I SLAY! we told her, most of us sounding pretty dumb, because Beyonc is one of the few people alive who sounds cool when she says "I slay." No matter. She had just emerged from a rotating, skyscraper-sized cube made of LED lights; she had a team of eight acrobatically gifted women dancing behind her; a tireless female drummer to her right and a ferocious female bassist to her left, and a Super Bowl-sized stadium of followers screaming her name in every other direction.

After opening with "Formation," the politically charged call to arms that sent football fans clutching for their pearls when she stole Coldplay's show with it at the aforementioned Big Ol' American Sports Event at Levi's in February, Beyonc dove full-speed into a set that leaned heavily on Lemonade, her much-discussed, barely three-week old manifesto about love and pain and infidelity and the messy realities of being a woman, not to mention an obscenely famous woman of color, in America.


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"Sorry" saw thousands of middle fingers in the air, waving with a gusto that suggested the fingers themselves had been waiting patiently for years to do just that. "Hold Up" was jaunty testimony as much as it was an admonition, a map of hurt and marital betrayal, even as she segued easily into the relationship celebration of "Countdown" and strutted athletically down a catwalk into the middle of the crowd. "Don't Hurt Yourself" invited the most committed, gleeful headbanging I've ever seen from an R&B or pop star, helped in no small part by Beyonc's (again, female) electric guitarist standing in for Jack White, wailing through heavily distorted riffs, rocking an Afro and shredded jeans.

"This is a song about the most important relationship in your life, and that's the one you have with yourself," Beyonc said by way of introducing "Me Myself and I," off her debut solo album, somehow managing to sound earnest while also staying on message with the precision of a knife-thrower. "Every other relationship is just a bonus."

With a few other exceptions -- "Flawless" was a beast of a performance; "Crazy In Love" opened with a dark, ominous downtempo rendition that emphasized the negative connotations of "crazy" before B flashed a smile and jumped into its rightful pace; the sloppy, sexy devotion of "Drunk In Love" also took on a new gravity in light of the cracks we've now seen in its central relationship -- songs from previous albums got shorter treatments. Destiny's Child tracks, in particular, became something like a tangled teaser-medley of lyrics about independent ladies and survivors and jelly (this jelly, to be specific, and whether or not you're ready for it).

As the show charged on, my initial frustration at the medley approach to early songs was outweighed by the power of juxtaposition; nothing highlights how much she's grown like hearing 2003's "Baby Boy" (ft. Sean Paul, though this show did not, thankfully, feature Sean Paul) in close proximity to the layered, orchestral, triumphant "All Night" -- which Beyonc referred to as her favorite song to sing from the new album, because "it's about redemption." (See: knife-thrower storyline crafting, above.)

That juxtaposition also helped to eliminate any doubt that this woman can carry a stadium show by herself. Not only was Jay Z conspicuously missing from the premises, his parts were actually removed from her songs -- and I didn't miss them. In the same vein, the sets were certainly big visually (video clips from Lemonade, aerial dancers and complicated platforms of various sizes, fireworks, more than a half-dozen costume changes). But it was tough not to draw a comparison to Taylor Swift's '1989' tour, which also came to Levi's Stadium, and during which the stage became something like the set for an over-the-top, Taylor Swift-themed musical; the dancers and complex video elements at that performance seemed crucial to making it interesting enough to last two hours.

When Beyonc's on stage, you don't need much else. I never got to see Michael Jackson live, but I have to imagine it was a little like this. ("Hey, this is cool, but let's add some more grandiose set design just so people have something else to look at while Michael's dancing," said no artistic director ever.)

As the evening wound to a close, B disappeared and reemerged in white, her dancers stone-faced, bound in costumes that looked like rope. Together, barefoot, they took to a rectangular, ankle-deep pool of water at the edge of the catwalk to dance for the duration of "Freedom," the drum-driven, heart-pounding Kendrick Lamar collaboration on Lemonade. Hair was flying, water was flying, arms and legs took the shape of wings. It looked primal. It looked like liberation. It looked exhausting.

"You know, she doesn't have to work this hard," I yelled to my friend, as her dancers left and Beyonc closed the show solo, still barefoot, with "Halo." "She's not even lip-syncing!" my friend yelled back, and it was true: Beyonc was clearly singing her ass off, all while doing squats and lunges and high-kicks in heels for, let me repeat it, 120 minutes straight.

But the thought I woke up with this morning -- after three hours of traffic and three and a half hours of sleep -- was something like: Actually, she does have to work that hard. Because the more records she breaks, the more people are waiting for her to slip. No matter what she does, people will line up to say she doesn't deserve her success, that she's a pretty lady pop star propped up by shrewd male writers and producers; to proclaim that her newfound public political consciousness is just a well-crafted but disingenuous marketing ploy, instead of entertaining the possibility that a 34-year-old performer who's been in the spotlight since age 16 might grow up and develop fresh ideas and want to go in new directions, and that doing all of that on an international stage will obviously, at times, get messy.

But whether it was calculated or genuine or somewhere in between, the sparkle of a tear in Beyonc's eye as she put her hand to her chest, looked around the stadium, and smiled a gracious, humble, goddamn beautiful smile before saying "thank you" one last time and disappearing below the stage said everything I needed to know about what she thinks she deserves. She might not have always been clear on that. It might have even taken heartbreak for her to see it.

And if that's not proof that the personal is political -- especially, yes, if you're a woman, and especially if you're an obscenely famous woman of color in America -- I sure as hell don't know what is.

Beyonc knows how to talk a lot without talking. She can create psychodrama, she can create conversations in your head. And that's her artistry: making you think about two ideas by juxtaposing them next to each other, while trying to make a record that is, like, semi-competitively trying to get on the charts. And in fact, ends up going to number one. So that's part of what makes her the greatest living artist in popular music right now.

She's coming to you as a historian and an archivist who can say: here are all the tools you need to understand how we got to this musical moment. You can do the thing that people do when they engage with pop music and go like, this is fun, and I want to dance. Or you can go: this is history, this is a library, and I'm going to spend my time trying to figure out and decode all the connections and the ways that these ideas are engaging with each other. And the fact that it works in both dimensions is not easy at all. I say this as one of many people who have tried to like, you know, write the vegetables into a popular story!

Right now we have enough subscribers to pay Melody through mid-June, but we need your continued support to make this sustainable, otherwise all these future episodes on J-Lo and Goodreads and the weirdness of online shopping and running a romance bookstore will just disappear into the podcast ether.

Happy Friday, Happy Day After New Taylor Swift Album Drop, Happy Get Ready for Our Episode of on the new album (with Sarah Chapelle of Taylor Swift Styled, which we\u2019ll be taping on Monday and NEED YOUR QUESTIONS (about the album, about all the looks)\u2026.which you can submit here).

We\u2019ll get to Taylor soon, though. Right now, we\u2019re still very much talking about Beyonc\u00E9 and Cowboy Carter \u2014 and I wanted to send you some highlights of my conversation with Elamin Abdelmahmoud if you haven\u2019t yet added the pod to your rotation.

Beyonc\u00E9 is largely a conceptual artist. She's been a conceptual artist for maybe the last 12 years or so, since 2013. So when Self-Titled came out. Halfway through her career, she sort of switches modes and becomes this larger conceptual artist. The albums are not albums, they're sort of explorations of ideas, you know? You get Self-Titled, which is like different explorations of the nuances of womanhood in that particular moment in her career. Lemonade explores all these nuances of marriage, you know\u2026.

\u2026She's now in this Renaissance project. And to me the Renaissance project, it's a project of repatriation. There are musical ideas that have been divorced from their history. And that is not going to sit well with Beyonc\u00E9. You can sort of imagine her being like, \\\"Nope, this belongs in my museum, thank you.\u201D She's just taking all these ideas back. She does it for house and techno music, which has become like, largely disembodied from its Black history. And then, with a single album, she manages to sort of recreate that history or sort of replace that history sort of upfront. And then she says, I'm making this country album and everybody's like, \\\"Oh, here we go!\\\"

Beyonc\u00E9 knows how to talk a lot without talking. She can create psychodrama, she can create conversations in your head. And that's her artistry: making you think about two ideas by juxtaposing them next to each other, while trying to make a record that is, like, semi-competitively trying to get on the charts. And in fact, ends up going to number one. So that's part of what makes her the greatest living artist in popular music right now. 152ee80cbc

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