Tonight marks the 58th annual Country Music Awards ceremony. Some of country music’s biggest stars will take home trophies — but one of the year’s best-selling country artist won’t.
Beyoncé Knowles’ album “Cowboy Carter” was one of the top albums of the year, earning critical raves and tons of press for its exploration of the often-overlooked influence of Black artists on the canon of Americana music. But, it received zero CMA nominations, raising plenty of eyebrows in the music world, and renewing difficult conversations about lingering racism in the country community.
For ASU professor Dr. Neal Lester, the incident recalls the debate surrounding a previous Beyonce release: 2022’s “BREAK MY SOUL.” The song encourages listeners to leave toxic relationships in the name of personal fulfillment and joy. It arrived in the midst of the so-called “Great Resignation” and the aftermath of the George Floyd protests, and it quickly took on a political valence — something Lester says Beyoncé seems to welcome.
Lester recently published an article titled “Beyoncé’s ‘BREAK MY SOUL’: An Anthem of Courage, Resistance, Peace, and Community.” Lester joined The Show to talk about how Beyoncé's work is increasingly focused on inspiring her audience to ask fundamental questions about society.
Full conversation
NEAL LESTER: This is an opportunity to reflect. This is an opportunity to rethink, to remap and to look forward without necessarily being controlled by other people’s expectations. And that’s this courage that’s in the title there, because it takes courage to break away from that.
And even if the breakaway is more an interior breakaway rather than a physical breakaway, there was still a breakaway, because I try to expand in the essay on this notion that it’s any relationship that may be breaking our soul.
So the song became a ripple effect of many things beyond the one or two things that it may have started when we started talking about quitting jobs.
SAM DINGMAN: Yes. And I think some people could listen to that type of relationship with a job and see it as a purely kind of professional, mental health sort of dynamic. But one of the explicit ties that you’re making in the article — and that it seems like Beyoncé is making in her work — is that for folks of color in particular, for queer folks in particular, the idea of taking that kind of self care so that you might have emotional energy available for other activities, perhaps political activities, actually lends a larger civil rights valence to the idea of changing your relationship with work that folks from other communities might not even think about.
LESTER: Well, I do think the song meant different things to different people. I think the song means and meant something very different to women, to Black women, to other women of color. I think it meant something different to queer folks. I think it meant something different to Black people generally.
And I would like to think that there’s a message there that — I hesitate to use the word “universal” — that could be the lens through which anyone could look at the relationships, however we define those, and decide not so much if the relationship is bringing them joy, but are they feeling at peace and satisfied with how they are functioning in a relationship?
And the answer for me that I’ve received from the song was if it’s not, then why are you in that relationship to the extent that you are in it? She’s asking you to look inside yourself and to build a new foundation of what it is you think you want.
DINGMAN: Yes, that it’s about using, like, a framework of possibility.
LESTER: Yes. And it was hard for me not to acknowledge that energy within a historical context. This is not the first time — and I’ll speak in terms of my own studies in African American literature and culture — where black people have had to reach inside themselves and find a resilience so as not to be beat down by these systems that would sometimes kill us or otherwise demonize and dehumanize.
DINGMAN: Yes. You say and this is a quote from the article. You say, “‘BREAK MY SOUL’ sustains Black women vocalists’ legacy of calling for justice and self-empowerment amid personal and systemic injustices.” And that this was, in fact, kind of a continuation for Beyoncé. It’s not like this came out of nowhere for her.
This is something that in particular, in her headlining performance at Coachella, she really made a very significant display of the fact that she wasn’t just a headlining popular artist. She was a popular artist who saw her music as in dialogue with and emergent from very specific cultural influences.
LESTER: Absolutely, which most — or many, I shall say— of the Coachella mostly white audience did not get.
DINGMAN: So tell us, for folks who maybe are not as familiar with the Coachella performance, in the words of one of her fans: “She gets Blacker and more reckless every time.” So tell us about some of that.
LESTER: Well, I’ve never been to Coachella. But I have students who have been. And they tell me there is a certain demographic that goes to Coachella, mostly young white college students who are going there. I haven’t looked up the demographic. I’m not particularly interested in that.
What I was interested in, however, is that as the first Black woman to do Coachella as the headliner, that she chose to bring this historically Black vibe that comes with, Black bands and HBCUs and this kind of energy that comes when you’re seeing these competitions between Black bands at halftime in the Deep South that involve stepping, that involve all kinds of rhythms that are funked up.
And I think that other audiences can appreciate that. But I think it was that unexpected disrupt in of something that seems so “vanilla” that she was sort of adding something in there. This sense of self-love, Black self-love in particular, that people have not quite associated.
DINGMAN: And as you point out, she did not shy away when “BREAK MY SOUL” and the Renaissance album more broadly came out. She did not shy away from calling out the fact that this album was being released, not just around the time of George Floyd, but also in the midst of Pride Month.
LESTER: Juneteenth.
DINGMAN: Juneteenth. She was really making no secret of the tradition that she sees herself as being part of. And in fact, you call her in the piece a conscious disruptor.
LESTER: And that’s because there’s a way in which that can take its toll on your success if you are too political. So I think Beyoncé is in a space where she can afford to do that. What she’s done with “Cowboy Carter” and this disruption of cowboy culture.
DINGMAN: So one of the reasons that your essay is particularly relevant at this particular moment is that Beyoncé was not nominated for any Country Music Awards in spite of releasing one of the bestselling country music albums of the last year.
LESTER: Yep. Yep yep yep yep.
DINGMAN: And that takes us right back to where we began our conversation in terms of why this song? I mean, claiming agency is exactly what “BREAK MY SOUL” is attempting to do.
LESTER: Well, the fact that she hasn’t gotten those Grammys or the fact that she didn’t get a nomination are reminders, again, that your commitment to this has to be bigger than being acknowledged in the ways that people somehow value or don’t value the work that you’re doing. And to go ahead and — as Toni Morrison said and I mentioned in the essay — move outside, stay outside, but make sure that you’re outside in a way that centers you and not necessarily moves you to the margins.
And that’s the part that is the caged bird singing. That is the part that will allow, no matter what the outside world deems as your worth, you can determine your worth with your own foundation and your own vibration. But you’ve got to have the courage to do it.
