How Solange and Mitski Reconsider Who Can Be the Cowboy

The American cowboy usually appears in modern pop culture as a lonesome gunslinger—a symbol of Manifest Destiny and a standard of white masculinity, a brave hero who fought the Native American “enemy.” But this John Wayne mythology is far from the truth, erasing the legacy of Native and black cowboys who existed long before a Western film was ever shot. In the 1500s, Native Americans were enlisted to drive cattle for Spanish ranchers in Mexico, eventually becoming known as vaqueros. Throughout the 1800s, men of other races took up cow herding as a profession, including European immigrants, Southern settlers, and formerly enslaved African-Americans.

In the past three years, a new wave of black artists have been reclaiming the cowboy archetype. Inspired by photographers like Brad Trent, Deanna Lawson, and Ron Tarver, who’ve been documenting black cowboy culture, the “yeehaw agenda” has spread across social media with a fury this year. The term was coined by the Twitter user Bri Malandro at the end of 2018, but the movement officially went viral last month when Brooklyn art critic Antwaun Sargent posted a long photo thread of black people in cowboy garb—some of musicians like Lil’ Kim and Mary J. Blige, some taken by the aforementioned photographers, and some from campaigns by the subversive black fashion designers Pyer Moss and Telfar. As others clamored to add their own pictures to Sargent’s chain, it became clear: this archive of black cowboys and cowgirls wasn’t just beautiful. To many, it was a revelation.

Since then, the yeehaw agenda has launched numerous primers and thinkpieces—on the historical context of black cowboy erasure, on artists like Cardi B and Kacey Musgraves wearing bedazzled chaps and 10-gallon hats, and the #YeeHawChallenge that is currently lighting up TikTok. Amid all this, women of color have incorporated elements of cowboy culture into their music over the last year. The most prominent examples are Solange and Mitski, who’ve both released stunning albums that, among other things, explore how the white cowboy mythology impacts them.

In the companion film to Solange’s new LP, When I Get Home, she dedicates multiple sequences to capturing the majesty of black cowboys and cowgirls: their pack rides, their tenacious bull-riding, and their hypnotizing lasso tricks. For Solange, this was part of a larger mission to reclaim a piece of erased American history. “I knew from about a year and a half ago that it was really, really important to me to be a small part, in any way that I could, of telling the story of black cowboys,” she told Sargent at a screening event in her hometown of Houston earlier this month. “All of the first cowboys I saw were black…. We’ve had to constantly rewrite black history and what that means for us from the beginning of time, and so that was really just the moment to really express this culture that was so enriching for me. It’s not just an aesthetic.”

Solange’s interest in Western imagery falls into a lineage of black hip-hop artists incorporating country sounds, from Bone Thugs ‘N’ Harmony and Nelly to Young Thug and her sister, Beyoncé. The yeehaw agenda, though, feels unprecedented in its reach—something Sargent suggests is rooted in an excitement of uncovering lost history. “The cowboy has meant so much to American identity,” he tells Pitchfork. “Before, there was this idea that black people were never cowboys and black people didn't have access to that quintessential part of an American identity. These images—and real history—say otherwise.”

The yeehaw agenda also questions what it means to philosophically embody the cowboy—something Mitski started probing last year. She wrote 2018’s Be the Cowboy, her celebrated fifth album, from the perspective of a character channeling the cowboy’s bravado and entitlement—the antithesis of the Orientalist stereotype that Asian women are submissive and meek. In an appearance on “The Daily Show With Trevor Noah,” Mitski explained, “There’s such an arrogance and freedom to [the cowboy that] is so appealing to me, especially since I am an Asian woman. I walk into a room and I feel like I have to apologize for existing.”

A newfound assuredness shows up in subtle ways throughout Be the Cowboy, manifesting in theatrical arrangements and intentional melodrama. Summer Kim Lee, a performance studies scholar at Dartmouth, notes that the cowboy persona seems to be most evident when Mitski broaches themes of chosen isolation; her song “Nobody” is, in a way, a celebration of being alone, and on “A Pearl,” the protagonist denies the touch of her partner. “The cowboy is a figure of loneliness and having open terrain. He has his boots at the door, and he’s ready to leave at any moment,” Lee tells Pitchfork. “If Kacey [Musgraves] is singing to that figure [on ‘Space Cowboy’], Mitski is saying, ‘I am that figure.’ It's not that she has someone breaking her heart; she’s the one that would actually break your heart.” Lee also suggests that there is a privilege in being able to walk away: “In terms of discussions around solidarity, people who occupy any kind of minority position can't afford to be alone.”

The Japanese-born Mitski has attributed her ambivalence toward isolation to the fact that her family moved around a lot, coupled with her usual long stretches of touring these days. But her call to “be the cowboy” also takes an added meaning when considering the dichotomy between wandering cowboys and Chinese laborers, who were integral to the construction of the first Transcontinental Railroad. “Cowboys were always those who passed through, whereas Asian laborers were really tied to their work in one place,” Lee notes. An Asian woman embodying that kind of freedom is unexpected—radical, even.

Mitski and Solange, as well as the larger yeehaw movement, subvert the longstanding legacy of the white cowboy by proposing that anyone can fill those boots. But being the cowboy, either mentally or aesthetically, might not necessarily be a good thing. Sargent expresses some concerns about the trend ultimately glamorizing the cowboy’s role in Western expansion. “I think it does move you away from some of those hard realities about how that westward march eradicated a Native America,” he says. “It's a complicated history.”

At its best, though, this cowboy focus opens up discussions around a previously hidden part of American history, amid a country-wide identity crisis of sorts. “The idea of America is in such flux right now,” Sargent points out. “We’re having this conversation about who gets to be American, and people are reconsidering their relationship to their own their own American identities. Because the cowboy is so tied up in that [identity], we’re having these conversations about who fits into those symbols of America.” Perhaps the yeehaw agenda will prompt more people to consider how the cowboy archetype is as troubled as America’s formation. It’s a new frontier, y’all.