Nine years after being snubbed by country music’s elite, Beyoncé opens the Cowboy Carter Tour, not by shying away from the controversy that spurred its namesake album, but by demonstrating the power of protest.
The first bars of the lead track on her 2024 album, “American Requiem,” kick off the show in complete darkness, leaving the audience to focus on the gospel-tinged challenge to America’s original sin. Minutes later, her rendition of “The Star-Spangled Banner” is backed by Jimi Hendrix’s acerbic riffs from Woodstock, bringing the politicized performance 55 years into the future. As she sings, “History can’t be erased,” during “Ya Ya,” the screen behind her punctuates the lyrics with archival footage of civil rights marches. The frenetic, emotional, joyous first minutes of her latest stadium tour delivers the message with the subtlety of a sledgehammer, but, like Bey herself, it’s bombastic in its euphoria. I’ll sum it up in the feeling that washed over me after reading an essential edict displayed on stage, several stories tall: “Never ask permission for something that already belongs to you.”
