Review

Culture

Music

Race

12 April 2024

6 min read

Beyoncé’s breaking barriers

Cowboy Carter sees the star crack her whip in the temple of the music industry.

Krish Kandiah

Krish is a social entrepreneur partnering across civil society, faith communities, government and philanthropy. He founded The Sanctuary Foundation.

Side by side, two rodeo riders on horses trot toward the camera. One is Beyonce, the other a cowboy

Beyoncé at the Houston Rodeo.

Beyoncé.com

I sometimes wake up in a cold sweat with flashbacks of one terrible swimming lesson at school. I had accidentally forgotten to forget my kit, so was forced to face not only the freezing water, but the spouting of ignorant prejudice from my teacher.

“Kandiah, you’re useless,” he said, as I heaved myself out of the pool at the end of the lesson. “Although I guess it’s not your fault you can’t float like the white children. Your bones are heavier. Look at the Olympics – you never see black and Asian swimmers, do you?”

I opened and closed my mouth a few times, like the fish out of water I suppose I was, but inside I was seething.

Being told I couldn’t do something made me all the more determined to do it. Back in I jumped.

Last week, in another splash aimed at proving people wrong, Beyoncé’s magnificent album “Cowboy Carter” became the first album by a black woman to top the country charts.

On her Instagram feed she said: “the criticisms I faced when I first entered this genre forced me to propel past the limitations that were put on me.”

It was a brave move. Back in 2016, she had received heated and hate-filled reactions when she performed her song Daddy Issues at the 50th Country Music Association Awards with the country music group Chicks, formerly known as the Dixie Chicks. Many country music fans were outraged, calling it an act of cultural appropriation. One response on social media put it starkly: “SHE DOES NOT BELONG!!”.

But as a Texan who had been brought up around country music, Beyoncé disagreed. She would spend the next five years planning her response. Cowboy Carter proves her country credentials beyond all doubt. It’s not only about the music. It also does three important things that show the world what can be done when faced with barriers of prejudice and ignorance.

She honours the past

The album is clearly an act of tribute to trailblazing country artists before her. Beyoncé included notable guest appearances and feature tracks and took the unusual step of sending flowers to all who had inspired her.

Beyoncé sent flowers to Mickey Guyton, the first black female artist to be nominated for a Grammy Award in the Country category. She also sent flowers to K. Michelle and featured Tanner Adell, Brittney Spencer and Reyna Roberts on the Cowboy Carter track Blackbird, a song that Paul McCartney wrote as a response to the case of the Little Rock Nine, a group of African-American schoolchildren initially barred from attending a previously racially segregated school in Arkansas. It took the direct intervention of then President Dwight Eisenhower in 1957 to make it possible for these children to attend their school. She also included guest appearances from country music royalty Dolly Parton and Linda Martell, who both introduce songs on the album. Dolly’s introduction to Beyoncé’s reworking of Jolene is particularly poignant: “Hey Queen B it’s Dolly P”.

The song Jolene sticks faithfully to the guitar riff from the original, but the words and the tone of this song are completely different. Dolly’s original Jolene was begging another woman not to take her man from her. But Beyoncé will have none of that. She is full of threat and menace:

“I’m warnin’ you, don’t come for my man… don’t take the chance because you think you can.”

As Beyoncé pays her dues to the greats that have gone before, she also offers a very different picture. She can recognise the past, and yet not be imprisoned by it. She can appreciate those who have laid the foundations for a new era, unbound by cruel stereotypes.

She challenges the present

We don’t have to look far to see the way that western society is splintering. It is becoming harder to find common ground, harder to move from one tribe to another. Beyoncé’s album is political in that it is deliberately breaking down a wall and smashing a division. She refuses to accept that there are no-go areas for people of colour. The album feels like Beyoncé’s famous baseball bat from Lemonade, but this time it isn’t smashing cars, but preconceptions and prejudices instead.

There’s anger in this record. The first song is “American Requiem” and includes the line:

“They used to say I spoke ‘too country’./ And the reaction came,/ said I wasn’t country ’nough / If that ain’t country / I don’t know what is?”

Full of confidence and rage she asks over a bed of country music guitar chords:

“Can you hear me? / Can you stand me?”

Beyoncé does not disguise the ironies. The fresh anger and challenge weaves into classic forms and tropes of country music. The artist that some wanted to exclude from the genre tops the charts. The pop icon becomes an iconoclast. The smashing of divisions makes way for the building of something new.

She opens a door for the future

It is within living memory of many that black people were prohibited from sitting at the front of a public bus or drinking from the same water fountain as white people. Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter is not just a smash hit it is a smash down of the boundaries of genre that had excluded her and others. With this boundary smashed the opportunity is opened for others too.

For example, there was a recent stand-out performance at the Grammy awards watched by millions around the world – the duet between the country star Luke Combs and Tracy Chapman. Luke, a young white man, is part of a new generation of country singers with a huge following. The legendary black artist Tracy Chapman recently turned 60. The joyful performance was particularly touching as the two of them looked genuinely delighted to be singing together. The video went viral and lead to a huge uplift in Chapman’s sales. The song Fast Car rocketed to the top of the charts some 36 years after it was first released.

Cowboy Carter is Beyoncé using her voice and talent to push back against prejudice and push forward to a new era. She is cracking her whip in the temple of the music industry. She is driving out those who have commandeered the space that rightly belongs to those from any and all backgrounds. She is righteously angry at the injustice. She is declaring that country music be reclaimed as a meeting place for all nations to enjoy.

When Jesus unleashed the whip against the tables of the moneychangers in the temple who were excluding the non-Jews the space rightly belonged to, he fiercely declared: “My father’s house is to be a house of prayer for all the nations.” He was not only breaking the barriers of the past but ushering in a new future, a future where everyone could gather together before God on equal footing. Jesus would eventually die on a cross to ensure this free access to God was available to everyone - wherever they were from, whatever they had done and whatever they looked like.

I welcome this album by Beyoncé in that spirit of challenging prejudices, breaking down barriers, and clearing the decks for a new future equally available to all.

If only I could have whipped myself into shape, I believe I could have been the Cowboy Carter of the swimming world forty years ago.

Beyoncé in her own words

“Ain’t got time to waste, I got art to make/ I got love to create on this holy night/ They won’t dim my light, all these years I fight.”

16 Carriages

“Say a prayer for what has been / We'll be the ones that purify our father's sins / American Requiem / Them old ideas (yeah) / Are buried here (yeah) / Amen (amen)

Amen

Review

Culture

Film & TV

Monsters

War & peace

4 August 2025

6 min read

The Fantastic Four taught me about family, truth and the end of the world

The whole film has a grown-up sophistication about what really matters.

Krish Kandiah

Krish is a social entrepreneur partnering across civil society, faith communities, government and philanthropy. He founded The Sanctuary Foundation.

Walt Disney Studios.

I’ve just been to see the The Fantastic Four: First Steps, and honestly, I think it’s brilliant. It’s my favourite Marvel film in a long time. I might have to go all the way back to Guardians of the Galaxy to find something as funny, engaging, and moving. There’s a lightness to it, but also a surprising depth.

First of all, the setting. It’s done in this beautiful, kitschy 1960s style—retro aesthetics, clean design, soft colours. It’s subtle, not forced, and it gives the whole film a kind of grown-up sophistication. Then there’s the casting—each of them is just spot on. Vanessa Kirby plays Sue Storm as an independent, intelligent, maternal powerhouse. And Pedro Pascal’s Reed Richards—brilliant but vulnerable—brings something pretty human to the role of a superhero. Even through the layers of CGI animation, Ebon Moss-Bachrach brings pathos and quiet dignity to the role of Ben Grimm aka The Thing. 

But what really grabbed me wasn’t just the style, the humour or the casting—it was the themes. At the heart of this film are some big, timely questions: about family, about sacrifice, about truth—and about how we respond when the world is falling apart.

The power of sacrifice

Here’s the big plot point—and this is not a spoiler because it’s in the trailer—the Fantastic Four are about to become the Fantastic Five. Sue Storm aka The Invisible Woman is pregnant. She portrays well that beautiful mix of nervous excitement that every expectant parent knows. But because she and Reed Richards aka Mr Fantastic are becoming parents with superpowers and gamma radiation in play there is an additional fear and uncertainty about their unborn child. In the middle of this domestic intimacy things escalate. A threat emerges—Galactus, a cosmic entity capable of devouring entire planets. Sue and Reed are given an impossible ultimatum: to relinquish their unborn child to Galactus and save the world or keep their child and see the world destroyed. 

The film could have taken the easy route and made the unborn child symbolic or vague. But instead, it takes this child seriously. There’s a very beautiful moment where Sue uses her invisibility powers to reveal their baby as a fit and healthy little boy asleep in her womb. He is real, precious and non-negotiable.

The heroes will not even consider sacrificing the unborn child. They are willing to give up their own lives. They are willing to risk everything they have. But they won’t hand over their child to save the planet.

That hit me hard in a culture where the idea of sacrificing a child—or at least, the rights of the unborn—has become politically and ethically contested. People take a range of views on the issue, but here is this blockbuster superhero movie saying: “No. Even if the planet is at stake, this child matters.” This is a brave, countercultural stance that surprised me.

It is also particularly poignant given a view that is becoming more widespread: some people are suggesting that in order to save the planet, we should stop having children. Clearly they genuinely believe the world would be better off without future generations. But that logic feels deeply broken. It is as if we are trying to protect the planet from children, instead of for them.

What this film offers is a total reversal: the child is not the threat—the child is the hope. And for Christians, that resonates. Because at the heart of the gospel is the story of a child—born into a broken world, not to destroy it but to save it. And while Sue and Reed won’t give up their child to save the world, the Christian story is that God did just that. He was willing to do what this superhero family wouldn’t—sacrifice his Son to save us.

Truth and politics

As if the personal and familial dilemma was not enough by itself, the film also raises important political questions. The Fantastic Four are given the ultimatum about saving the world in the privacy of a meeting with Galactus on the other side of the universe. When they finally make it back to earth, they are asked to make a press statement and told to keep it short.

I found myself willing them to be quiet, to protect the privacy of their decision to save their baby, to save themselves the inevitable backlash, but instead they choose honesty. They tell the world the truth about the impossible decision they had to make—and why they made it.

In today’s political landscape, that kind of transparency feels rare. We’ve seen moments—during COVID, during the cost-of-living crisis, even around immigration and the rescuing of Afghan families—when the public hasn’t always been trusted with the full picture. Leaders hide behind spin, afraid to speak plainly, or take responsibility.

In the film we see what happens when the Fantastic Four choose honesty, even as a baying crowd surrounds their base. A speech is made that displays vulnerability, integrity, and courage. It reminded me that truth isn’t just about facts—it’s about trust. The best leaders are those who invite people into difficult conversations, who treat others as grown-ups, who inspire hope rather attract blame.

How do you face the end of the world?

It is not unusual for a superhero movie to navigate a global catastrophe, but this time planet earth is given some warning. The Silver Surfer comes as a herald ahead of the impending doom, warning of Galactus’ plan to devour the planet, and challenging people to use their time well, to celebrate life and show love to their families. The Surfer is almost a John the Baptist figure, although the prophet’s advice was repentance not just holding your loved ones closer. God was not coming to consume the earth for his own gratification, but to make the ultimate sacrifice to deal with the problem and reconcile humanity to himself.

A headline in the Daily Express the other weekend claimed: “Global Crises send GEN Z to church” It does seem that for some young adults there is renewed interest in spiritual things in general and Christianity in particular. Perhaps it really is because the world feels like it is about to implode. With climate crisis, political chaos, and global conflict, people are looking for hope, purpose and salvation in real life as well as in happy endings to movies.

Fantastic Four really made me think - while also making me laugh about car seats, pregnancy tests and giving birth on a spaceship.  I left feeling encouraged. Not because it offered easy answers, but because it reminded me that love—real, sacrificial, inconvenient, dangerous love—is still heroic. Truth matters. Children matter. Andd all the more so when faced with a brewing apocalypse.

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