Beyoncé NFL half-time show review – country ho-ho-ho-down live-streamed on Netflix is playful and infectious

SOne of Beyoncé’s most iconic moments took place on an American football field. Her stunning Super Bowl performance in 2013, complete with a Destiny’s Child reunion, was topped by her guest appearance at Coldplay’s own halftime show in 2016, when she paid tribute to the Black Panthers and freaked out a significant portion of the American establishment ( “It is now ‘cool’ to embrace violence, chaos and, frankly, even racial separatism for the cause of civil rights,” the right-wing Heritage Foundation think tank shouted at her Coachella performance at the time in 2018, Homecoming, while not on a football field, featured college football majorettes and marching bands while celebrating historically black colleges and universities.

On Wednesday — during a Christmas Day halftime show streamed on Netflix from her native Houston as the Texans played the Baltimore Ravens — she once again used a football game as a place where she could interrogate and play with American iconography.

Beyoncé is part of the football world: Since 2019, her husband Jay-Z’s company Roc Nation has partnered with the NFL to book halftime entertainment and guide their social justice initiatives. (Although Jay-Z has been criticized in his role for joining an industry that shut out Colin Kaepernick after his kneeling protests against racially motivated violence). There’s also the latent sense that Beyoncé is playing to win: an artist who is as committed as an elite athlete to improving her craft, and who, like an elite athlete, is the subject of endless fan debates about who is the greatest of all time .

The Christmas Day performance marks the first live outing for material from Cowboy Carter, Beyoncé’s 2024 album that added a whole new discipline: country music. She begins with a pre-recorded segment in which she rides a white horse and wears a cowboy hat so wide it could have its own zip code, singing 16 carriages as she passes people standing on horseback – thereby recognizing the tradition of African American riding clubs around the American South and even nationally. Part of the Cowboy Carter project was to firmly emphasize the contributions of black Americans to country music and culture (not convincing everyone), and that’s the case now too – next up is her cover of the Beatles’ Blackbird, with a quartet of Black Country backing singers.

Any solemnity is swept away when the stadium performance begins with Ya Ya – a song whose total exuberance may grate in the studio version, but is transformed live. Beyoncé has occasionally been guilty of stiffness or dull regality during live performances, but on the Renaissance world tour she has noticeably loosened up and remains thrillingly slim here. She stalks past bleachers full of brass players and dancers, her eyes bulging, her hands mock-bearing, her movements jaunty and antique in the manner of black performers from Little Richard to Janelle Monaé.

Halftime shows are always packed harder than the turkeys of the day, but this quickly becomes a true spectacle of hits: a mega mix that brings in My House, Riiverdance and then Sweet Honey Buckiin with special guest Shaboozey. It then feels a bit ungenerous not to give him even a brief sound of the year’s defining Black Country anthem, Tipsy (A Bar Song).

A little more space is given to Leviis Jeans, as Beyoncé and Post Malone sing while lounging around a denim-clad pickup truck. So the whiff of surf becomes all the stronger, and some may find the way they lean into this song’s cornpone melodies almost a mockery of the genre, but it’s self-aware and charming enough in its silliness.

A banner deviously proclaims that we are in the midst of a “ho-ho-ho down,” and it continues with her cover of Jolene. Even Beyoncé stans have a hard time getting behind this version, which blatantly changes the dynamic of the original. Beyoncé lets her lust for power get the better of her; she just won’t get vulnerable and plead like Parton did, and instead just make threats. Live, the drummers and brass of the marching band sound great and provide a blinding dazzle, but there’s so much to see because lasso tricks are being done in the background while Beyoncé drives around in a lowrider. It all barely fits this bruised American standard.

However, everyone is at least in place for a triumphant ending, with Texas Hold ‘Em proving beautifully contradictory: there’s something homely and comforting about the beat, like a gentle slap on the skin of a faithful old horse. Only here it is done here with dozens of musicians and dancers, including, at Beyoncé’s side, her daughter Blue Ivy. The brilliant whiteness of everyone’s clothes is dazzling and downright theatrical, but perhaps there’s also a nod to how her all-black outfits were received in 2016.

At the end she is held up, the word ‘Bang!’ unfolded beneath her as if from a cartoon gun. That playfulness – making fun of cowboys, even debunking them – is what irritates some country fans, who see Beyoncé as a tourist. But that playfulness is also what makes her live shows so great these days.