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 2016 half-time show as she paid homage to the Black Panthers and freaked out a sizeable section of the US establishment (“It is now ‘cool’ to embrace violence, mayhem and, frankly, even racial separatism in the cause of civil rights,” the rightwing 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.
