After initially refusing, Oklahoma country radio station KYKC has agreed to play Beyoncé's new country singles following social media outrage.
ICYMI: after a surprise appearance during a Super Bowl 2024 commercial, Beyoncé announced her next album, titled Renaissance: Act II, would be a country project. To coincide with the announcement, the singer released two singles in advance, "Texas Hold 'Em" and "16 Carriages," giving fans a taste of what's to come.
On February 13, a fan took to X to share a screenshot of an email from KYKC replying to their request to have "Texas Hold 'Em" be played on the station. “We do not play Beyonce' [sic] on KYKC as we are a country music station," read the station's rejection.
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Shortly after the fan's original post, popular aggregated news account PopBase caught wind of the story, which made KYKC's email response go even more viral on the platform and sparking an immediate outcry from the Beyhive.
"This station needs to be held accountable for their blatant racism and discrimination against Beyoncé," the original poster wrote under the tweet sharing KYKC's response. "It begins," someone else commented, anticipating the racism that fans have predicted will clash with the album's rollout and likely referencing the long-standing mistreatment and exclusion of Black artists in country spaces despite the genre having Black roots.
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After seeing the outrage on social media, a spokesperson from SCORE Broadcasting, which owns KYKC, provided a statement to Entertainment Weekly. The spokesperson explained that general manager Roger Harris, who was revealed to be the author of the original request denial email, replied that way because he "was removed" and didn't know that Beyoncé was releasing country music.
"Up until now, [Beyoncé] hasn't been a 'country artist.' So we responded to the email in the same way we would have responded to someone requesting a Rolling Stones song on our country station," Harris himself told EW about the incident over email. "We literally just learned about the new song... but we didn't have the actual song in our possession. Normally we would watch a new song to see how it does on the charts before we added [sic] it. But... we apparently were targeted in a big campaign to add the song. As soon as we received the file, we did add it to the playlist of our country station."
Merely hours after the initial fan's post was uploaded, KYKC took to its own X account to announce it would be playing "Texas Hold 'Em" after all, following a slew of requests. "Lots of call [sic] coming in for Beyoncé's Texas Hold' Em. It's coming up in minutes," the station posted.
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The initial refusal to play "Texas Hold 'Em" by KYKC is reigniting the age-old debate around Black artists' exclusion from the country genre. In 2019, Lil Nas X's hit track "Old Town Road" sparked a similar conversation after the song was removed from Billboard's Hot Country Songs for "not embracing enough elements of today's country music."
Earlier, in 2016, Beyoncé herself faced a similar predicament after her performance of Lemonade's "Daddy Lessons" at the Country Music Awards was faced with backlash. Shortly after, the song made headlines again after The Recording Academy's country music committee reportedly refused to accept her submission in the country category for the Grammys.
Act II by Beyoncé will arrive on all digital streaming platforms on March 29, 2024.
