressed for a funeral rather than an OnlyFans session. What they all shared with Harris was an inability to provide a valid reason for voting Democrat (even when it came to a contentious issue on which they have a point – namely, reproductive rights).

There was something low-rent about the whole Harris campaign, despite the billions invested in it and a series of rallies ‘headlined by more celebrities than Coachella’, as Marie Claire described it. These mega-wealthy superstar backers were wheeled out to champion a contender you simply didn’t believe they had much faith in.

No one seemed more lacking in conviction than Beyoncé. You can be convinced by her when it comes to her pitching her whisky brand (SirDavis), her hair products (Cécred), and the earnestness and effort she puts into her art. But she always seemed too smart and savvy to throw her support behind someone as inept as Harris. Although, as one reporter pointed out, it would be remiss for the biggest black female performer in the world not to back the first black woman in reach of the American presidency. ‘Our voices sing a chorus of unity’, Queen Bey boomed out during the pro-Harris rally. Regally addressing her loyal subjects, she called for ‘a world where we’re not divided’.

Yet the people partly responsible for dividing America were on the stages at those rallies – that is, the celebrity elite which subscribes to the unpopular identity politics that ultimately made Trump the better prospect in the eyes of the poor, huddled masses. Even the presence of the Obamas at the Harris campaign rallies couldn’t lift them. In the absence of their previous stature, they emerged like contestants on Bill Cosby’s You Bet Your Life from yesteryear, as clueless about the questions as they were the answers. In Philadelphia, at the last of the rallies, Oprah wore a t-shirt that played on Barack Obama’s most famous line. Seldom has a slogan had such a short shelf life – ‘Yes she can’.

America has a problem, according to Beyoncé on her 2022 Renaissance album. She’s right about that. But like the rest of America’s cultural elites, she’s wrong to reduce it to the supposedly racist, sexist views of the people. Harris didn’t lose because she’s a black woman, although these are the only two recommendations that originally parachuted her into the role of vice-president, before propelling her into the presidential race. She lost because the Democrats had nothing to offer the American people.

The elite cries of ‘America is a racist country’ don’t cut it any more. This and similar chants heard from the embers of the Black Lives Matter movement and Democrats embittered by Trump’s victory further confirm that. As Beyoncé herself once pointed out, America needs to sing a new song. Just not the one her and her fellow celebrities hope to hear. After the savagery and the mayhem, the BLM movement was officially discredited when it was ultimately exposed as a money-making racket in 2022. Or maybe its death knell was rung before this, when Sixties relic and Hollywood’s in-house revolutionary, Jane Fonda, put on a beret and gave it her backing in the summer of 2020.

With this in mind, it would be passé and démodé of Beyoncé to riff on the Black Panther cosplay and the Black Lives Matters references at the NFL performance on Christmas Day. This was the routine she employed during her half-time show at the 50th Super Bowl in 2016. It was the performance in which she launched the song, ‘Formation’, and sung ‘I like my Negro nose with Jackson 5 nostrils’. It was later the inspiration for what a supportive critic described as ‘one of the most political music videos in recent memory’. The film features Beyoncé lying on the roof of a sinking, water-logged police car in New Orleans – reputedly a response to the plight of black residents during Hurricane Katrina, 13 years earlier.

Perhaps this was the point. The point at which Beyoncé embraced racial identity politics. The point at which she stopped being nice. From those first moments in the spotlight with 1990s girl-group Destiny’s Child she was always nice. It was in her nature. She was, and perhaps remains, the courteous, demure, shy, well-brought-up, family-oriented, God-fearing 16-year-old girl that the 28-year-old Jay-Z met at a party in 1997. (They were married in 2008.)

Something did seem to change during the 2010s. As she put it in 2023: ‘I spent so much of my life being a serial pleaser, and finally, I don’t give a fuck.’ But maybe she didn’t stop being nice, she simply did what every wealthy black entertainer has to do to cling on to their street cred having clocked up the cash, the staff, the mansion in Montecito, the home in the Hamptons, the holiday bolthole in Aspen – go back to black. That is, prove themselves to be more homie than honky; still the poor kid from the projects; still the Jenny from the block. It’s the journey Whitney Houston embarked on the night of the 1989 Soul Train Awards. This was the moment she met Bobby Brown, having been booed by the crowd when her name was announced during the nominations, because her look and her sound were now ‘too white’.

By way of control and creativity, Beyoncé is having the career that Whitney Houston missed out on. It’s a long time since 1993, when she was a runner-up as part of Girls Tyme on Fox TV’s Star Search, and later, on these shores, when she performed a duet with Britain’s Alexandra Burke on the final of The X Factor, in 2008. Her niceness and courteousness was evident in a brief excruciating exchange with the show’s host, Dermot O’Leary. It certainly suggested there was more depth to her than the company she was keeping in that moment.

The niceness was evident the following year at the MTV Video Music Awards, when Kanye West snatched the microphone from 19-year-old Taylor Swift as she won the award for Best Female Video, demanding it be given to Beyoncé for ‘Single Ladies’. In the audience, Beyoncé seemed genuinely embarrassed. When she finally collected an award at the 2009 VMAs, she called Taylor Swift on stage and stepped back before speaking: ‘I remember being 17 years old. Up for my first MTV award with Destiny’s Child. It was one of the most exciting moments in my life. So I’d like for Taylor to come out and have her moment.’ It was a genuinely honourable, courteous, decent gesture. It was nice.

But a lot has changed between Beyoncé’s performance of racial identity politics, complete with raised fist Black Panther-style, at the 2016 Super Bowl, and the NFL show on Christmas Day this year. A pandemic closed America and the world down and a cost-of-living crisis has taken hold. In 2024, what unites, rather than divides, a majority of Americans, whatever their faith, race or gender, is the utter boredom that consumes them when subjected to the bleat of black victimhood from celebrities who are billionaires themselves, or married to spouses that are. (Jay-Z is the wealthiest music artist in the world according to Forbes, with a fortune estimated at $2.5 billion in 2024.) Returning to history to flag up the brutal prejudice of the past, to cancel the privilege of their present status, is equally redundant. If reparations for slavery are in the offing, it’s unlikely many of the rich figures calling for them will be in line for a pay out, not least because, in certain instances, their ancestors weren’t slaves but in fact slave owners.

History is being re-written as myth, to satisfy the cosmetic diversity of the modern age. ‘History is often told by the victors’, Beyoncé says. ‘And American history? It’s been rewritten endlessly.’ An error she attempts to correct when it comes to the black experience and her music. This was the case with 2022’s Renaissance – a homage to the gay black roots of house and disco. This year’s release, Cowboy Carter, the second album in a proposed trilogy, might warrant charges of cultural appropriation, as she dabbles in country and western while wearing bad blonde wigs that even Tammy Wynette would have rejected. But Beyoncé believes she is simply moving the black story into spaces from which it has been excluded, or giving credit to the role black figures played within a culture that for so long denied them their rightful place. The cosplay has shifted from the Black Panthers to the pioneers and the prairies.

Ultimately, Cowboy Carter isn’t exclusively or traditionally a country album. The first single taken from it, ‘Texas Hold ’em’, is a brilliantly executed, beautifully produced, quaint-yet-contemporary pop song. This latest chapter in Beyoncé’s career builds on the ambitions and the goals that have defined it thus far (the most nominated and awarded artist in the history of the Grammys). This year, she became the first black woman to top Billboard’s Hot Country Songs chart.

In a recent interview with men’s magazine GQ, she gave an insight as to the forensic detail and research that goes into the albums, the documentary films and the tours. She rarely gives interviews these days, and this one, conducted via email, had the air of one written in parts by a PR team or AI. But you hoped her authentic voice was in their somewhere, as there was an eloquence to it that was absent when her and fellow celebrities took to the stages at those rallies for Kamala Harris:

‘I’m drawn to authenticity. I don’t waste my time on something unless I’m deeply passionate about it. If I don’t wake up thinking about it and I’m not going to sleep dreaming about it, it’s not for me. My perception of what success looks like, for me, is very different than most. When I commit, I’m 100 per cent in. I prefer to focus quietly, uninterrupted by things that are a distraction to the authenticity.’

For the Beyoncé performance on Christmas Day, the obligatory taking of the knee and the raising of the fist will no doubt be among the moves within the dance routines. But if BLM-style posturing doesn’t quite have the pull it had a few years ago, neither does the feminism Beyoncé riffs on – certainly in the light of recent developments that have made the private life of Mr and Mrs Carter newsworthy.

When it emerged in the mid-2010s that Jay-Z had been embroiled in an extra-marital affair, his wife addressed it in her music, and publicly forgave him. At the time of writing, Jay-Z is the subject of a lawsuit filed by an unnamed plaintiff who alleges that, aged 13, she was drugged and raped by him and Sean ‘Diddy’ Combs at a party in 2000. Jay-Z has dismissed this as a ‘blackmail attempt’, and said that true justice is coming his way. In words akin to the battle cries from his wife and similar celebrities at those Democratic rallies, he stated on X: ‘We fight from victory, not for victory.’ Whether these allegations prove to have some foundation, or fade away, they cast a giant shadow over the NFL concert screened by Netflix – despite the show of unity the Carter family presented at the world premier of Mufasa: The Lion King, in Hollywood earlier this month.

But, as she has pointed out in her songs throughout the decades, Beyoncé is a ‘survivor’. She has overcome other obstacles – her husband’s infidelity; coming second on Star Search. She’s an ‘independent woman’ with a fortune estimated to be worth $760million. She will do everything in her power to protect her marriage, her family and her brand. In the grand ole country-and-western tradition, she will stand by her man.

Michael Collins is a writer, journalist and broadcaster. He is the author of The Likes Of Us: A Biography of the White Working Class.