High expectations are not my thing, and it’s impossible not to set them high for one of the most important popstars of my life, an artist who saved us from the rock era and has defined the genre I seem to be dedicating my career to writing about. The hype for the current Beyoncé tour has reached fever-pitch, with people on my social media saying it is “the best thing they’ve ever seen”. What if it’s not the best thing I’ve ever seen and there is something wrong with my soul? I hate disliking art, one reason I could never be a music critic - everyone tried their best! But when whispers started to circulate that this Beyoncé tour had the feeling of a farewell, I got the jitters and finally went for it. It was time to cross the Rubiconcé.
My friend Annabel and I surfed our way up to Tottenham on a wave of prosecco that didn’t seem to take effect due to the intense adrenaline coursing through our veins. We gripped each other’s hands tightly as we took our seats. The sun was setting over Tottenham Hotspur football stadium, diamanté cowboy hat capacity: 62,850. Although pop often appears dominated by women, Bey is one of few female artists who can fill this kind of venue. At many of the US stadiums on this tour, such as Gillette Stadium in Massachusetts, she is one of only two women to ever headline, along with Taylor Swift. In Europe, a very small number of other women have headlined before her at each venue, few enough to list here: Celine Dion, P!nk, Lady Gaga and Tina Turner, who Beyoncé honoured at Tottenham with a cover of ‘River Deep, Mountain High’. Each of these artists is an expert audience-builder, picking a demographic ranging from 13-year old girls (Taylor) to the LGBTQ+ community (Gaga) and building from there to the mainstream. I’m intrigued to see who shows up for Bey.
The demographic at Tottenham tonight is firmly millennial-ish women who love a night out (we exist) but beyond that it’s clear that Bey has scratched up these massive crowds one song at a time. To mine and Annabel’s left are two young Black women who confide that they aren’t that interested in the recent album Renaissance and are more excited for songs from her visual album Black Is King. I was astonished. I thought it was agreed that Renaissance is the greatest album of Beyoncé’s career and that Black is King, a spin-off from Disney’s live-action version of The Lion King, is barely canoncé. Clearly this project meant something very different to these girls. They really want to hear ‘Black Parade’.
When the sun finally dipped below the other side of the stadium and stopped blinding us, the enormous video screens flick from the LGTBQ+ pride flag to an image of Beyoncé, languidly reclining like a woman in a Titian painting, clearly meant to be Aphrodite, Greek goddess of love and beauty. It is a reminder of her status as the most beautiful woman in the world, a byword for gorgeousness. Beyoncé is 41, a mature woman well past the conventional “cut-off” age where women in pop supposedly fade. Her back catalogue is sprawling and, when you dip below the surface of hit singles like ‘Single Ladies’, somewhat strange. I occasionally do a top-to-tail re-listen and am always baffled when she starts in on ‘Ave Maria’ halfway through an album ostensibly meant to be her most crowd-pleasing. Hopefully no one showed up wanting to hear anything off I Am… Sasha Fierce. If they inexplicably wanted to hear five ballads in a row though, they were in luck. In a move that I now think of as typically Bey in its quirkiness, instead of opening the show in the blaze of lights, sparkle and booming music that she virtually invented, she began with a niche Destiny’s Child ballad, ‘Dangerously in Love 2’ and followed it with four songs whose main benefit was allowing me to sit down for the last time that night. Structure is a little-discussed aspect of concerts - Renaissance World Tour is 2.5 hours long. You’d typically expect the quieter section halfway through but clearly it couldn’t be squeezed in and Bey was damned if she wasn’t going to sing ‘I Care’. After three ballads I realised this show was not going to go as I expected and it was time to just unhinge my brain and let it happen to me. After the end of the ballad section, Beyoncé retired for quite a long costume change break. When she came back we really got started, and the en-er-gy only intensified more, and more, until it reached a fever pitch.
Renaissance is an album of house music put together so obsessively and so creatively that I actually think it was appropriate not to give it the Grammy for Best Album as she should skip straight to the Nobel. It’s a perfectly unified dance experience that Beyoncé describes as “a safe place, a place without judgment. A place to be free of perfectionism and overthinking. A place to scream, release, feel freedom.” It’s also a document of African-American LGBTQ+ life and culture dedicated to her Uncle Jonny, a gay man who died of AIDS. After a career where she has embodied femininity and the image of wife and mother, it is fascinating to see Beyoncé set aside her own persona to inhabit that of gay men. Academy Award! Palme d’Or! It’s so damn good. Yes, it was very nice to hear her sing pretty ballads, and her voice is unparalleled, as soft and rippling as a rhythmic gymnastics ribbon. But the most moving sections of the show are when she showcases her other voice - the one with attack, the ferocious one that comes closer to rapping, like her bravura performance on ‘Heated’, in which she fires off lyrics while wearing a glittering Loewe catsuit, a work of Surrealist art in itself from a fashion house headed by Northern Irish designer Jonathan Anderson.
Even from section 309, the sparkle per centimetre coming off Beyoncé is too many lumens for me to absorb. More happens to my senses in the first hour of the show than in the average year. The family to my right sits down at some point and doesn’t get back up again. At first I think, wow are these people so jaded they can’t rouse themselves to dance and sing along with this, the most entertaining thing that’s ever happened? Not long after, Annabel asks if I’m alright, as I mechanically swing my arms around and stare at the crowd in front of me instead of my idol. The music boomed but was slightly muffled in the huge, open-air venue. The Edinburgh show had a special moment where the crowd tunefully sang five or six iterations of the famous ever-ascending key change in ‘Love on Top’. Our attempts to replicate this fell apart immediately and horribly because of the timelag caused by the inadequate speed of sound compared to the cavernous venue. Beyoncé’s sing pitch-perfect melismas (the twiddly Mariah-Carey bits) are stunning but in addition to the music and the screens and the shiny silver stage and the massive, massive inflatable prop horse and the football stadium full of screaming fans, it’s a lot of sensory complexity to take in. It is spectacular. It is overwhelming. During ‘Crazy in Love’, one of my favourite songs of all time, I reach for my phone and watch it through the screen. Walter Benjamin was right - the proletariat will become unable to look directly at the work of art and will instead become accustomed to consuming pale reproductions. It’s me, hi, I’m the proletariat, it’s me.
After one of six costume change breaks, during which Annabel dashes to the bar and I stare into space, a clamshell appears, opening to reveal Beyoncé, the goddess of love and beauty.
The repeated identification with Aphrodite/Venus is part of an intent to elevate Beyoncé to the status of a goddess, a valuable project for a Black woman in America, and a suspicious project by someone who is rumoured to be a billionaire. Her 2013 UK tour was announced with pictures of her dressed as Queen Elizabeth I; her nickname is “Queen Bey”. It’s one step from there to Mount Olympus.
Every Beyoncé project is a rich text of references, samples and collaborators. In the Queens remix of ‘Break My Soul’ (which mixes Bey’s “quit your job” anthem with Madonna’s ‘Vogue’) she shouts out 29 Black female musicians from Bessie Smith to Rihanna. The index for this show would be a good read. But the references to male artists, as ever, immediately got us into choppy waters: snippets of songs by Kanye West and Michael Jackson left me feeling icky. My blood was also chilled by the image of Beyoncé sitting atop a silver tank, in a section of the show entitled ‘Opulence’. In hindsight this may very well have been intended to be a moon buggy, an afrofuturist image that makes sense given the first song she sang from her perch was ‘Black Parade’. I’m pleased for the girls to my left because they got their favourite song from Black is King. It’s a loose and joyful number I enjoyed as a bit of light relief amidst the high-BPM house rhythms of Renaissance. It reminds me that I got into Beyoncé for the ebullience, not the cultural analysis. Later I read the lyrics. It was written in response to the death of George Floyd, but the song is a celebration of Black culture and pride that comes across as more of a party song than one for a funeral. Turning politics into a party is very Beyoncé, and so is the contractual necessity of releasing her protest song in collaboration with Disney.
The tank completely perplexed me. If you understand the references, it is possible to work up a theory of Black space exploration, but from where I sat, I just saw her rolling out on a tank in the middle of a crowd. I couldn’t help but connect the dots between this image of oppression and her recent performance in the United Arab Emirates, a country with “indentured servitude” and where being gay is illegal.
I completely lost track during the section ‘Mind Control’, which I notice no one has been putting up on their instagram. The words “Whoever controls the media controls the mind” flashed up on the screens, followed by “Imagination is more important than knowledge”. I couldn’t tell if Beyoncé intended the slightly conspiracy-theory feeling of these statements, if they were satirical or meant as a classic celebrity clapback at rumours and criticism. It’s at this moment that Beyoncé emerges onstage in a metallic bee costume complete with antennae and I park the analysis for the time being. I haven’t forgotten though. It’s almost like everyone in attendance just agreed not to talk about these jarring elements. I know Beyoncé doesn’t do anything without a considered reason and I wonder if she has also read Benjamin and has some questions about her role as a mass-media entity. What is her relationship with media power? She gives almost no interviews and as a result her image usually stands in for her words. She has made no videos for Renaissance, leaving us with even less narrative than usual. If the media is misrepresenting her, is that because she’s left us in a vacuum?
The prosecco kicked in after 2.5 hours and re-watching my final video from the night, I can see my finger wobbling into shot and hear myself slur “she’s flyingggggg… That’s… craaaaazy.” Beyoncé floats around the arena on the back of a sparkling horse and then she is gone.
When the dazzle dust settled, and I was able to have feelings again, I was left with the sense that Beyoncé is odder than the category of “popstar” allows for and a greater artist for it. She is incredibly entertaining, a true star in the old mould: charisma, powerful dancing, era-defining physical beauty, a voice of great technical perfection, and somehow despite being in the fame bubble for decades, something new to say in the year 2023. She puts on a different level of show, one that does more than we really need, to overpowering effect. The level of effort reflects what she has to do to draw in a crowd willing to pay this money to see her. The politics is there, but can also be ignored if you’re there for a prosecco-sponsored Night Out. The balance is struck. If the tour was just about the money, she wouldn’t risk it with the strangeness. If it was just about providing entertainment, she wouldn’t open the show with five ballads. Going to this Beyoncé show was a mutual investment of money, time, and a willingness to take what is given, at any cost to your nervous system and previous relationship with Queen Bey. We got every penny back, with interest.
Some notes:
A heartfelt thank you and I love you to Annabel, who grounded me with her grip during one of the most stressful experiences of my life. She gave up free floor tickets to go through this experience with me, a sacrifice beyond my imaginings (and imagination is, as we know, more important than knowledge).
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