It's always a bit embarrassing when you realize that a popular artist has become disconnected from his time and suddenly comes down from his hill with the wrong message, understanding everything backwards.
It can happen to anyone, even Beyoncé. The album that she released in the middle of Easter, like an Advent, is being received much less enthusiastically than she surely expected. Cowboy Carter contains 27 songs and a torrent of information that algorithmic thinking processed with the speed that characterizes it – the important thing is to have a strong opinion about anything and have it quickly – but the discourse is currently focusing on one of the two versions that the album contains, the most predictable for an album that wants to reinvent country. Beyoncé has taken Dolly Parton's Jolene and, wanting to give it an empowered spin, she has ended up looking like a bully.
What makes the original song such a big and murky topic is that the woman who literally begs this Jolene not to steal her man has an imagination more fired up by Jolene than the same guy, who we already sense Irrelevant. With her copper hair, her green eyes, her spring-like smile, Jolene could have anyone. There has never been anyone as magnetic as that aggrandizing rival in the head of the woman who is going to be mocked.
In the new version, however, there is no supplication, 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 Mrs. Carter mode. By putting all the emphasis on the husband she has been with for 20 years and whom she claims to have “raised,” all that vibrant charge of electricity between the two women is deactivated.
Maybe Beyoncé miscalculated, she thought that her brand couldn't afford a verb like beg, that things are still the same as in 2013, when she went out to sing Flawless (without blemish) in front of a sign that said "Feminist" and she didn't do it. Need more. Eleven years later, even the mainstream demands a nuance, rewards vulnerability, no matter how fake it may be – is there anything less contemporary than boasting about being right in the head and having everything clear? – and, above all, it is dying of I want to know what Jolene thinks about all this.
