“I want to hear an American poem,” rings out the voice of Ras Baraka to introduce the second act of Beyoncé’s stadium-conquering Cowboy Carter Tour. “Something American, you know. Some sassy s–t, or South Carolina slave shouter, Alabama backwoods church shack call and response… Are there any American poets in here?” 

Baraka — the current mayor of Newark, N.J., spoken word poet and son of Black Arts Movement luminaries Amiri and Amina Baraka — asks a question that Beyoncé sketches out an answer to through her career-spanning, three-hour Cowboy Carter spectacle. When the 35-time Grammy-winner appeared at the top of the show on July 4, with her cowboy hat tipped down and an American flag fur coat draped over her shoulders, for a few seconds, the bitter realities of life outside of Northwest Stadium seemed to dissipate.  

Taking place just a 25-minute drive from the White House and on the same day President Trump signed his destructive new bill into law, the Cowboy Carter Tour arrived in Landover, Md. in a season ripe for discourse — though that’s been the name of the game for the singer’s current era since she kicked things off with the Billboard Hot 100-topping “Texas Hold ‘Em” during the 2024 Super Bowl. Given its parent album’s themes of illuminating the oft-obfuscated Black roots of country music and her implementation of Americana symbols and aesthetics, many people expected Beyoncé to make some sort of statement during her July 4 show.  

But beyond a quick “Happy Fourth” near the top of the first act, Beyoncé didn’t say much about the holiday (or its pressing present context) during the show. In a way, that made the tour’s overall message even more poignant — while also exposing some of its shortcomings. 

After opening with the rousing “Ameriican Requiem,” a dirge of sorts for “a pretty house that we never settled in,” Beyoncé segued into “Blackbiird,” her faithful cover of the Beatles classic. On the record, Beyoncé’s version of “Blackbird” invites several ascendant Black women in contemporary country music (Brittney Spencer, Tanner Adell, Reyna Roberts and Tiera Kennedy), while her solo live rendition comes after a verbal and visual acknowledgement of the boundary-pushing Black women in entertainment who paved the way for her. After taking the Founding Fathers to task with the first song and honoring her trailblazing foremothers in the second, Beyoncé then delved into a medley of the National Anthem and “Freedom” — perhaps her most direct commentary of the night.

Taking notes from Jimi Hendrix’s iconic Woodstock ‘69 version of “The Star Spangled Banner” — a brooding take on the anthem streaked with startling octave jumps and distorted regressions — Beyoncé’s equally unnerving rendition of the anthem perfectly captured the ominous energy of the current administration. It’s not a moment of pride or patriotism at all; just as Hendrix called on the anguish of the Vietnam War and Dr. Martin Luther King Jr.’s assassination the previous year, Beyoncé funneled the stomach-churning anxiety of the current administration’s Project 2025 rollout into her rendition.  

After reaching exactly midway through the anthem’s first verse, Beyoncé sings, “You were only waiting for this moment to be free” from “Blackbiird,” signaling the transition to “Freedom,” a Grammy-nominated track from her 2016 Lemonade album that served as the official song for Kamala Harris’ 2024 presidential campaign. With its cries of “Freedom, freedom, where are you/ ‘Cause I need freedom too,” the anthemic track — born out of early Black Lives Matter-era fury — smartly complemented her Hendrixifed “Star Spangled Banner” rendition. Yes, she’s draped in red, white and blue, but her vision of America is built on the innate understanding of its countless evils and atrocities.  

She continues to hammer this point with her subsequent medley of “Ya Ya” and “Why Don’t You Love Me?” As she takes stock of America’s fault in the former — albeit in a way that’s not nearly as ballsy as Baraka’s “American Poem” — she uses the latter to process the emotions of a people constantly denied access to a dream that would be incomprehensible without their contributions, both by force and by choice. 

In his close reading of Hendrix’s anthem rendition, writer, musician and academic Paul Grimstad writes: “We find that an electric guitar can be made to convey the feeling that the country’s history could be melted down, remolded, and given a new shape.” And that’s the exact feeling Beyoncé attempts to tap into throughout the Cowboy Carter Tour. It’s why she kicks off the next act with “America Has a Problem.” When she released the Miami bass-laced track alongside the rest of Renaissance in 2022, Beyoncé made it clear that she is America’s problem. As she recontextualizes the song to introduce the show’s Southern hip-hop-rooted section (“My House,” “Diva” and “Formation” all make appearances), America’s problem is no longer just her — it’s all Black people staking their claim to “country,” the fearless innovation of the Black queer community that grounded Renaissance and the resounding confidence of young Black girls like Blue Ivy, who kills her dance solo during the song each night.  

It’s also why “Daughter,” an opera-inflected Cowboy Carter track in which Beyoncé plays America’s scorned daughter, introduces the Renaissance act, a segment lifted from 2023’s Renaissance World Tour that uses house music and ballroom to imagine a version of America that embraces and uplifts all of its citizens. It’s also why she closes the show with an enormous bust of a masked Statue of Liberty, during “Amen.” Clearly, the American project is still in progress — and for Beyoncé, the promise of what the country could be is enough to keep fighting for it. 

Beyoncé has been one of the defining artists of our time from a sociopolitical standpoint since at least 2013’s eponymous surprise album. But the Cowboy Carter Tour begs the question of whether her art is actually meeting the present moment. With Trump’s newly signed bill effectively deading upward class mobility for future generations and the ongoing conflict in Gaza, a lot of Americans understandably don’t just feel betrayed by the American flag, they’re outright rejecting it. For them, the cost of America isn’t outweighed by its promise, so why continue to stake a claim in its current iteration when it can be discarded in favor of something completely new? From the instability of the housing and job markets to the upheaval of federal institutions as they relate to healthcare and the arts, the current moment seems to call for something a bit stronger than allusions and metaphors.

Take Bob Vylan, for example, the English punk-rap duo that was recently dropped by their talent agency, UTA, after calling for a free Palestine and “death to the IDF” at the 2025 Glastonbury Festival. There’s also the way Kendrick Lamar explicitly called out the U.S. using its imagery during his Super Bowl halftime show performance earlier this year — but even that, arguably, pales in comparison to the fearlessness of protester Zul-Qarnain Kwame Nantambu, who crashed the show in support of Gaza and Sudan and was later arrested. More recently, Bad Bunny called U.S. dates for his upcoming Debí Tirar Más Fotos World Tour “unnecessary,” presumably due to the current administration’s targeting of immigrants and Latino people. The same day Beyoncé played Landover, Bad Bunny dropped his “Nuevayol” music video, in which he references the 1977 takeover of the Statue of Liberty by Puerto Rican nationalists and trolls Trump by having an imitator apologize to immigrants in America. These are the kinds of in-your-face, explicit actions that the current climate calls for. They’re naturally divisive and inherently messy moments (particularly Bob Vylan’s), sure, but they make the point unignorable and unmistakable. 

These artists are putting something on the line: touring dollars, industry representation, and even their visas. Yes, much can and should be said about America’s declining literacy rates and the misogynoir people carry when interacting with Beyoncé’s work, but it’s also worth interrogating the effectiveness of art (and its presentation) that ultimately leaves quite so much to interpretation. Queen Bey’s desire to let her art speak for itself is paramount to her brand, but without her speaking on her own intentions as they relate to Cowboy Carter’s political elements, the project can only stand for so much. For what it’s worth, she has spoken plainly and explicitly through the Democratic electoral framework — the effectiveness of which varies wildly depending on who you ask — for the past decade and change, stumping for Obama, Clinton and Harris during their respective races. (She also shared an Instagram post in support of Biden in 2020.)

Perhaps one of Beyoncé’s goals with the Cowboy Carter Tour is to say that the American flag and standard Americana imagery belong to all its people, not just white nationalists or those who favor a WASP-steeped version of the country. Through her costuming alone, she’s challenging whitewashed ideas of who is “allowed” to be seen and understood as American. Maybe another one of those goals is to intentionally lean into those aesthetics to offer a critique of the country, no matter how milquetoast.  

Those are admirable intentions, but they’re borderline impossible to do effectively in a country that often mistakes protest for patriotism. Look at Bruce Springsteen’s “Born in the U.S.A.” becoming an Independence Day anthem despite being about a disillusioned Vietnam veteran’s return home. Or Ethel Cain’s “American Teenager,” an anti-war song that critiques American gun culture and deconstructs the concept of the American Dream, which Barack Obama named one of his favorite songs of 2022. At minimum, hopefully, Cowboy Carter and its tour mark the beginning of some people’s questioning and critique of the American project — even if it may not feel potent enough for those who are already much further down that path.

Throughout the Cowboy Carter Tour, Beyoncé also includes bits of Gil Scott-Heron’s “The Revolution Will Not Be Televised” to call for a sort of metaphorical, cultural and spiritual revolution that makes an expansive version of America the default. Here, she’s trading on the same revolution-minded aesthetics she employed during the Lemonade album era — remember her recreating Huey P. Newton’s iconic peacock chair pose on the Formation World Tour? Or the Malcolm X and Black Panther Party tributes during her “Formation” cameo at the 2016 Super Bowl halftime show?  

If Beyoncé was fully invested in the principles and framework behind those symbols and aesthetics, then she would likely agree that the primary way her cultural revolution will result in a significant improvement of the lived realties and material conditions of oppressed people is through a mass redistribution of wealth and the dismantling of capitalism — two things that are at direct odds to the ethos and essence of what we understand to be the Beyoncé brand. All this is to say, for all its technical achievements and innovations, the Cowboy Carter Tour is a stark reminder that an institution like America will only embrace revolutionary aesthetics in art so long as it can keep selling the dream and concept of revolution, whilst ensuring a material and physical revolution remains virtually impossible. 

Taken as a moment of personal and artistic catharsis, Cowboy Carter and its accompanying tour are two of the strongest musical offerings of the 21st century. Taken as a political statement, things get a bit shaky. But that’s precisely why Beyoncé remains this century’s greatest pop star; no other artist is inspiring this level of debate and conversation on so many different planes at the same time. And they’re certainly not packing stadiums and breaking records outside of their core genre while doing so. As the tour interludes remind us, Cowboy Carter is just the second installment of Beyoncé’s yet-to-be-concluded album trilogy. Of course, nothing is confirmed, but it’s likely those interludes also include bits of a film that will presumably thread together all three albums.  

And that’s probably the most important thing to keep in mind as the Cowboy Carter Tour approaches its close in Las Vegas on July 26. As much as parts of Renaissance gained new meaning upon Cowboy Carter’s release (the “un-American life” she sings of in “I’m That Girl,” for example), Queen Bey’s vision is still incomplete until Act III arrives. Until then, we’ll continue to sit with Cowboy Carter and all its complexities, an apt soundtrack for a country slowly crumbling under the weight of its own contradictions.