The Singles Jukebox

Maybe the colossal discography of Beyoncé — which now includes country music — might lend a clue?

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Dorian Sinclair: Rhiannon Giddens’ banjo is the first thing you hear on “Texas Hold ‘Em,” and it’s both a lovely introduction in its own right and a suggestion that Beyoncé is undertaking this genre shift in a smart, informed way. The banjo work isn’t the only standout on the track, either. Beyoncé, as always, knows how to wrap her voice around a melody line, and the backing harmonies are frequently gorgeous. I just wish the song that this is all in service to felt a little less slight. “Texas Hold ‘Em” is undeniably a real country song — but a middling one.
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Rachel Saywitz: Beyoncé’s long-awaited country turn is a bit lackluster, if only due to the nonsensicality of it—I find it hard to believe that the rumored Vegas Sphere headliner has been to a grimy Southern dive bar, drinking bad whiskey out of Solo cups, even once during the past few decades of her career. “Texas Hold ‘Em” sounds like what a pop star thinks country sounds like: stomp claps, echoing vocals, the word “hoedown.” Even with Rhiannon Giddens playing a banjo riff ready-made for the barnyard dance hall, the song is a bit too commercial to be fully believable. Yet as on even the most lackluster Beyoncé songs, her vocals and intonation save the track from diving into pure pop country slop. Her growls in the chorus fit the song’s overstated twang, and while the second verse’s depiction of a heatwave seems totally devoid of Beyoncé’s material reality, she rises to meet the drama with a tenor that sounds almost believable. 
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Daniel Montesinos-Donaghy: Beyond the camp appeal of listing country apparel (“boots! spurs!”), this is shockingly half-assed stuff from Beyoncé. Lyrically and sonically, it’s the type of inoffensive pablum engineered to soundtrack a commercial for the new Lexus TX, with nothing spiky to distract from how its three-row luxury treats every seat like the best seat.
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Aaron Bergstrom: I understand that country songs are not required to be true-to-life first-person narratives, but I would believe that Johnny Cash actually shot a man in Reno before I would believe that Beyoncé has ever set foot in a dive bar.
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Brad Shoup: She’s jumped right into the vibe of a country singer on the gentle downslope: the easygoing, modest gem that tips its hat at contemporary songwriting but is mostly an excuse for a nice hang. It’s here for a good time, not a long time. The banjo’s loping; the acoustic has a nice percussive affect. We’re here to do a little stepping, not watch the band cut loose. The text itself is about a rich couple dabbling in the honky-tonk lifestyle—the image of perhaps the most in-control pop star of the century popping into a dive bar on a lark is pretty funny. The sampled piano and whistling at the end suggest another kind of dive; suddenly, it’s the aughts and she’s checking out Grizzly Bear with her sister.
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Jackie Powell: Beyoncé’s decision to release the instrumental to “Texas Hold ‘Em” and its a cappella versions accentuates her desire to remind those who love her, and those who might not, of the innate musicality that she has always possessed. She’s not just great because she’s Beyoncé. Her knowledge of music history—which has been a motif in her solo work since 2016—and also her vocal tone and ability to emote through her four-octave range are essential to her greatness. Between her intonation of each hook of “Texas Hold ‘Em,” which captures how bouncy a hoedown feels in person, to the stunning two-part and sometimes three-part harmonies in the verses, Knowles gives such a memorable and fun vocal performance. Those overdubbed harmonies are so bright. They give off a warmth that feels like a much more enjoyable morning alarm. The banjo, which is heard throughout, is played by Rhiannon Giddens — yet another example of Beyoncé’s methodology when it comes to using her platform. Her modus operandi as of late has been to use the attention she attracts to bring the mainstream public to those who have been doing the work and under-recognized in the genres she’s making music in. This willingness to uplift artists continues to be noble, but I question how self-aware Beyoncé is when she mentions parking a Lexus in the hook. While this is a reference to her partnership with the luxury car brand over the summer that provided half of a million dollars to small minority-owned businesses, it still comes off as a bit out of touch with the communities she’s paying homage to. 
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Jeffrey Brister: I’m astounded that Beyoncé released a song that sounds so dilettantish. The beginning really gets me—I’m getting ready for something incredible. And then it just…keeps going and going. It sounds marginally more country than “You Should Be Sad.”
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Nortey Dowuona: The difficulty in writing music, especially popular music, is that when composing songs, the most catchy, acceptable, understandable sounds become so overused that anyone who’s spent a lifetime paying attention to popular music in all its forms could start noticing the similarities. Megan Bulow, a German singer who lived in Texas at 14, is credited as a songwriter on this song, as well as Lowell, a Canadian singer who briefly tried to share the good news of her involvement and later took down the video. They both have written lyrics such as “I’m going all white at your funeral/if you think I’m gonna cry, you’re delusional” from bulow’s “Boys Will Be Boys” and “but not me, I’m free/by the wings on my back on my shoulder blades” from Lowell’s “Runaways” — two songs I picked from their discography at random that have lyrics evocative enough to jump off the page but empty enough for a stronger, more defined voice to take ownership. This is hopefully a reason they were chosen to work with Beyoncé. Raphael Saadiq, Killa B, and Nathan Ferraro are listed as producers alongside Beyoncé; Rhiannon Giddens is playing the banjo and viola, Khirye Tyler is playing the piano alongside Saadiq, Ferraro and Lowell as well as the bass, Saadiq is credited for piano, organ, and bass alongside Tyler and Ferraro and drums alongside Killa B. Hit-Boy is playing the synthesizer and contributing to additional production work as well as Mariel Gomerez and Stuart White. I’m just saying — if any of these people watched Franklin when they were young and interpolated it, it was definitely an accident. The deeper one goes into making one little song, the spiderwebs of avoiding even partial similarities to existing songs is becoming less charming and more sinister. It is so difficult that I can list all of these veterans of the industry allied and united in creating this great, if only slightly vague song, but a random person can notice a similarity to a kids’ TV show’s theme song, and it can gain enough steam for the composer to gently and firmly deny it. Don’t be a bitch, just take it to the floor now.
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Hannah Jocelyn: Props for rendering Noah Kahan redundant, but bettering one of Mumford’s sons isn’t saying much. The song is cute — I won’t mind hearing it in every sandwich shop for the next year or so — but of the two songs Bey released, this is by far the less engaging one.
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Taylor Alatorre: The difference between this song and “16 Carriages,” and “Daddy Lessons” as well, is that it doesn’t feel like either of those two songs expects me to be impressed by the mere fact of its existence. “Don’t be a bitch,” as the eternal anti-critic refrain goes — what, were you expecting a reverent, sepia-toned tribute to Bob Wills or something? Just accept the thing for what it is, turn off your brain, and have some down-home country fun, dammit! And as a born-and-bred Texan who’s unduly excited for the upcoming Twisters film, I so wish I could. But those mechanical stomps, those painfully forced “woo”s, the “dive bar we always thought was nice,” and the chirping cricket sound effect that someone probably put in as a joke and then forget to remove: all of this is laziness dressed up as genre-busting. Rhiannon Giddens is called up to add more subtextual fodder about the Black roots of country, but with the anonymized production she’s given, it comes across as just more stats-padding for next year’s Grammys. Only in the outro does Beyoncé suddenly remember that she can do Beyoncé things with her voice, sprinkling some belated shards of personality onto a stiff composition that wouldn’t be out of place on a filler episode of Phineas & Ferb. If Bey still has Diplo in her contacts, it may have been worth giving him a ring for this — feels icky to say it, but he can at least make the appropriation go down smooth when he tries.
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Katherine St. Asaph: Has anyone done a tally of the number of country songs that mention the word “hoedown,” versus the number of pop songs? Would the hypothetical person who’d do so not be among the most tiresome people in the world? “Texas Hold ‘Em” (and companion single “16 Carriages,” to a lesser degree) is an argument as much as it is a song. As on Renaissance, Beyoncé and her team have done careful, purposeful curation to showcase Black women in country — and it’s earned those women actual streaming boosts (if maybe not literal streaming dividends), which is pretty cool. But the thoroughness and fervor with which she proves this song’s authenticity has inevitably — and deliberately, I should add — invited Discourse. And as usual, that Discourse keeps missing the most obvious points. There’s no use arguing how properly rootsy this sounds or how storied its session musicians are. The country purists object because of the usual respectability politics — i.e., Beyoncé says “bitch” and has her boobs out in the video — and those politics form an auricular plug in them that is so strong that this could sound like literally anything and still be dismissed as pop. There’s not much more use digging into the whys and why-nots of its country radio airplay. Country radio is playing this because country radio is dominated by iHeartMedia aka Clear Channel, who have the playlisting power that comes with monopoly and the inclination to support fellow megabrands. (Aside: According to Hits Daily Double, after the iHeart execs made their airplay decree, “[they then excused themselves as they were due to have their Stetsons blocked.”) While the historical context and broken barriers are undeniably worth taking seriously, they’ve also kind of led people to make more of the song than what it is. “Texas Hold ‘Em” is mostly frivolous, and that’s fine! The melody is a grin put to sheet music. It’s also a pop song, and that is also fine! If it’s a country song about nothing more than the fact that it’s a country song, then so are enough country-radio hits that not even I can write a sentence long enough to do the one-YouTube-link-per-word gag for them all. (And “Texas Hold ‘Em” would probably be delivered as much more of a gimmick if it was instead given to Lennon Stella or Hailee Steinfeld or Madison Beer, or any of the other B-minus-listers that co-writer Lowell has sold songs to.) Any holdout doubters are advised to listen to the end, where the genres stop competing for views space and start to truly simmer together, with all the heat that implies.
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Jacob Sujin Kuppermann: Fulfills the promise of Beyoncé-fied country only in its last 45 seconds – the house pianos interwoven with finger-picked guitars are almost psychedelic in effect, emerging out of the stomp of the rest of the song in a dazzling clarity. There, she’s fragmented and lucid all at once, singing individual words and phrases each laden with strange wells of meaning. Everything else is just slightly too chipper, the joy of those whoops and whistles and nonsensical lines about various bars coming off like strange procedural imitations of authentic human experience.
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Isabel Cole: The song reveals itself as more of a fluffy little nothing with each listen, and while it’s carefully assembled it feels perhaps too careful—this is very well-mannered for a song about greeting life’s disasters with reckless abandon. Still, I love the way the melody twists on the pre-chorus, and I’ve always tended to favor the Beyoncé songs where she relies more on her unbeatable vocal charisma than the ones on which she flexes her sheer power. The way you can almost see her drawl Don’t be a bitch, come take it to the floor now keeps me coming back.
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Alfred Soto: I don’t care whether it “sounds country.” It sounds like Beyoncé, just like Madonna made Madonna music and Bowie made Bowie music: they absorbed genres, reconstituted their DNA, and discarded the ephemera. “Texas Hold ‘Em” treats contractions and banjos like Madonna did acoustic guitars on the chopped salad mix of “Don’t Tell Me”: an excuse to express whatever she damn pleases.  A fab radio track that reduces The Weeknd’s latest to a puddle, “Texas Hold ‘Em” is a challenge, a provocation, no more and no less.
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Mark Sinker: Reacting against the discourse™? froth up just as you’d expect round this light, slight, likeably McCartney-ish near-fragment of a song, it’s time to turn to sometime TSJ-er Frank Kogan in his essay ‘Roger Williams in America,’ the first superwords essay, as collected here, on the decades-old problem of authenticity, or actually the problem of the problem: “The discussion never seems to go anywhere, since the tendency is for people to debunk ‘authenticity’ without first trying to understand it (…) Rather than debunking it, I would want to explore the power of the real, why the search for the real has such a hold on rock. It’s not a problem to be stopped. I think this is one of the good things about rock (…) Even when the manifestations are stupid, rock’s uneasiness is profound. Great rock thrives on insecurity (…)”. Even back in 2006, the word “country” couldn’t always just be switched in anywhere to replace “rock” as an obvious identity — though the reason there’s a kerfuffle going on right now (or part of the reason, as ppl enthuse or recoil) is that the search for the real does also have a powerful hold on country. So you can swap words in and sometimes still get sense. Switch more words in and out of these sentences and (by the transitive properties of equality!) we will reach this: “Beyoncé’s uneasiness is profound.” And suddenly this seems much less of a slam-dunk. It surely isn’t the case in this song; to me it’s not much the case elsewhere either. Quite the opposite, in fact. She does not usually come across as (to quote Frank again, it’s a very quotable essay) “born in flight, chased by fear”. And you could — or I could — happily argue that this superb confidence is one of the great things about her. Take it all back out of algebra, though, and the upshot here is yes, of course, Beyoncé can be country, if and only if (of as logicians write it, “iff”) country both is and isn’t rock; when it’s bothered about the real yet at the same time not at all uneasy. I like this as a conclusion, because it has also to mean a whole bunch of stuff is going to be gently churned up — less by the song itself, to be sure, than by all the panics and chatter around the song. It’s an unstable solution, and even if you turn to the extremely solid undergirding supplied in this nice long interview with banjo-scholar and picker Rhiannon Giddens, complete with all kinds of detail you’d need to firm up several arguments (details that include Yo Yo Ma), you’re acknowledging that authority and justification are going at some point and in some places to need ruggedly repositioning or reclaiming, immediate catchy unruffled serenity notwithstanding. 
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Ian Mathers: I think it’s both good and interesting to discuss the broader genre considerations (sonic, political, aesthetic, emotional, etc etc etc) of this, but I am neither qualified to do that myself nor interested in doing it. So let me just say that, while I have not looked up how it’s actually doing, “Texas Hold ‘Em” feels like it ought to be a hit, not in some overdetermined four-quadrant you’ll-take-it-whether-or-not-you-like-it sense, but just because… it’s so much fun! It feels like the kind of song all sorts of people will find entertaining and might catch themselves singing along to. Beyoncé is clearly prominent enough it’s got a shot, and god knows all sorts of cultural factors might boost it or hold it back, but a world where this is blasting out of everyone’s radios just feels nice and somehow correct.
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Dave Moore: I don’t like admitting to myself that I find Beyoncé more exhausting than Taylor Swift (in part because everything Beyoncé does actually works). It’s some real coolest kid in school is class president and valedictorian and the lead in the school play shit. Once again, the song’s credits are impeccable, and the song itself is fine. 
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Will Adams: Much like the Verizon Super Bowl ad that kicked off her new promo cycle, this on-the-nose genre dress-up feels beneath Beyoncé. Renaissance proved she was willing to put in the research. Synthesizing that into something exciting requires more work than this.
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Wayne Weizhen Zhang: I want Beyoncé to break barriers making country music as much as the next queer, but please god, I hope the album is more interesting than this Lumineers-sounding fluff. 
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