The manipulation behind ‘Texas Hold ’Em,’ Beyoncé’s latest media coup
Stetsons off to Yvette Noel-Schure, the mastermind publicist behind Beyoncé’s media manipulation, especially the Black History Month exploitation of art and politics that has made the faux country-western single “Texas Hold ’Em” into the No. 1 single on last week’s Billboard charts.
That statistic results from the career calculations of Noel-Schure and Beyoncé, the behind-the-scenes media strategies that fool celebrity-fanatics into thinking that everything in showbiz is natural, right, and deserved.
Let’s start with the fact that Beyoncé’s previous album, the gay house-music gambit of Renaissance, was an artistic dud. (House music belonged to the Nineties; it is not part of the millennium’s pop pulse — even though corrupt media will promote anything.) “Texas Hold ’Em,” a laconic toe-tapper, is mediocre. Aspects of Beyoncé’s career memoir make no mention of Texas being under invasion, it doesn’t strike a universal emotional chord like Luke Combs’s cover of Tracy Chapman’s “Fast Car.” Beyoncé clearly envied that hit and it was Noel-Schure’s job to make sure that Beyoncé’s simulation made news.
The fake news began with fabricated outrage: Variety planted an inflammatory question: “Will Country Radio Play Beyoncé’s New Songs?” It was headlined that way for no other reason than to stoke race fears. That was February 13; by February 23, Beyoncé’s followers and the media came together and pushed the new release to the top of the charts.
Variety had ignored historical cultural fact: Country-music radio stations are country-music stations. They were not being discriminatory during the 1980s when global chart-reigning kings Michael Jackson and Prince were left off their playlists. Variety rang the Diversity-Inclusion-Equity (DIE) alarm that is now the trade-media standard aligned with the current administration’s agenda. Beyoncé’s new imitation-country tracks, “Texas Hold ’Em,” and “12 Carriages,” are used as tools to advance racial unease.
It’s another example of the media engineering social attitudes and using politics to divide the nation.
Beyoncé’s expedition into propaganda pop began with her 2016 Super Bowl half-time-show performance of “Formation,” in which she travestied race politics: Her routine featured Black Panther–style fist-thrusting, plus choreography that modeled dancers into a giant “X” to invoke Spike Lee’s glib Malcolm X trademark and pretend black militancy. It was alarmingly pseudo-serious (because glitzy and trashy) — a prelude to the exploitation of black feminism in her Lemonade album. Rather than growing into mature musical expression, Beyoncé latched onto political fashion, a craven move.
Yet Lemonade’s most interesting track, “Daddy Lessons,” was also its least heralded. Evoking Beyoncé’s Houston upbringing and saluting the patriarchal influence of Texas masculinity, “Daddy Lessons” struck an appealing down-home vibe. Given its cheerful use of guns as an answer for women’s need to resolve problems of male aggression, “Daddy Lessons” had the quality of folk wisdom. But its grassroots feminism went against the more urbane variety that embraces superiority and — ironically — victimhood. So this real country tune, which should have been more popular, and maybe turned into a National Rifle Association theme song, was so unmarketable that not even Yvette Noel-Schure could sell it. When Beyoncé joined the leftist Dixie Chicks (now repentant and renamed The Chicks) at the 2016 Country Music Association awards show and sang “Daddy Lessons,” it felt awkward — a sisterhood stunt nobody asked for.
Now, there’s no such promotional miscalculation with the unexceptional “Texas Hold ’Em.” Instead, loveable Dolly Parton was pressed into service and got straight to the point on X: “I’m a big fan of Beyoncé and very excited that she’s done a country album. So congratulations on your Billboard Hot Country number one single. Can’t wait to hear the full album.” Parton’s blurb cagily avoided the racial booby trap, but it also skirted opinion. Showbiz makes unconvincing sisterhood. Parton’s diplomatic non-rave reminded me of George Jones’s first response to Taylor Swift and Carrie Underwood: “I wish they’d call what they’re doing something else, cuz it’s not country music.”
“Texas Hold ’Em” lacks a country twang. Beyoncé doesn’t make that instinctive link you can hear in the rap song “First Light of the Day,” by the Houston group Geto Boys, in which blues and country are indistinguishable, because genuine. “Daddy Lessons” achieved such crossover, but “Texas Hold ’Em” sounds calculated, kitschy. It does not advance the genre.
Unethical journalists distort social progress. Press agents may misrepresent history. Landmarks such as Ray Charles’s 1962 Modern Sounds in Country and Western Music (featuring the immortal single “I Can’t Stop Loving You”) and Charley Pride’s hitting No. 1 on Billboard’s Country chart get diminished by media ideologues. They promote Beyoncé’s genre-hopping and obscure the steady work of a lesser-known black female country singer like Mickey Guyton or Linda Martell, who crashed the Grand Ole Opry’s hayseed ceiling in 1969, performing her cover of the Winstons’ R & B hit “Color Him Father.”
Not just an icon, Beyoncé, with her rhetorical effigy posturing, lets the music industry exploit pop history to create a phony statistical phenomenon. Maybe Beyoncé will remake Ray Charles and sing “I Can’t Stop Tricking You.”