Sitting to Beyoncé’s left was Rumi, her seven-year-old daughter, tucked under her arm; behind her, Blue Ivy, her 13-year-old daughter, and in front of them, a crowd of 80,000. The MetLife Stadium in New Jersey was a sea of stetson hats and rhinestone handbags, shining silver chaps and American flags, mothers, daughters, teenagers and their friends.
Welcome to the Cowboy Carter and the Rodeo Chitlin’ Circuit Tour, Beyoncé’s three-hour, western yee-haw, a stadium-sized imagining of her ninth studio album, Cowboy Carter. Alongside the camp and the sequins and the flying Cadillac, the horseshoe swing and the chrome mechanical bull was, most noticeably, the singer’s growing family dynasty.
Although ticket sales have been, by Beyoncé’s standards, sluggish in the UK and the US (there were seats available on the night of the New Jersey show), the music is considered her most ambitious yet. Cowboy Carter won best album at the Grammys in February, after four successive snubs — a 27-track romp through country, rhythm and blues and black folk music, as well as various southern traditions (psychedelic soul, bluegrass, zydeco).
It has cemented the 43-year-old as one of the most enduring stars of her generation, but also as a quasi-matriarch of black Americana — using her work to hark back to the women who have come before her (the singers Donna Summer, Nina Simone, Linda Martell), surrounded by her young children who will succeed her. “My twenties were about building a strong foundation for my career and establishing my legacy. I was focused on commercial success and number ones,” she told Harper’s Bazaar in 2021. “My thirties were about digging deeper.” Her forties, she said, will be about “freedom”.
Today Beyoncé has the most Grammy wins of all time (35), is the only female artist to debut all her studio albums at No 1 in the Billboard 200 charts and, together with her husband, Jay-Z, became music’s first billionaire couple (today they are worth about $3 billion, compared with Taylor Swift’s $1.6 billion). So how did Beyoncé come to be “Queen Bey”? And how, after all these years, has she kept that crown?
When you speak to her collaborators the answer that comes up is work. The producer Larry Griffin Jr, aka Symbolyc One, worked on Beyoncé’s 2011 album, 4, which featured the singles “Run the World (Girls)” and “Love on Top.” She was involved in the minutiae of every sound and sequence, Griffin says, her work ethic on “another level”. “She knows exactly what she wants. It was one of the most intense weeks I’ve ever had in my career.” Griffin has also worked with Madonna, Eminem and Kanye West.
Beyoncé recorded 75 songs for 4, aiming to narrow them down to 16. To do so, she hosted listening sessions in between studio time. “The first session was taste makers, bloggers, radio people,” Griffin says. “The second one was designers and other types of companies that she was close to. Then the third was family. She had these little score cards, where you ranked the songs one to five and she had a few questions like: is this song a single? How does this song make you feel? I had never seen that level of data or detail before.”
The same goes for the latest tour. The stage is shaped like the Texas lone star, with neon saloon signs and an enormous screen covering the back wall that, between acts, plays music videos so highly produced they are more like short films. There is Beyoncé as the “400ft cowboy”, taking the Statue of Liberty off its stand to light a cigar; another of her in a Cleopatra-like headdress and a rodeo sash that reads “The reclamation of America”. At one point the screens flash bright red like a strobe while Beyoncé sings the Star-Spangled Banner. Hers is a gothic sort of patriotism — powerful and proud, with a shriek of violence running through it, the short films depicting cowboy shoot-outs or American flags torn and burnt.
The British architect Ray Winkler, whose company Stufish designed sets for Beyoncé’s Renaissance (2023) and On the Run II (2018) tours, as well as her 2018 Coachella performance, also has experience of that attention to detail — from the height of each step to the roughness of the floor, he says. “The visual landscapes of her shows are just extraordinary. It’s sacred architecture, like a cathedral, so that if you’re at the back of the stadium you can still take in the magnificence — only the stained glass windows are replaced with an LED wall.”
On this tour there is an emphasis on collectivism and inheritance: audio clips of Ras Baraka’s poem “I Want to Hear an American Poem,” archive footage of civil rights marches and of news panels decrying “what is happening” to country music, home videos of her children, enormous dance troupes line-dancing in perfect sync, their heels slamming down on the stage.
Yale University has just launched a course on Beyoncé’s cultural impact. “Who are her peers?” the tutor Daphne Brooks, a professor of African-American studies, wonders. “No one else has been able to sustain her kind of popularity and critical acclaim.”
Brooks argues that Cowboy Carter is “one of the most ambitious albums of the 21st century. We’ve never had someone of her stature take on the history of Jim Crow and the recording industry as a theme for a record,” she says. “She took an enormous swing at some of our thorniest issues.”
The album’s artwork depicts Beyoncé on a white horse, outsized American flag in hand, a challenge to perceived national identity. (“My family lived and died in America,” she sings in “YaYa,” “Whole lotta red in that white and blue.”) The tour name references the chitlin’ circuit, music venues that allowed black artists to perform through the segregation of the Jim Crow south. “She has used all the cultural capital she gained in the first decade of her career,” Brooks says, “to create a new path for black super pop stardom.”
Beyoncé Giselle Knowles was born in Houston, Texas, into an affluent middle-class home. Her mother ran a hair salon, her father was a sales executive for Xerox. “I didn’t grow up poor,” she told Vanity Fair in 2005. “I went to private school. We had a very nice house, cars, a housekeeper. I wasn’t doing this [singing] because I didn’t have a choice … I just was determined.”
At school she was painfully shy and “walked into every classroom trying to be invisible”, her mother, Tina Knowles, writes in her recent memoir, Matriarch. But on stage, she was “at home”. At seven she started going to dance lessons. By nine she was in a girl group called Girls Tyme, the first iteration of Destiny’s Child, which included her bandmate Kelly Rowland.
Her father, Mathew, built a stage in the garden for her and her younger sister, Solange — now also a star in her own right, albeit less chart-topping — to rehearse. At his summer boot camp the sisters had to sing as they jogged, to increase their lung power. “My mother loved me unconditionally, so I felt safe enough to dream,” Beyoncé told Elle magazine in 2016. “My father stressed discipline and was tough with me.”
Mathew eventually quit his job to manage Destiny’s Child, who sold more than 60 million records and were nominated for 14 Grammys. He also managed his daughter’s early solo career. “Crazy in Love,” her first single and first collaboration with Jay-Z, went to No 1 when it was released in 2003.
Beyoncé split from her father as manager eight years later. “I had to let go,” she said in her documentary Life Is But a Dream. The same year she released 4, an album that Griffin describes as “a little more intimate, more vulnerable — a breakaway from her previous pop sound”.
James Alsop also worked on 4, choreographing “Run the World (Girls).” “I had to fly to New York [from Los Angeles] to listen to the song,” she says. “Just hours later Beyoncé popped into the studio and said, ‘Let me see what you got.’”
Beyoncé was involved in “ev-er-y aspect”, she says. She rarely took breaks in rehearsals, eating and drinking as she danced. When she got on stage, “her mind clicked into this other gear that other people don’t have. I have never seen her afraid.”
In 2013 there was a shift in her work. The civil rights activist and actor Harry Belafonte had criticized Beyoncé and Jay-Z in an interview for “turn[ing] their back on social responsibility”. (“Give me Bruce Springsteen, and now you’re talking,” he added. “I really think he is black.”)
Beyoncé’s politics shifted and sharpened. That year she founded her philanthropic organization, BeyGOOD. On her next album, titled Beyoncé, she featured a clip from the author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s TED talk “We Should All Be Feminists,” as well as audio from Malcolm X. Her 2016 album, Lemonade, pushed harder against political tensions. In the video for the song “Formation” a young black boy dances in front of a line of white police officers in riot gear.
Beyoncé went on to perform at Barack Obama’s inauguration in 2013, host a fundraiser for Hillary Clinton and give permission for Kamala Harris to use the song “Freedom” in her 2024 presidential campaign, endorsing the politician at a rally in Houston. Beyoncé’s production company was paid $165,000 after the appearance — leading to criticism from Donald Trump that her support had been bought. She has also been criticized from the left, for playing a private show in Dubai in 2023, for which she was paid $24 million, according to Forbes. The United Arab Emirates’ criminalization of homosexuality was in contradiction, many said, to the queer culture she celebrated on Renaissance.
On her last tour in 2023 Beyoncé pledged $1 million in grants to businesses near venues, including ten black-owned businesses in the UK. Ifeyinwa Frederick, 33, who with her brother owns Chuku’s, a Nigerian tapas restaurant in Tottenham, north London, received $10,000, which helped with renovations. But it was Beyoncé’s celebrity that helped more, since they were namechecked each night on stage.
“You can’t get a bigger endorsement,” Frederick says. “We went viral in Brazil.” The restaurant benefited from an uptick in customers and attracted new investors as it fundraises for a second outlet. Chuku’s still has frequent catch-up calls with BeyGOOD, as well as invitations to seminars on business and leadership. “To the outside world it might look like just a money handout,” Frederick says. “But it’s been so much more.”
Beyoncé, meanwhile, rarely talks to the press and restricts almost all public access to her life — she was the first celebrity to be on the cover of US Vogue without giving an interview, in 2015 — producing her own documentaries and giving away little on social media. Parkwood Entertainment, her management and production company, creative agency and record label, gives her even greater ownership. Such obsessive control has allowed her to release entire music and visual albums without any leaks or warning.
“She wanted to become more powerful than the industry,” says Kevin Allred, author of Ain’t I a Diva? Beyoncé and the Power of Pop Culture Pedagogy. “There are stories of her Parkwood offices having everything from her career archived. Like an athlete, she watches the tapes back and sees how she can improve. She’s mentioned how Prince, who also had his own vast archive, told her to be in charge of her own image, to not cede control.”
Instead, fans pore over her lyrics, which might or might not reference her husband’s infidelity — her sister, Solange, 38, was filmed hitting and kicking him in a hotel lift in 2014, causing frenzied speculation. In a 2018 article in Vogue Beyoncé wrote that she comes “from a lineage of broken male-female relationships, abuse of power and mistrust”, including a slave owner who married a slave. “Only when I saw that clearly was I able to resolve those conflicts in my own relationship.” Last year a lawsuit was filed by an anonymous woman, claiming Jay-Z and Sean “Diddy” Combs raped her in 2000 when she was 13. Jay-Z insisted the claim was “fictitious” and a “blackmail attempt’; it was dropped by the claimant in February.
After kicking off in Los Angeles in April, the Cowboy Carter tour is projected to make more than $325 million from 32 shows, according to Live Nation and Billboard. Her 2023 Renaissance tour pulled in $579 million — but with 56 shows, took less cash per night. However, the earlier tour sold out in minutes. A week before the first of her six Cowboy Carter shows in London earlier this month, seats were still available for most of the nights.
Some have put this down to the set list, which is dominated by tracks from Cowboy Carter rather than old favorites, as well as the pricing. The Sunday Times previously reported significant price hikes, with the “premium fan experience” increased by 31 per cent, from $502 to $657.58. Prices on the resale market have fluctuated wildly.
Her sales and streaming figures, however, remain strong, says Martin Talbot, chief executive of the UK’s Official Charts Company. According to its data, “Texas Hold ‘Em” was Beyoncé’s longest-lasting No 1 single at five weeks (“Crazy in Love” was three) and to date, she has sold five million albums in the UK and generated 4.4 billion streams.
“Those are enormous numbers,” Talbot says. “She pulls this incredible feat of balancing being innovative and groundbreaking, at the same time as being totally mainstream — and for 20 years. There aren’t many like her.”
Megan Agnew is a features writer at The Times and The Sunday Times of London
