In June 2025 I had the pleasure and the privilege of attending the third of six dates at Tottenham Hotspur Stadium in London for Beyoncé’s “Cowboy Carter” stadium tour, showcasing the 2024 album of the same name. I consider this show more of a continuation of than a sequel to 2023’s “Renaissance” tour, also a tour of the 2022 album of the same name, which is as strong a contender as any to date for the finest record of the 2020s, and which I was also lucky enough to attend.
It would seem a stretch to describe the themes and conceptualisations of the “Renaissance” tour as ‘smuggled’ given Beyoncé’s status as an astronomical pop mega-star, but while the very similar ideas which flow through said album have been widely and deeply engaged with, they are perhaps most strongly realised on that stage, and have not always been covered with the significance they command in my view. Like the album, that stage show pushes forward thematics centred around an interrogation of the black and queer roots and history of house music, wider dance and disco music and dance culture, with an especial focus on ballroom. As part of this exploration, its messaging is explicitly radical and heavily focused on notions of joy, belonging, peace and love, experiences and emotions which are actualised live among the artist’s fan community. In the modern climate, I believe these to be nothing short of revolutionary positions.
Personally, I found this deeply moving and empowering to be immersed within, and it was with delight that I found the “Cowboy Carter” tour to, even if inevitably, move along similar conceptual lines. Like its sister album, the show this time engages with the hidden black histories of country music, the symbolism of America and its culture and the reclamation of aspects of both as being unapologetically black. It seemed to me to eschew some of the most politically radical underpinnings of “Renaissance” despite this, while only further emboldening its celebration of the touchstones of family, community and identity, which is utterly radical in its own way. The entire jamboree is a marvellous triumph, and we await part three of this trilogy in both album and live show form with positively giddy anticipation.
The “Cowboy Carter” tour, as mentioned, pulls no punches in asserting the rightful place of blackness within the narratives of a specific musical genre and the United States as a country, utilising corresponding video packages, the album’s incredible songs, call-and-response moments with all of the charged racial history implicit within that and various visual and vocal allegories both subtly and explicitly sociopolitical along the way.
As anyone who knows their history ought to, I found it striking to see such a show play out so colourfully, boldly and beautifully in the heart of London, a city which was once the nerve centre of the Transatlantic slave trade, albeit at a remove from the living hell of said atrocities, especially since their shockwaves continue to considerably influence how we live. Not far from my mind was another much different but also excellent 2024 album confronting this history head-on; “The Great Bailout” by Moor Mother, stage name of the incendiary and diabolically brilliant Philadelphia poet, musician and spoken word artist Camae Ayewa.
The latest in a string of outstanding records, but Moor Mother’s darkest to date by my reckoning, “The Great Bailout” contends with the Slavery Abolition Act 1833, an act of the UK Parliament abolishing slavery and compensating former slave owners, with not a penny paid to former slaves or their countries. Through this prism, the record, which is studded with avant-garde guest stars from Lonnie Holley to Angel Bat Dawid to Vijay Iyer, tackles slavery and colonialism in the UK and its relationship to the historical structuring of capitalism and its functioning to this very day, hacking miraculously through the dense thickets of time to transport the listener there.
Against all odds, on a foggy, chilling record characterised by haunting horn work, grinding, twisted and experimental percussive textures and a steamy, metallic atmosphere which nods to slavery’s enabling of Britain’s Industrial Revolution, Moor Mother places us deeply, unnervingly into the centre of the raw, gaping injustices of the past which continue to shape our societies in the present. One cannot listen to the penultimate nine-minute track “South Sea” with an understanding and awareness of the central themes and not be shaken and distressed to the core, a testament to her power as an artist and collaborator with the countless underground talents present on “The Great Bailout”. The steely, robotic clatter of “Liverpool Wins” is the stand-out to my ears, frighteningly marrying the past to the present through its gloriously disturbing sonics, and contextualising the economic competition of Britain’s 19th century slave-trading port cities by way of comparison to modern day footballing feuds.
While in London this summer I also headed to the National Portrait Gallery to take in their exhibition of Edvard Munch portraits. Best known for his 1893 work “The Scream”, which has passed over firmly into popular culture, Munch left behind an extensive body of portraiture. While not captured anything like completely here, I nonetheless came away feeling I had witnessed some of the horrors not just of the human condition but of subjectivism, from the handiwork of an artist often credited with a proto-existentialism, often linked to Nietzsche (and who painted his portrait despite never meeting him) and whose later life was considerably impacted by the Second World War. It wasn’t lost on me that Beyoncé and her husband Jay-Z are often considered, or perhaps more appropriately I should say accused of being, capitalism’s favourite musicians, along with all of the individualism mixed up and entailed within this. This, to me, is what makes Beyoncé’s employment of her almost unrivalled global platform to broadcast some of the ideas and ideals I referred to earlier all the more striking, and speaks to a complex inter-relationship between art, beauty and contemporary societal contexts in the same way as Munch’s artistic legacy could.
All the same, this isn’t the artistic offering within the walls of the National Portrait Gallery which seemed the most meaningful to me. On the gallery’s second floor, in room 23, hangs Thomas Jones Barker’s 1862-1863 work, “The Secret of England’s Greatness”, a large and somewhat turgidly framed painting depicting Queen Victoria presenting a bible very much downwards into the hands of an unidentified African ambassador. The painting very effectively exemplifies the Victorian leveraging of propaganda, specifically the channelling of supposed religious and racial justifications for imperialism and hierarchy in depicting the moral superiority of the English people and nation. Up close the canvas undoubtedly packs a glow, and I came to wonder if some of the tense, horrid stirrings of recent English summers explained this, perhaps with its apparent in-person thrum reducing in times of greater harmony (perceived or otherwise), like something from “Ghostbusters II”.
The crucial importance here is that Barker’s painting is referred to by Moor Mother in the lyrics of “Liverpool Wins”:
“1856, the opening of the National Portrait Gallery/Full of lies/Europeans’ first encounter with a mirror and look how they see themselves/In the famous painting of Queen Victoria she is presenting a Bible to a Moor in Windsor/Called ‘The Secret of England’s Greatness’”.
This, as much as any of the depictions of slave transportation or regular demands for reparations which have instead been used to build a capitalist world of injustice both financial and otherwise, perfectly portrays the anger of Moor Mother’s album. She has spoken of the necessity of exploring this area specifically through the lens of the United Kingdom despite not having face-value links to the country, given that all people of African origin and ethnicity are indubitably tied to and affected by the country due to its centrality in Atlantic slavery, a process which, as mentioned, influences our societies to this very day. While they may differ considerably in focus and tone, this for me mirrored Beyoncé’s own reclamation and reassertion of history in the name of black justice. It is at this nexus where the seemingly disparate and disconnected worlds of pop music and underground music intersect, blend and collide explosively and sometimes flip positions in unexpected and seemingly improbable fashions that we can locate the territory upon which and the community through which to bring about radical sociopolitical discussion and change via the refractions of pop culture.
As I write this months later and as England is widely dotted with St George’s flags variously flapping in the breeze or vandalised onto roads in the name of something much uglier than a so-called patriotism, the histories challenged, memorialised and re-advocated on the two records I have touched upon demonstrate very powerfully and trenchantly why, like the artists who brought them into the world with their own distinguishing and divergent admixtures of passion, love, fury and unalloyed strength, those of us who know these pasts and the ways in which they flow through history will never stop fighting for justice and equality, today and for the future.
Roads To The North 