Some of Beyoncé’s most iconic moments have been on an American football field. Her barnstorming 2013 Super Bowl performance, complete with a Destiny’s Child reunion, was outdone by her guest appearance during Coldplay’s own 2016 half-time show as she homaged the Black Panthers and freaked out a sizeable quotient of the US establishment (“It is now ‘cool’ to embrace violence, mayhem, and frankly even racial separatism in the cause of civil rights”, the right-wing Heritage Foundation thinktank fumed at the time). Her 2018 Coachella performance, Homecoming, though not on a football field, featured college football’s majorettes and marching bands as she celebrated historically Black colleges and universities.
On Wednesday – in a Christmas Day half-time show streamed on Netflix from her native Houston as the Texans played the Baltimore Ravens – she again used a football game as somewhere for her to interrogate and play around with American iconography.
Beyoncé is part of the football business: since 2019 her husband Jay-Z’s company Roc Nation has partnered with the NFL to book half-time entertainment and guide their social justice initiatives. (Though Jay-Z has faced criticism in the role for aligning with an industry that shut out Colin Kaepernick after his taking-the-knee protests against racially motivated violence). There’s also the latent sense that Beyoncé plays to win: an artist as devoted as an elite sportsperson to bettering her craft, and who, like an elite sportsperson, is the subject of endless fan debates about who is the greatest of all time.
The Christmas Day performance is the first live outing for material from Cowboy Carter, Beyoncé’s 2024 album that added a whole new discipline: country music. She begins with a pre-recorded segment riding a white horse and wearing a cowboy hat so broad that it could have its own postcode, singing 16 Carriages as she passes people stood on horseback – acknowledging the tradition of African American horse riding clubs around the American south and indeed countrywide. Part of the Cowboy Carter project has been to firmly underline the contributions of Black Americans to country music and culture (not convincing everyone), and so it is here – next up is her cover of the Beatles’ Blackbird, with a quartet of Black Country backing singers.
Any solemnity is swept away as the in-stadium performance begins with Ya Ya – a song whose total effusiveness can grate in its studio version but is transformed live. Beyoncé has occasionally been guilty of stiffness or boring regality in live performance, but she noticeably loosened up on the Renaissance world tour and continues to be thrillingly rangy here. She prowls down bleachers filled with brass players and dancers, her eyes bugging out, her hands mock-testifying, her moves gleeful and antic in the manner of Black artists from Little Richard to Janelle Monaé.
Half-time shows are always stuffed harder than the day’s turkeys, but this quickly become a veritable turducken of hits: a megamix that pulls in My House then Riiverdance then Sweet Honey Buckiin with special guest Shaboozey. It feels a little ungenerous then to not give him even a brief blast of the year’s defining Black Country anthem, Tipsy (A Bar Song).
A bit more space is given to Leviis Jeans, as Beyoncé and Post Malone sing while mooching around a denim-upholstered pickup truck. The whiff of branding thus intensifies all the more, and some might find the way they lean into this song’s cornpone melodies to be close to mockery of the genre, but it is self-knowing and charming enough in its silliness.
A banner punningly proclaims we’re in the middle of a “ho-ho-ho down”, and it continues with her cover of Jolene. Even Beyoncé stans struggle to get behind this version, which egregiously changes the original’s dynamic. Beyoncé lets her imperiousness get the better of her; she simply won’t be vulnerable and beg in the way Parton did, and instead merely issues threats. Live, the marching band drummers and brass sound terrific and give it some razzle dazzle, but there is so much to take in as lasso tricks are done in the background while Beyoncé cruises in a lowrider. It all hardly suits this bruised American standard.
Everyone is at least in place, though, for a triumphant ending, with Texas Hold ‘Em proving gorgeously contradictory: there’s something down-home and comforting about its beat, like a gentle thwack on the hide of a trusty old horse. Only here it’s being done here with dozens of musicians and dancers, including, by Beyoncé’s side, her daughter Blue Ivy. The brilliant whiteness of everyone’s garb is dazzling and straightforwardly theatrical, but perhaps there’s also a wink at how her all-black outfits were received back in 2016.
At the end she’s held aloft, the word “Bang!” unfurled beneath her as if from a cartoon pistol. That playfulness – poking fun at cowboys, even emasculating them – is what riles some country fans, who see Beyoncé as a tourist. But that playfulness is also what’s making her live shows such a blast these days.
