“THIS IS THEATER” reads a message across the gigantic screen dominating the stadium, as an operatic violinist struts and saws her few minutes on the stage, around two-and-a-half hours into the barrage of glitz, glamour and belt-thumbing boot-slaps that is Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter show. And it’s a grand-scale theater (sic) of the absurd.
For a good decade now, Queen Bey has been a proud pioneer of pop music as progressive art, making wildly exploratory, shape-shifting and genre-splicing albums that have elevated the form and absorbed several others: queer culture dance music on 2022’s Renaissance, country on last year’s Cowboy Carter. Translating them into stadium and festival sets, though, has tended to result in bewildering bombardments of entertainment, and she do-si-dos into a damp Tottenham Hotspur Stadium tonight with her 10-gallon crystal crown apparently slipping.
