Here she comes round again, the horse goddess. When Beyoncé released “Renaissance,” in the summer of 2022—a paean to house music and disco, and to the Black queer people who invented them—the album cover featured the artist perched on a glittering beast. Now, on “Cowboy Carter,” her new country-inspired album, she sits sidesaddle on a live horse, an iteration of the animal that had shattered the disco. She wears latex Stars-and-Stripes rodeo-queen gear, an écru cowboy hat, as if a crown; her hair is blonder than blond, basically ash white. She is holding a large American flag, but half of it has been cut out of the frame; the country has been brought to her scale. The album’s backdrop is pure black, the picture of pre-Genesis nothingness. All manner of culture and history and personality, then, is concentrated in Beyoncé’s image, hovering over a spotlighted patch of rodeo dirt.
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