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Beyoncé's Number One in Country

30 April 2024

Beyoncé very explicitly announced her latest album to be a country album, calling it "Cowboy Carter", and her single "Texas Hold 'Em" made her the first Black woman to top Billboard's Hot Country Songs charts.

It is good that Beyoncé made it so glaringly obvious that her song is a country song. The number of Black artists to have topped the Hot Country Song charts is surprisingly small: Charley Pride in the 70s, Ray Charles in a duet with Willie Nelson for one week in 1984, and then Darius Rucker and Kane Brown in the last decade or two.

Maybe one reason to understand why it is so hard to chart for Black artists in this particular genre: "Old Town Road", the debut single by Lil Nas X, first was listed on the Hot Country Song chart, but then Billboard decided that this was a mistake and instead recategorized the song, taking it off the Country charts in March 2019 before it would have become the Number One hit on April 6, 2019 were it not removed.

Billboard released a long explanation explaining that this decision had nothing to do with racism.

Cowboy Carter was released exactly in the same week five years after Old Town Road would have hit Number One.

I guess Beyoncé really wanted to make sure that everyone knows that her album and single are country.

Simia

War in the shadows

26 April 2024

A few years ago I learned with shock and surprise that in the 1960s and 1970s Croatians have been assassinated by the Yugoslav secret service in other countries, such as Germany, and that the German government back then chose to mostly look away. That upset me. In the last few weeks I listened to a number of podcasts that were going into more details about these events, and it turned out that some of those murdered Croatians were entangled with the WW2 fascist Croatian Ustasha regime -- either by being Ustasha themselves, or by actively working towards recreating the Ustasha regime in Croatia.

Some of the people involved were actively pursing terrorist acts - killing diplomats and trying to kill politicians, hijacking and possibly downing airplanes, bombing cinemas, and even trying an actual armed uprising.

There was a failed attempt of planting seventeen bombs along the Croatian Adria, on tourist beaches, during the early tourist season, and to detonate them all simultaneously, in order to starve off income from tourism for Yugoslavia.

Germany struggled with these events themselves: their own secret service was tasked with protecting the German state, and it was initially even unclear how to deal with organizations whose goal is to destabilize a foreign government. Laws and rules were changed in order to deal with the Croatian extremists, rules that were later applied to the PLO, IRA, Hamas, etc.

Knowing a bit more of the background, where it seems that a communist regime was assassinating fascists and terrorists, does not excuse these acts, nor the German inactivity. It is a political assassination without due process. But it makes it a bit better understandable why the German post-Nazi administration, that was at that time busy with its own wave of terror by the Rote Armee Fraktion RAF, was not giving more attention to these events. And Germany received some of its due when Yugoslavia captured some of the kidnappers and murderers of Hanns Martin Schleyer, and did not extradite them to Germany, but let them go, because Germany did not agree to hand over Croatian separatists in return.

Croatians had a very different reputation in the 1970s than the have today.

I still feel like I have a very incomplete picture of all of these events, but so many things happened that I had no idea about.

Source podcasts in German

• Krieg im Schatten - Auf Deutsch, ein Podcast in sechs Folgen, zu einem bestimmten Fall in den Ereignissen - Mischung aus True Crime und Geschichte
• Episode 78 von "Neues vom Ballaballa-Balkan" - Besser fand ich noch diese Folge, welche die Ereignisse im größeren Zusammenhang betrachtet

Simia

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