8/1/2023 0 Comments Remix halo beyonce![]() ![]() In Stockholm, to an audience bracing themselves for Lights! Fire! Glitter! Flash! the song’s pleading landed with an emotional wallop. Only when it was released from its mix in live shows could it become a big gutsy ballad. “I love you I love you I love you,” she began, singing “Dangerously in Love 2.” It’s a track that always sounded slight on its album. There was Beyoncé, in a custom Alexander McQueen catsuit, a mic stand, and a deep cut. Clouds, peachy and lavender in their golden-hour glow, glided across a screen that spanned the stage. When the show started, it didn’t start with a bang - it started with a ballad. “The Bible says eyes have not seen, ears have not heard.” We both cackled. In a hotel lobby close to the stadium, I asked a news-producer-artist-nomad in his 30s what he expected from the show without videos to memorize and mimic. I had given in to the spin: It was actually better that there weren’t any music videos. (Perhaps there were too-white candles, as she’d said once while giving notes during a rehearsal.) I had taken shots of her Kool-Aid. ![]() Maybe it was just the result of Beyoncé’s well-documented perfectionism. That it wasn’t the result of a stalled corporate partnership. That afternoon, I’d convinced myself that the lack of music videos was intentional. Maybe this was because of the lack of visuals from an artist who has released not one visual album but three. The fans I spoke to said they had no expectations for the show. “No skips? What does it mean? Should I know what it means?” one said. Three other fans were confused about what a merch T-shirt proclaiming “NO SKIPS” meant. ![]() A pregnant woman from Denver, in a shimmery silver disc shift dress, asked me to take a video of her, her sister, and her best friend fanning their merch fans emblazoned with the number ten - a reference to the lyrics for “Heated” ( Ten ten ten across the board). Two 20-somethings had white glitter cowboy hats hanging down their backs.Īt the stadium close to sunset, half the crowd came to dance in on-theme sequins, glitter, and chrome, and the other half came to dance in whatever was comfortable. When I walked around Gamla Stan, Stockholm’s old town, a few hours ahead of the show, I saw a man in official tour merch recognizable from fans’ posts. The customs agent rolled her eyes and said, ‘Ugh, why did I even ask?’ She turned to the other agent and started speaking in Swedish.” Not to say that every Stockholmer was anti-Renaissance: In stores and at restaurants, every local seemed to know someone who wouldn’t miss it. “Going through customs, they ask why you’re here. “There’s been some mixed reception,” Charles Ray Hamilton, a TV writer living in Los Angeles, told me. Is that the polite way to say even locals seemed to find it random? During a walk around the city Tuesday afternoon, I could count other Black people I passed on one hand - and one was a poster promoting the Shondaland show Queen Charlotte. Stockholm is a pleasant but quaint city to start a global tour in. She remembered it saying “Welcome to Beyoncé.” Every Black person she’d met so far in Stockholm has traveled here for the show - except for one couple from Seattle who just came because it’s spring. A film programmer from Los Angeles told me her hotel had a sign in the elevator specifically for the Hive. They got on the plane wearing compression socks for Beyoncé. ![]() going for less than $200 in Stockholm) those fans booked entire Eurotrips around Beyoncé. After a viral TikTok tipped off fans that floor seats abroad were selling for one-tenth the cost of tickets in New York or Los Angeles (with enviably close seats that cost $2,000 in the U.S. I swear I could hear the reply sizzle as it hit skin: “ Ohhhh, well it will still be fun!”įor two nights this week, Stockholm became the capital of Black Planet, the epicenter of all internet activity, when the Renaissance tour - Beyoncé’s first solo tour in seven years and two(-ish) albums - took over the city. Night two, or, as far as his seatmate was concerned, night last. One man asked another what night he was seeing the show. I heard it first on the Delta flight from JFK to Stockholm as an almost entirely Black - and almost entirely Beyoncé-bound - boarding group took our seats. There is a certain hierarchy between Wednesday, night one of Beyoncé’s Renaissance world tour, and Thursday, night two of Beyoncé’s Renaissance world tour. ![]()
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