Beyoncé Just Dropped the Mic With the Best Live Performance of 2024

This week:

• Briefly coming back from holiday break to rave about just how good Beyoncé’s Christmas halftime show was.

How Beyoncé Saved Christmas

Just how extreme is Beyoncé’s starpower? For almost 13 minutes on Christmas Day, my family finally shut up.

If you knew us, you’d understand what a feat that was.

It took someone as talented as Beyoncé, the greatest living live performer (that is not up for debate), to, on the sacred holiday, bring peace on Earth—or at least to my parents’ maelstrom-of-chaos living room.

Beyoncé’s halftime show during the Ravens-Texans game on Netflix, dubbed both “Cowboy Carter Christmas” and the “Beyoncé Bowl,” was the rare, shared cultural moment. Presented with the most captive audience an entertainer could have besides the Super Bowl—which she’s already torched with brilliance multiple times—Beyoncé delivered a meticulously produced and thrillingly performed set. I’d use some sort of football/sports metaphor to describe it, but from what I gather, the game she performed during was so embarrassingly bad that it doesn’t deserve being compared to Queen B.

According to Deadline, Netflix’s gameday viewership surged during Beyoncé’s performance, apparently attracting audiences who were interested in her set exclusively. (Hi! It’s me.) By the time she finished her medley of songs from her album Cowboy Carter—the first time she performed any of them live—social media buzzed with praise, as did all the occupants of my family’s Christmas party.

Was the fawning hyperbolic? Sure. This is the internet in 2024. But if you filter the histrionics, you’ll see the pure response to the halftime show: Beyoncé’s greatness is undeniable.

Proof of how irrefutable the performance was? It was met with the typical conservative backlash that happens anytime Beyoncé (or a female artist, especially a female Black performs) performs at a major event like this. Yet even one of the typical flag bearers of inventing things to be mad about, Tomi Lahren, stepped in to shut the discourse down.

“Can we stop with the faux outrage about Beyoncé? I’m not her biggest fan either, but she put on a good performance and she is immensely talented,” Lahren posted on X. “As conservatives, we don’t have to be outraged by everything, it’s a tired charade.”

Beyoncé is so powerful, she even zapped a modicum of sense into Tomi Lahren.

On Friday, the performance became available to watch as its own special on Netflix, so I rewatched it again…seven more times. Taking off my personal Beyoncé superfan (cowboy) hat, it’s an objectively striking performance.

Beginning the performance on a horse that parades through the halls of the stadium as she sings “16 Carriages,” a stirring ballad with a cannon-blast of a chorus, Beyoncé flipped the script on the kind of bombastic entrance expected of a production on this scale—which was, truly, Super Bowl-level.

The one-take shot was entrancing, continuing with the hypnotizing vocals of the “Blackbird” cover, ending poignantly with the lyric “you were only waiting for the moment to arrive” as she prepared to take to the field: celebrating her profound moment performing these songs for the first time in her hometown, and preparing viewers for the moment they were about to witness.

Then she detonated the nuclear bomb: the high-octane, energy-packed prototypical Beyoncé performance, a phenomenon that manages to be both exacting and perfect, yet feral and unhinged at the same time. “Ya Ya,” “My House,” and “Sweet Honey Buckin’” are songs practically engineered to be performed in this kind of arena with its explosive energy. Bringing in Post Malone as a guest to perform “Levii’s Jeans” was smart, showing off that, beyond all the noise about genre and opportunity that drowned out much of Cowboy Carter’s release, it has some incredibly accessible songs.

And the scale of “Texas Hold ’Em,” with the entire football field crowded with dancers and marching band players, built like an volcanic eruption, to the point that when she ended the set high in the air on a floating platform with the cheeky, cartoonish finger-gun “BANG!” joke, you reflexively scream and laugh.

In my experience watching with my family, I found it remarkable that it didn’t matter if people weren’t familiar with the Cowboy Carter songs. It was a bold move to attach this massive of a production to an entire set list of new songs instead of a medley of greatest hits. Were some of us zapped out of our Beyoncé trance by relatives loudly asking, “Why is she singing ‘Blackbird’?” or, “Hold on! Is that that Dolly Parton song?” Sure. But at least there was curiosity, and a renewed appreciation for Bey’s musicianship.

It didn’t matter whether a viewer understood the significance of all the Houston, Texas, and local Southern Black culture references that Beyoncé wove into the set: the rodeo stars, the references to HBCU marching bands, the line dancing, the homecoming parade, and so much more. But it is the attention to detail, which Beyoncé and her creative team are unmatched in executing, that elevates the production. Regardless of whether each allusion is clocked, it’s integral to the spectacular as a whole.

At the risk of my own personal safety amidst relation from a certain fan army, there is something else significant about Beyoncé’s Christmas Day performance.

The year in both sports and pop culture was defined by Taylor Swift, her relationship with Kansas City Chiefs star Travis Kelce, and her historic world tour that only recently wrapped. But in the last week of 2024, Beyoncé books the halftime slot of a NFL game—the arena that had been owned by Swift, with her headline-making appearances merely in the stands of games—and delivers a set that is inarguably the live performance of the year. (And live performance had been Swift’s whole thing for the last two years.)

It was the ultimate mic drop to end 2024.

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What to watch this week:

Babygirl: A sexy shot of cinematic Viagra, with a never-better Nicole Kidman. (Now in theaters)

The Fire Inside: The inspirational sports movie is perfect for holiday viewing. (Now in theaters)

Wicked: Releasing on digital New Year’s Eve. Time it so that Elphaba’s “Defying Gravity” scream plays at midnight. (Tues. on VOD)

What to skip this week:

Squid Game: We’re gonna have to say “red light” on streaming this one. (Now on Netflix)