Outside the gates of Levi’s Stadium Monday evening, a monster merchandise truck hawked an array of Beyonce-centric swag including “I Got Hot Sauce in My Bag” tote bags and T-shirts with slogans like “Slay All Day,” “Beyhive Boys” and “Boycott Beyonce” t-shirts that welcomed even the artist’s haters to spend money on her empire.
Her two-hour performance centered on her recently released visual album “Lemonade” and her 2013 self-titled album, teasing with the tips of Destiny’s Child hits like “Independent Women,” “Bootylicious” and “Survivor,” the latter performed during the concluding set of songs in a pool of shallow water, an original visual that also got some audience members wet as dancers kicked it into the crowd. While consumers continue to debate the veracity of the claims of her husband’s infidelity that consume the album and admire the brilliance of profiting on the gossip that has swirled around them for years, the woman she showed onstage did not look like she felt “worthless” inside, as she admitted happened to her in the face of marital trouble on the new song “Hold Up.” [[379785881, C]]
Beyonce and her dancers worked tirelessly through the whole show, frequently changing into progressively tinier and shinier costumes and throwing fierce shapes with choreography inspired by a wide range of styles of movement, including West African dance, Jamaican dancehall, Tina Turner’s bounce and Michael Jackson’s robotics, all while teetering atop heels. She paid tribute to Prince throughout the show, first with a wrenching rendition of “The Beautiful Ones,” continuing with a solemn playing of his version of “Purple Rain,” accompanied by a sea of cellphone lights illuminating the stadium, and concluding with riffs from Vanity 6’s “Nasty Girl” in the midst of her own song “Blow.”
Pre-recorded tracks ruled the night, but the moments when Beyonce’s all-female backing band and backup singers were allowed to contribute elevated the musicality in a dramatic way, all sounding all the more impactful due to the use of THX audio. When she wasn’t hoofing it and singing well and on key, she was really belting out her songs. A towering, rotating LED projection wall offered stunning outtakes from the “Lemonade” movie’s more familiar setups, including many black and white images re-rendered in bold red. Fire columns and red sparking fireworks added elements of surprise, but didn't upstage the star.
While she made a point to say in the middle of the show that she always has a good time in the city, having just performed the Southern-drenched single “Formation” at the Super Bowl halftime show at Levi’s Stadium in February, the evening’s most Bay Area-centric moments belonged to Beyonce’s opener DJ Khaled, a hip-hop hustler from Miami who is best known for amassing more than six million followers on Snapchat and helping it reach the tipping point as a social media tool.
After playing repeated snippets from the late Vallejo rapper Mac Dre’s regional hits, Khaled brought out internationally famous local rappers Too $hort and E-40 to run through a string of their hits — and shoot a “snap” for posterity, one of a moments in time worth capturing on this evening.[[379737191, C]]
