So opens the first “Lesbian Health” segment on , a lesbian feminist television series that aired on New York’s public access stations from 1993 to 2006.

The half-hour program focused on lesbian activism, community issues, art and film, news, health, sports, and culture. Created by three artist-activists—Cuban playwright Ana Simo, theater director and producer Linda Chapman, and independent filmmaker Mary Patierno—Dyke TV was one of the first TV shows made by and for LGBTQ women.

While many people might think LGBTQ representation on TV began in the 1990s on shows like and , LGBTQ people had already been producing their own television programming for decades.

In fact hundreds of LGBTQ public access series produced across the country.

In a media environment historically hostile to LGBTQ people and issues, LGBTQ people created their own local programming to shine a spotlight on their lives, communities, and concerns.

Experimentation and Advocacy

On this particular health segment on Dyke TV, a woman proceeds to give herself a cervical exam in front of the camera using a mirror, a flashlight, and .

Close-up shots of this woman’s genitalia show her vulva, vagina, and cervix as she narrates the exam in a matter-of-fact tone, explaining how viewers can use these tools on their own to check for vaginal abnormalities. Recalling the ethos of , Dyke TV instructs audiences to empower themselves in a world where women’s health care is marginalized.

Because public access TV in New York was relatively unregulated, the show’s hosts could openly discuss sexual health and air segments that would otherwise be censored on broadcast networks.

, many of the producers of LGBTQ public access series experimented with genre, form, and content in entertaining and imaginative ways.

LGBTQ actors, entertainers, activists, and artists——appeared on these series to publicize and discuss their work. Iconic drag queen , where The American Music Show gave him a platform to promote his burgeoning drag persona in the mid-1980s:

The producers often saw their series as a blend of entertainment, art, and media activism.

Shows like and were tongue-in-cheek satires of 1950s game shows. News programs such as , which broadcast its first episode in 1985, reported on local and national LGBTQ news and health issues.

Variety shows like in the 1970s, in the 1980s, and in the 1990s combined interviews, musical performances, comedy skits, and news programming. Scripted soap operas, like , starred amateur gay actors. And on-the-street interview programs like used drag and street theater to spark discussions about LGBTQ issues.

Other programs featured racier content. In the 1980s and ’90s, , , and incorporated interviews with porn stars, clips from porn videos, and footage of sex at nightclubs and parties.

Skirting the Censors

The regulation of sex on cable television has long been .

But regulatory loopholes inadvertently allowed sexual content on public access. This allowed hosts and guests to talk openly about gay sex and safer sex practices on these shows—and even demonstrate them on camera.

The impetus for public access television was similar to the ethos of public broadcasting, which sought to create noncommercial and educational television programming .

In 1972, the requiring cable television systems in the country’s top 100 markets to offer access channels for public use. The FCC mandated that cable companies make airtime, equipment, and studio space to individuals and community groups to use for their own programming on a first-come, first-serve basis.

The FCC’s regulatory authority does not extend to editorial control over public access content. For this reason, repeated attempts to block, regulate, and censor programming throughout the , , and were .

The that attempt to censor cable access programming on First Amendment grounds. that contains “obscenity,” but what counts as obscenity is up for interpretation.

Over the years, producers of LGBTQ-themed shows have fiercely defended their programming from calls for censorship, and the law has consistently been on their side.

Airing the AIDS Crisis

As the AIDS crisis began to devastate LGBTQ communities in the 1980s, public access television grew increasingly important.

Many of the aforementioned series devoted multiple segments and episodes to discussing the devastating impact of HIV/AIDS on their personal lives, relationships, and communities. Series like , , and were specifically designed to educate and galvanize viewers around HIV/AIDS activism. With HIV/AIDS receiving —and a —these programs were some of the few places where LGBTQ people could learn the latest information about the epidemic and efforts to combat it.

The long-running program is one of the few remaining LGBTQ public access series; new episodes air locally in New York and nationally via Free Speech TV each week. While public access stations , production has waned since the advent of cheaper digital media technologies and streaming video services in the mid-2000s.

And yet during this media era—let’s call it “peak public access TV”—these scrappy, experimental, sexual, campy, and powerful series offered remarkable glimpses into LGBTQ culture, history, and activism.

This article is republished from under a Creative Commons license. Read the .

Here, lush date palms once shadowed a serene oasis called La Source Bleue: shallow pools that filled naturally from the underground aquifer. Until 2021, this oasis was a popular tourist destination and a cultural hub for Indigenous Amazigh communities, the nomadic tribes who have lived in Morocco’s desert regions for centuries. 

“The oases are truly a source of life for the nomads who live in the Drâa-Tafilalet region and the entire Moroccan desert,” says Mustapha Tilioua, an anthropologist of Amazigh descent and professor at the nonprofit Tarik Ibn Zayad Center for Studies and Research in Errachidia, a half-hour drive from Meski. La Source Bleue, he says, was “the heart of the oasis.”

For the past three years, climate-change-induced drought across much of Morocco has hit places like Meski especially hard. Now, La Source Bleue is dry, its low walls crumbling into an empty basin. Scarce drinking water has forced Amazigh families to relocate to urban centers with more reliable water resources for themselves and the livestock on which they depend. 

Tourism has likewise dried up, causing a loss of income for the more than 20 families who have depended on La Source Bleue for their livelihood. 

But amid the silence, there is music. In a medina near La Source Bleue, an Amazigh musician is trying to revive Meski—and his community’s heritage—with the sounds of the desert. Mouloud Amrini, who performs under the name Meskaoui, hopes to use what he calls “environmental music” to help his community attract visitors. 

“The music that I play [is like when] I walk throughout the desert,” Meskaoui says.

Meskaoui first founded his Gallery of Music Mouloud Meskaoui in 2009 to educate people about Amazigh musical traditions and nomadic music from around the world. It is supported in part by the Tarik Ibn Zayad Center, where Tilioua teaches Amazigh cultural history. 

On average, Meskaoui says the gallery receives about 800 to 1,000 visitors a year—a mix of international visitors and fellow Moroccans. That’s far fewer than before the oasis dried up, but he says its purpose remains vital. 

Meskaoui’s gallery is part of a wider goal to preserve what Tilioua calls a “rich regional heritage for future generations.” Some of Tilioua’s students have Amazigh lineage but lack a connection to their identity—the result of many years of government-led marginalization. That’s why he established the Sijilmassa Museum: Crossroads of Civilizations, with photographs, instruments, clothing, and other relics that show the diversity within Amazigh tribal history.

Tilioua and Meskaoui’s partnership started 20 years ago when they went on tour together to introduce nomadic Amazigh music to the world, performing in Saudi Arabia, China, Peru, Paraguay, Mexico, Mali, Timbuktu, Egypt, and elsewhere. Soon enough, they began to host musicians in Meskaoui’s gallery.

Mandolins, West African djembe drums, tambourines, electric guitars, keyboards, and other souvenirs from Meskaoui’s travels crowd the walls of his performance room, where he and other musicians play improvisations that blend elements of Amazigh music with their own styles. 

For Meskaoui and Tilioua, the message is simple. 

“It’s a call for peace in the world,” Tilioua says, “between peoples and civilizations and all cultures.”&�Բ�����;

Interviews were conducted in English, French, Arabic, and Darija. French translation was done by Marlowe Starling and Arabic and Darija translation was done by Rana Morsy. 

The reporting for this article was made possible by New York University’s GlobalBeat program.

, a documentary by , Emmy-nominated director of , intricately examines the evolution of racist attitudes and actions toward Black music genres that spans centuries, connecting the current legal weaponization of rap music to a long-standing history of Black musical genres being deemed immoral and illegal.

“At every stage of a new Black [musical] genre being made, it was stifled,” Harper says. “It was bringing white and Black people together. It was erasing these fabricated racial boundaries that allowed one people to oppress another. That was, and still is today, a very contentious thing to do. So why are lyrics used in this way? There’s 400 years of history to go through to answer that question.”

During the trans-Atlantic slave trade, enslaved people used song as a way to hold onto home, hope, and culture. While working in fields, Negro spirituals often disguised hidden messages that could be sung in front of plantation owners. Following the , the largest rebellion by enslaved people in the British mainland colonies, in 1740, banning drums and citing them as a tool of insurrection.

There were also protest songs in the rhythm and blues era. Both jazz music, which emerged in criminalized places like brothels and speakeasies, and rock ’n’ roll (before it was stolen from Black artists like  and appropriated by artists like Elvis Presley) were demonized. During the civil rights movement, soul music was a clear outlet for Black voices to be heard, like James Brown’s “”&�Բ�����;

Hip-hop followed shortly after, emerging from the underground scene and quickly growing into a whole new genre and culture that encapsulated DJing, graffiti, breakdancing, and eventually rap, born out of frustration and chaos of negligent social structures within the South Bronx, New York. Sally Banes, one of the first journalists to , described it as “ritual combat that transmutes aggression into art.”

Hip-hop and rap created an outlet for battles to diffuse nonviolently, repurposing struggle to provide social mobility while being therapeutic, and providing systemic critique and social commentary that was upfront, anti-establishment, and anti-police. It’s no surprise that the genre—which includes which can be viewed as political speech—hasn’t been received well by institutions. As Harper says, “No system of entrenched power wants to be questioned [or] threatened in such a way.”

Lyrics read during court, isolated from music and meaning, is undeniably an attack on the art form. Rap is embedded with metaphors, allegories, double entendres, and references to other musicians’ bodies of work, which can easily be misinterpreted or misunderstood. 

“The only voices that are speaking are the district attorney, the prosecutor,” Harper says. “The only person who’s silent in that whole constellation of people is the rap artist, the person on trial. It just seemed so bizarre that the person who was at the center of the circus was quiet, and these are people who live for the stage.”

Harper was inspired to create the documentary after reading Erik Nielson and Andrea L. Dennis’ 2019 book,, which is full of testimonies from people whose lives were forever changed because of this prosecutorial tactic. Nielson and Dennis estimate that in 95% of cases where lyrics were admitted into evidence, the defendant was a Black or Latino man.

Nielson, a professor of liberal arts at the University of Richmond, focused his Ph.D. research on the policing of Black creative expression in the United States from antebellum South to the present day. He has since testified, on behalf of defendants, in more than 100 cases.

“I really see the prosecution of rap as a trap,” Nielson says. “You systemically put people in circumstances where they have very few ways out. You dangle a couple of options, and then if you pursue one of those options, you slam the door as soon as they take it.”

is a living example of this. While performing at a show in Louisiana in 2000, a fight broke out that eventually resulted in gunfire. Knowing his family was in the audience, Phipps drew his firearm for protection, leading to him being identified as the primary suspect. There was a lot of conflicting evidence: Phipps’ gun was never fired, there was no forensic evidence tying him to the crime was uncovered, witnesses changed their stories, and a description of the shooter didn’t resemble Phipps. Even after another man confessed to the crime, Phipps was still charged with first-degree murder and sentenced to 30 years, despite having no previous criminal record.

The real incrimination came in the courtroom, when a prosecutor presented lyrics from two of his songs. The prosecutor spliced them together, one from a battle rap and another rap referencing his father’s experience as a Vietnam vet, to create a more violent verse that Phipps had never spoken nor written. Phipps served 21 years, refusing to accept parole because he would not say he was guilty for a crime he did not commit, before being granted clemency by Louisiana Gov. John Bel Edwards in April 2021.

“It almost seems ridiculous when a judge is reading a lyric out, divorced from its music [and] its context,” Harper says. “It’s very easy to mischaracterize that music. And it just totally ignores the fact of the tradition of hip-hop, of lyrics passed from one song to another, or one artist to another.”

Even with the First Amendment, Nielson says artists’ creative expressions are able to be criminalized because in most cases it’s not the lyrics themselves being punished. A crime is being punished, and the speech is used to establish involvement. If the actual lyrics are being punished, it’s because they’ve been deemed a threat. 

Yet Johnny Cash, who sang, “I shot a man in Reno just to watch him die,” and Freddie Mercury, who famously belted, “Mama, just killed a man / Put a gun against his head / Pulled my trigger now he’s dead,” are beloved. Authors who write horror or crime novels are not accused of being killers because they possess the knowledge to write about it. There’s a clear distinction between author and narrator that is respected and not questioned.

Hip-hop artists aren’t afforded that same distinction because, as Harper sees it, there’s a cultural disbelief in the idea that Black people have the intelligence and creativity to create anything besides a direct account of their life, failing to see the “brilliance and poetry” of rap. 

Rap has grown into a radical tool for social mobility, allowing communities who’ve been systematically oppressed and excluded the opportunity to get rich relatively quickly. When asked whether he believes prosecutors are using this tactic to stifle social mobility, Nielson said, “In some instances, maybe knowingly [or] subconsciously, I see this as an attempt to check these young men. As a way to say, ‘Remember who you are. Know your place.’”&�Բ�����;

“Too often, prosecutors are not really focused on a just outcome. They are focused on a win. And for them, a win is a conviction,” Nielson continues. “Any kind of foothold they can get, they’re going to use it. It’s a combination of much broader systemic inequalities and racism, but also just the nature of what it means to be a prosecutor in the American criminal legal system.”

While prosecutors use lyrics to incarcerate rappers, there are also many cases in which lyrics are used against people with no ties to an alleged crime or even to the music itself. Just being in the background of a music video or having lyrics from a favorite rapper scribbled in a notebook can be enough for prosecutors. 

Thanks to visibility sparked from Young Thug’s trial, there’s hope that this heightened attention can be used to address inequities in the criminal legal system. In 2023, Georgia Rep. Henry C. Johnson reintroduced the , a first-of-its-kind federal legislation that attempts to limit prosecutors’ ability to use creative expression as evidence in criminal trials.

However, in order for the legislation to be truly effective, Nielson says it needs to be implemented on both a federal and state level. California, which has seen the most cases of lyrics introduced as evidence, passed . Although it isn’t the strictest legislation, it’s a start. A New York state law, passed in the senate, limits the admissibility of lyrical or creative evidence. In March, the of an incarcerated man whose lyrics were used in his trial.

Harper is hopeful that legislators on both sides of the aisle can come together to address this issue. For Republicans, it is an issue of freedom of speech. For liberals, it is an issue of racial justice. 

“There’s a rare opportunity for there to be agreement that this is something that shouldn’t be happening constitutionally,” Harper says. “The system won’t correct itself. Prosecutors’ job is to win with any tool in front of them. It’s a matter of making this tool less available, so that it’s not so easy to abuse and put people away wrongfully.”

Since it’s an election year, Nielson is encouraging people to be vigilant about local elections. As We Speak discusses the case of Drakeo the Ruler, an influential rapper who was wrongly incarcerated for three years. The day after Jackie Lacey, the former district attorney for Los Angeles, was removed from office and replaced with George Gascón, he was . (Drakeo’s freedom only lasted a year; in 2021.) 

Nielson is hopeful that this prosecutorial tactic can be thwarted through continuous conversation and education about this issue and pressuring elected officials to pass legislation. However, in the meantime, rappers have begun censoring their own work, starting music videos with self-protective disclaimers.

“These artists attesting to the fictional nature of their lyrics, combined with all the disclaimers you now see on these videos [stating that] everything here is a prop,” Nielson says. “All of it reveals the sort of specter of the law hanging right over what they’re doing and their awareness that they are being watched. A mistake could be tragic for them. That to me, is not a healthy way for art to evolve.”

As the survivor of domestic abuse perpetrated by my, if you had asked me before reading the novel if it was OK to imbue humor into the discourse surrounding domestic abuse, I would have said, “Hell no.” But Casale doesn’t make light of violence; instead, she uses humor as an advocacy tool to illuminate a grim truth: Too often, the legal system rather than abusers. To stay safe and out of prison, women frequently have to (green thumb or not) take matters into their own hands.

If that’s too dark a thought, Casale gets it. “People don’t want to hear about the grim reality of male violence against women and girls,” she writes in her author’s note. “This novel is an attempt to use humor to cut through people’s reluctance to engage.” If readers giggle along as Sally covers her husband’s body in cat litter to dry it out, sprinkling on some rice for good measure—“just like our wedding day!”—then they’re not looking away from domestic abuse. And that’s the whole point.

The Lockdown Ladies’ Burial Club never had the pandemic luxury of baking sourdough or tie-dyeing tees. If their common bond was a love of Agatha Christie mysteries—rather than surviving abuse—they might have met in a virtual book club, cementing their friendship over wine-induced theories on how to get away with murder. Instead, they’re tasked with something much more difficult: figuring out how to avoid prison.

Women who claim self-defense against their abusers are than men who shoot strangers under. The law is more willing to side with a man who fires a gun at a nonviolent burglar than a woman who fights back against a husband who’s abused her for (as in Sally’s case) 20 years. That means Sally’s likely at fault, legally, when her husband, Jim, “punishes” her for making his tea too light—by pouring boiling water over her hand—and she reaches for her granny’s skillet to defend herself.

“There is a practical side of self-defense that can be empowering,” says Shaunna Thomas, co-founder and executive director of UltraViolet, a feminist advocacy organization. “But the concept is often grounded in a misogynistic idea that women who are harmed are and are solely responsible for their own safety regardless of the circumstances.”

In Sally’s case, the “circumstances” seem pretty clear-cut: Jim attacked her, and she defended herself, accidentally killing him in the process. But “self-defense law was not created with women or victims of abuse in mind,” says Elizabeth Flock, author of . Flock, an Emmy Award–winning journalist whose book examines what happens when, says the “” was “created by and for property-owning white men to protect their so-called ‘castles.’”

If that sounds disgustingly patriarchal,, and outdated, that’s because it is. The law allows deadly force to protect your home but “doesn’t account for women who defend themselves and their bodies against abusers who reside in their home and often have wielded violence for years,” Flock says. The result? “Women claiming self-defense often get convicted of murder or manslaughter, or take and end up spending years in prison.”

More years, in fact, than men who kill their female partners. Abusive men who kill women face in prison, while women who kill men——are sentenced to an average of. Unsurprisingly, prisons are filled with .

After Sally fights back, instead of calling the police, she eats some cake. Jim’s rotting on her kitchen floor, no longer capable of telling her she’s too fat or undeserving of treats. So she pours herself a glass of wine, grabs a bag of chips, and takes a bubble bath. The sense of relief and possibility Sally feels in Jim’s absence is overwhelming, so she makes a “be happy” list to extend her serotonin boost (bake! rescue a cat! get a job!). Then her “get rid of Jim” list takes precedence, because if she waited this long to call the police, would anyone really believe she acted in self-defense?

“In a court of law, a woman can put her hand on a bible and swear to tell the whole truth, but if her word isn’t valued, the whole truth may not be heard,” domestic violence court advocate Tonya GJ Prince says. Prince can still remember the haunting screams that pierced the courtroom 20 years ago when a survivor she was assisting played a recording of her violent attack. 

She was seeking a restraining order, but knew that without proof of violence, her request was likely to be denied. Her abuser was—as is often the case—seen publicly as a “nice guy.”

“When the recording ended, no one in the courtroom moved,” Prince recalls. “It was one of those moments where you had to remind yourself to breathe.”

The judge granted the woman’s request for a restraining order, but not without chastising her “dramatic and over-the-top” screams. If that sounds familiar—and sickening—you may remember that Amber Heard’s of was seen not as but of her.

The inherent in our is why an NYPD detective told my mom in the ’90s that the law couldn’t protect us from my father and that our only options were for my mom to either kill him or go into hiding with my sister and me. (She chose the latter, and if this sounds like a Lifetime Movie, it.)

New York didn’t have any stalking laws at the time, so my father—and the hit man he hired—was free to hunt and terrorize us. Unless it became a murder case, there was nothing the cops could do. 

Before we escaped our home in Canada and fled to New York, my father attacked my mom outside his office in Michigan and threw her into oncoming traffic. He spent a single night in jail, and the felony assault case against him was dismissed in less than 30 minutes. Despite my horror-fueled objections, I was forced by court order to visit him. If my mom refused to hand me over, she would be held in contempt and possibly jailed.

Too often, the law protects abusive men and abused women, and the media aids and abets this abuse. Recently, The New York Times when it wrote—then seemingly—that O.J. Simpson’s “world was ruined” after being charged with killing his ex-wife, Nicole Brown Simpson. Yet problematic language remains in the paper’s of Simpson’s obituary, which briefly mentions that he Brown Simpson—whom prosecutors said he —yet calls him “congenial” and his marriage “stormy.” The way the press has while is eerily reminiscent of the that failed Brown Simpson—and continues to fail domestic violence survivors 30 years later.

In the U.S. legal system, only dead women—who can’t speak up or defend themselves—are considered. My mom, thankfully, was not a perfect victim. Neither were Amber Heard or any of the members of fictional Lockdown Ladies’ Burial Club. These women didn’t only fight back; they survived.

“In this moment, after 100 years of erasure, false narratives, and racism built into the country industry, it’s important to shine a light on the Black co-creation of country music—and creation is the correct word, not influence,” Giddens writes. “Black musicians, along with their working-class white counterparts, were active participants and creators, not empty vessels with good rhythm.”

Sometimes these myths have been weaponized violently. Black country veterans, including , Charley Pride, and have shared their experiences performing in country music spaces, including the racial slurs and threats directed at them. For example, in his 1994 memoir, Pride writes about touring the U.S. South in the late 1960s, where some of the concert venues he played received bomb threats.

As both a Black fan and writer of country music criticism, I’ve thought twice about bringing my child to a country music festival or concert with me, out of fear she might witness or be the target of another fan’s violence. But while criticisms of Beyoncé have sometimes gotten ugly (’s dehumanizing comparison of Beyoncé to a dog peeing against a tree to mark her territory is one particularly vivid example), in the wake of Cowboy Carter, listeners who might not have heard their stories told in mainstream country music are into the genre.

Black country artists, including Tanner Adell, Tiera Kennedy, Reyna Roberts, Willie Jones, Linda Martell, Brittney Spencer, and Shaboozey, who all appear on Cowboy Carter, have seen an uptick in and overall listenership on streaming services. Perhaps we could dub this the “Beyoncé Effect,” a wave that lifts all who surround her, but Beyoncé’s impact goes beyond opening the door wider for a handful of Black country artists. 

Cowboy Carter also opens up conversations about Black creativity and imaginative freedom within country music and beyond, planting the seeds for deeper social change. On the album, Beyoncé cites and performs an expansive history of Black musical creativity, while also bringing her own unique energy and style. Throughout the album, Beyoncé channels Ray Charles’ showmanship and swinging reinterpretations that made his 1962 album, “Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music,” a in the country genre.

You can especially hear her power to freshly reinterpret classics on her version of “Jolene.” We get the sunny optimism of Charley Pride’s “Kiss an Angel Good Morning,” on “Bodyguard,” though it’s tweaked for modern times. (She even sings to her lover, “I could be your bodyguard/ Please let me be your Kevlar (Huh)/ Baby, let me be your lifeguard/ Would you let me ride shotgun?”) On “16 Carriages,” Beyoncé tells a story of lost innocence and sacrifice as a young performer, echoing themes present in Allison Russell’s “Night Flyer,” “Persephone,” and other songs about survival that appear on her 2021 album, “Outside Child.”

On her tender lullaby “Protector,” performed with her daughter Rumi, Beyoncé promises to nurture her daughter’s light: “Even though I know someday you’re gonna shine on your own/ I will be your projector.” I hear a resonance with Black country songwriter Alice Randall’s wonderful “My Dream,” performed by Valerie June and included on the 2024 album, “My Black Country: The Songs of Alice Randall.”&�Բ�����;

We get the muscular country rock spirit of Tina Turner’s “Nutbush City Limits” (especially of the song) on records like “Ya Ya” and “Texas Hold ‘Em.” (I can imagine these songs as production numbers in the style of Tina Turner and Beyoncé herself, seeing as Beyoncé performed “Proud Mary” with her icon at .)

And might Beyoncé’s flirty duet with Miley Cyrus, “II Most Wanted,” (“Making waves in the wind with my empty hand/ My other hand on you”) be the sequel (or prequel?) to Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car,” a sapphic provocation from the shotgun seat, Luke Combs left behind in the dust? “II Most Wanted” is one of several songs on Cowboy Carter that speak to the centrality of stories of finding love and mobility in Black country, blues, and rhythm and blues music. Whether by horse, train, Cadillac, or Starship, Black music is shaped by stories of leaving, returning, and wandering to places known and unknown.

Beyoncé’s crossing and melding, hybridizing and swirling on this album, has everything to do with reclaiming, an artistic action denied just about any Black artist who wants to make it in country music. For earlier Black artists like Bobby Womack, Millie Jackson, and Joe Tex, there has often been a double standard to “stay in your lane,” while white artists have been free to experiment, as Charles L. Hughes makes clear in his 2015 book, .

Cowboy Carter is a provocation, a new chapter, a clapback. It is not so much a rejection of the past as much as a sometimes-neck-popping conversation with that past, and with that, a rethinking of it. As both an improviser and re-interpreter, Beyoncé carries forward the tradition of African American art-making that is deeply invested in the changing same, bringing new energy to past songs. This spirit of circularity, a key African American aesthetic is evoked in the very first lyrics of the album: “Nothing really ends/ For things to stay the same/ They have to change again.”

In that way, we might see her as continuing a legacy of Black innovation in country music, whether it’s because of the ill fit of the instruments she inherited, the countrypolitan storytelling of Linda Martell, or the sex-positive grooves of Millie Jackson and Tanner Adell.

Ultimately, there is a kind of recovery at the heart of this album—a healing of the spirit of Black innovation in a genre that has worked so hard to repress it: “Hello, my old friend/ You change your name but not the ways you play pretend,” Beyoncé sings in “American Requiem.” A requiem is normally a mass for the dead, a ritual of remembrance. In traditional white and western ways of thinking, the purpose of a requiem is to lay souls to rest. But on this album, the purpose is to raise the dead, to animate histories and memories once forgotten, or misnamed.

This is an album meant to lift the lid off of the coffin of music that has grown stagnant. Like the exorcism that it is, this process of challenging old narratives and animating lost stories can be risky, vulnerable work. But perhaps it is time to abandon the old “pretend” narratives of “three chords and the truth” to honor other stories, to conjure in order to set all of us free.