Beyoncé, being Beyoncé, had won before she got to the Super Bowl, even though it involved defeating herself. Beyoncé’s version of admitting to lip-synching a pre-recorded version of the National Anthem at the Presidential Inauguration was to hold a press conference and sing that anthem live, without a net, before reporters. And, of course, the solo version was stronger, more nuanced, and less clichéd than the canned version. Sadly, she didn’t drop the mic and walk right off—her one fumble—but she did close by asking “Any questions?,” sealing the moment.
Last year’s halftime show gave us Madonna, a pop star struggling to regain relevance, being upstaged by a young star named M.I.A., who can’t seem to become irrelevant, no matter how bad her live shows are. This year, Beyoncé seemed as safe as houses—who could she offend? Maybe the lip-synching “incident” was a setup, allowing Beyoncé to validate her skills right before the Super Bowl.
Was it surprising that Beyoncé was amazing? Nope—she vaulted right into the top five halftime performers, along with Prince, Michael Jackson, Bruce Springsteen, and U2. (Anil Dash and I agree on this one.) My feeble attempt to describe her outfit was “black leather leotard with lace peplum, knee-high socks, and black platform heels.” More accurately, designer Rubin Singer made something that involved “strips of python and iguana,” while thinking of Valkyries. Makes sense.
Watching a performer in her prime, especially in the day of the hundred-forty-character one-liner, is as frustrating as it is thrilling. Beyoncé does nothing wrong live. She sings and dances as if both acts are simply getting easier as she ages, that synchronizing her body and voice to the visual mayhem around her isn’t even something she needs to rehearse. (She rehearsed.) The only thing that was problematic about this performance was the slight technical overload. Flames on the sides of the stage erupted, eventually forming two profiles facing each other, each with flowing hair made of light or flames or some kind of new flaming light that Jay-Z and Beyoncé’s secret Illuminati science cabal makes underneath Junior’s. (That’s not a thing.) On television, the camera angles never stopped changing, so the difference between live pyrotechnics and projection screens and whatever screens used to be all blurred together. What was intended to create excitement just created a tangle of visual wind.
But wind lifts things, like Beyoncé’s hair, so it didn’t matter. The version of “Crazy in Love” was compressed and chopped down, awkwardly, but Beyoncé was singing and dancing in the middle of it. When she brought out Michelle Williams and Kelly Rowland for a brief Destiny’s Child reunion, it was fun to hear them sing ”Independent Women,” but better to watch them reënact the choreography of “Single Ladies,” which is closing in on “Thriller” as the most easily recognized dance move in video history, with “Gangnam Style” galloping up behind.
Her smiles feel unforced, her high notes unstrained. She’s Beyoncé, the model of a pop star, who retains the right to be our alpha-female performer by never taking it for granted, by visibly loving all of the work the job involves. There’s a difference between being the object of everyone’s gaze and constantly recreating the reason the gaze is there. Who could look at anyone else when Beyoncé is on stage? The game apparently got pretty interesting after the blackout, but that involved some unknown force. (A power outage delayed play for thirty-four minutes right after Beyoncé’s thirteen-minute performance.) Beyoncé is exactly what we know, and it is more remarkable every time she just goes and does it, as if to always obscure the fact that she had to come up with herself first, before we knew her.
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