Beyoncé is breaking out.

Midway through Cowboy Carter, her eighth and most recent studio album, released this past spring, a voice makes the project’s mission statement plain over blaring alarms and a thunderous beat—declaring the concept of genre to be a sense of confinement for those artists whose creativity is too wide-ranging to fit in a neat box. All before Beyoncé herself saunters in comparing herself to Thanos, the Marvel villain known for seeking precious stones of mystical power to claim as his own and assemble into one unified superpower.

There may not be an accompanying music video, but the lyrics conjure a potent visual: Beyoncé, armed with a bedazzled gauntlet, breaking down every stultifying wall, label, or box the industry ever tried to put her in across her 30-year career.

It’s a theme that applies to much of what Beyoncé has been up to for the past decade or so, especially in the last couple of years: a mission of reclamation, recentering Blackness in spaces where our influence has since been de-emphasized, whether in rodeo, on the great American plains, or on sweaty ballroom dance floors.

The project has been powered by legacy. Each step forward is illuminated with a look back, a tour through time tracing her own roots, while also yielding the knowledge that her family tree is just one in a larger forest where everything is connected. Whatever she does feels that much grander because of it. A new country-influenced album isn’t just an exercise in undoing the strictures of genre; it’s a history lesson, where forgotten pioneers can get their props and true lineages can be explored. (That voice denouncing genres belongs to Linda Martell, the Black country pioneer whose efforts endured some of the same resistance Beyoncé faced.

And as such, her forays both inside and outside of music carry more weight than most celebrity brands can ever be expected to. For example, it felt equal parts momentous and inevitable when, in late July, Vice President Kamala Harris featured “Freedom” as the soundtrack to her first presidential campaign ad—and Beyoncé’s voice and lyrics seemed to announce a new political moment. Now, there’s SirDavis. Beyoncé Knowles-Carter is getting into the whiskey trade as a founder, in the most Beyoncé of fashions—challenging notions of masculinity and flipping them. Our biggest female entertainer presenting the manliest of all spirits, while honoring those in her lineage who came before. (SirDavis, created in partnership with Moët Hennessy, is named after her great-grandfather, Davis Hogue. And features the deliberate choice of branding it “whisky”—no e—like they do in Japan and Scotland, and in contrast to how it’s typically done in the US.) Like everything she does, it is ancestral, it is formidable, it has been concocted to perfection, and as a Black woman in a space perceived for old white men, it’s striking.

At 43, Beyoncé has shown, time and again, the ability to exert a rare kind of control—over her image, her likeness, her music and business worlds. She has become adept at breaking rules and entering new spaces, in business and in art, creating new norms and new opportunities for others as she goes. At this rate, there’s no frontier she can’t conquer, no stone any longer outside of her grasp. As the end of that Cowboy Carter verse goes, “I ain’t no regular singer, now come get everything you came for.” Still, there’s plenty left to wonder about: What keeps her going, three decades in, with nothing left to prove? Who is she, really, between the critically acclaimed albums, the blockbuster tours, and the dynamic docu-concert films? We got a rare glimpse in an extensive back-and-forth conducted via email this summer.

Order a copy to know more………………

Brand New Copies!! Newsstand Copies!! Magazine has a Bar-Code!!