We were so blown away by Beyoncé’s performance at the Coachella music festival that we decided to scrap our previous plans and dedicate this week’s entire episode to it. We think her performance will go down in the annals of American pop music as one of the greatest live shows ever.
We close read some of our favorite moments, including her beautiful rendition of the black national anthem, “Lift Ev’ry Voice and Sing,” and how she turns the swag surf into a dance for royalty. And we talk about the ways Beyoncé continues to shape-shift and grow as an artist, reinterpreting her own musical catalogue and making it richer, more sonorous and more black. We think about the ways black American music has always been misappropriated, and the ingenious way Beyoncé is pushing against that history, making music so skillful it can’t ever be replicated.
Discussed This Week:
“Kendrick Lamar Wins Pulitzer in ‘Big Moment for Hip-Hop’” (Joe Coscarelli, The New York Times)
Fantasies
Becoming
Joy
Reality
Relations
Kaepernick
Apology
Questions
We R-E-S-P-E-C-T Aretha Franklin
We Spy Two BlacKkKlansmen — and One is Omarosa
We Got Goop'd
We Give You Our Summer Faves
We Blaxplain Blaxplaining
We Heard Lauryn Hill, But Did We Listen?
We Can't Burn It All Down (Even Though Sometimes We Want To)
We Choose Our Own Families
Asian-Americans Talk About Racism, and We Listen - Part 2
Asian-Americans Talk About Racism, and We Listen - Part 1
We Louvre The Carters
We Need Bad Women
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