Mathew Knowles once told a young Beyoncé: “When you’re really into a song, it shows.”
Her daddy’s lesson loomed over the end of a nostalgic visual display recalling her odyssey through all of the losses, notable snubs and wins from her girlhood in Texas on up to her untouchable megastar status today.
Unlike the average Beyhive fan and stan, whose trials and tribulations aren’t on display for the world to scrutinize, almost every moment of Beyoncé’s pilgrimage to becoming the greatest living performer of this generation has played out in front of the cameras. For three nights in Chicago, tens of thousands of adoring fans and celebrities – dressed in their best yeehaw attire – cheered through video vignette moments of the mother of three’s life. The “Cowboy Carter and Rodeo Chitlin’ Circuit” became more than a tour; it was a glimpse into Beyoncé’s metamorphosis.
She’s no longer bound by the chains of a conventional music industry demanding the same ole commercial hits. She no longer has to care about respectability politics or pleasing those who want her to be everything to everyone.
Beyoncé is a country ass Black woman with deeply Southern roots and an immense amount of respect for the shoulders she stands on. Knowing that her Cowboy Carter album was supposed to drop before Renaissance makes the Rodeo Chitlin’ Circuit even more of a coming out of sorts. It’s her era of reclamation, akin to James Brown’s release of “Say It Loud – I’m Black and I’m Proud.” She’s weathered the storm, including the temperamental spring weather that Chicago threw at her and the fans who made the painful trek to an outmoded Soldier Field.
“I want y’all to know, y’all may be the best audience. I can’t believe y’all have so much energy,” Beyoncé told Sunday’s Night 3 crowd. She did so right after touching down from a flight around the stadium in an old-school red convertible with rims while singing the penultimate setlist song, “16 Carriages.”
The scene was magical for multiple reasons: 1) it gave fans in the balcony sections a close-up view of the Queen Bey, and 2) Soldier Field is roofless, so what were the harnesses carrying Bey and the car even attached to?
“It’s 50 degrees. They say it feels like 41 degrees,” Bey continued. Between her first show on Thursday and third show on Sunday, Chicago’s weather had given everything from a tornado warning and a modern-day Dust Bowl to both warm and chilly temps. “Y’all been out here giving me so much warmth and I wanted to do was give that warmth right back to y’all.”
I attended Night 2 on Saturday. What makes Beyoncé’s show special is her unabashed nod to Blackness being the foundation of everything socio-political in America. She sings “Blackbiird” while images of country and rock foremothers like Linda Martell and Sister Rosetta Tharpe illuminate behind her. She turns “The Star Spangled Banner” on its head by singing half of its opening verse to the sound of Jimi Hendrix’s 1960s Woodstock version; most of her fans understood the assignment and did not partake in the tradition of placing a hand over the heart.
Messages like “Never ask permission for something that already belongs to you” and “The reclamation of America” are issued as executive orders on the screen. Beyoncé lends her own image to strong displays of Black art, with one of her in a white veil surrounded by two crows and a mangled American flag, which circles back at the end of the show with an inflatable lady Liberty silenced by a bandanna tied around her mouth.
Stunning visual shorts of her creative takes on spaghetti westerns, an erotic peep show scene of Beyoncé turning herself on inside what’s presumably a saloon, and somewhat acid western of a larger-than-life Beyoncé shamar dancing through the desert to BigXthaPlug’s “The Largest” quenched a portion of her fans’ thirst for album visuals, but the people definitely want to see more. American westerns deemed white men as the stars and heroes, but Beyoncé reclaims the Blackness that’s been erased from that history.
There’s one section where she opened with her 2022 Renaissance track, “America Has A Problem,” to which she sings from a presidential podium. Even when she does a classic like 2016 Lemonade’s “Formation,” she updates it to fit her message, adding in a fun call-and-response “If you know who you are and where you come from, say I slay” and emphasizing one particular lyric, “You heard what I said? They’ll never take the country out me.”
With the “Cowboy Carter and Rodeo Chitlin’ Circuit,” Beyoncé blends and mixes in her past and current music in ways that underlines that country has always been in her. There’s a hint of “Flawless” in her performance of “Spaghetti,” a bit of “Haunted” is heard during “Tyrant,” sprinkles of “Bills, Bills, Bills” in “Heated.” And to show the connectivity of genres, and the fullness of Black creativity, Beyoncé slips David Banner’s “Like A Pimp” into a “Diva” dance break, 69 Boyz’s “Tootsie Roll” anthem into “Sweet Honey Buckiin,” adding her Willie Nelson “Smoke Hour” interlude on top of Twista’s “Wetter” (which she officially remixed for “Cuff It”), and the “Boots on the Ground” line dance craze into her homage to Frankie Beverly’s “Before I Let Go.”
Beyoncé includes a section dedicated to the Renaissance, including its iconic choreography of the robotic arms framing her up for “Cozy” and the otherworldly blanket swaddling her up into “Alien Superstar.” Though there’s never a moment where Renaissance doesn’t go super hard (I still listen to that album routinely), a dedicated section for it didn’t feel necessary for this tour. Watching that whole sequence again created a yearning for seeing the whole Renaissance World Tour in full. (In fact, many fans are still craving the streaming release of the theater-released documentary.) The other areas of the show where Renaissance tracks were blended in felt like a creative mixing of genres.
Notably, the “Cowboy Carter and Rodeo Chitlin’ Circuit” felt like the continuation of Beyoncé’s legacy. The moments of her flying across the stadium in both a glowing slot machine horseshoe and a red drop top car, paired with singing “Tyrant” while riding a chrome mechanical bull, embodied the stratospheric heights she’s achieved in her three-decade career. But it’s the times when her 13-year-old daughter Blue Ivy Carter appeared on stage, right by her side, not only executing but dominating the choreography that the show became a full circle manifestation of Beyoncé’s hard work.
Accentuated against a melting pot of vogueing and death drops, which add much-needed inclusivity to a genre brimming with God-fearing patriarchy, Blue Ivy herself strutted down the reimagined ballroom runway to her parents iconic 2006 track, “Deja Vu.” She topped off her performance by doing the exact dance sequence that her mother does to the song. It’s as if Blue Ivy grew up right before our eyes, especially after the world watched her learn in real time on the Renaissance World Tour. Just like her mother, she’s silencing the naysayers on this tour. And Mathew Knowles’ fatherly lesson is being passed down.
