It always hurts a little when you see that a popular artist has become disconnected from his time and goes all the way down his hill with the wrong message, with a new project that seems to have understood everything backwards.
It can happen to anyone, even Beyoncé. The album that he released in the middle of Easter, like an Advent, is being received much less enthusiastically than he probably expected. Cowboy Carter contains 27 songs and a torrent of information that the algorithmic mind processed with its characteristic speed – the important thing is to have a strong opinion about anything and to have it soon – but the discourse is focusing from moment in one of the two versions on the album, the most predictable for a record that wants to reinvent country. Beyoncé has taken Dolly Parton’s Jolene and, wanting to give it an empowered spin, has ended up looking like a bully.
What makes the original song such a big, dark theme is that the woman who is literally begging Jolene not to steal her man has a more fired-up imagination for Jolene than the guy himself, who already ‘intuit irrelevant. With her copper hair, green eyes, springtime smile, Jolene could have anyone. There has never been anyone so magnetic as this magnified rival in the head of the woman who will be mocked.
In the new version, however, there is no plea, there is warning. I know all the tricks, Jolene, I’m a queen and you shouldn’t pick a fight with me, warns a Beyoncé Knowles in the role of Mrs. Carter. By putting all the emphasis on that husband she has been with for 20 years and who she says she “raised”, all the vibrant charge of electricity between the two women is deactivated.
Maybe Beyoncé miscalculated, thought her brand couldn’t afford a verb like beg, that things continue the same as they did in 2013, when she came out to sing Flawless in front of a sign that said “Feminist” and he didn’t need anything else. Eleven years later, even the mainstream demands a nuance, it rewards vulnerability, no matter how imposed it is – is there anything less contemporary than boasting about being in the right mind and having everything clear? – and, above all, he’s dying to know what Jolene thinks about it all.
