Celebrities with massive followings should use their powerful voices sincerely to effect change. Their ethics and behaviour must resonate harmoniously through artistry that is embodied

The digital cover of the latest Beyoncé album, Cowboy Carter. Pic/X

Despite my growing wariness about Beyonce as a brand that feeds off feminist and Black liberation discourses, I was intrigued to listen to her new country album. I haven’t made my way through the whole album. Instead, I skipped ahead to Jolene because it is a song I have known from childhood. I was curious about what Beyoncé’s take on it would be. I found her collaborative cover of ‘Blackbird’ (titled ‘Blackbiird’) very tender in how it reorients you to the civil rights movement in America that was the inspiration for the song. Her version features Black American country stars like Brittney Spencer, Tanner Adell, Tiera Kennedy and Reyna Roberts, who, I read in an article in The Guardian, are ‘musicians who have struggled to gain a foothold in the notoriously gate-kept Nashville establishment in which women and Black artists are often marginalised’.

The song’s writer, Paul McCartney, has talked about how the lyrics reference the group of students called Little Rock Nine, who faced intense ostracism and ridicule for being the first to ‘colour’........

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