First of all, thank the pop music gods that Beyoncé’s St. Louis stop, part of her Renaissance World Tour, was played indoors. While most of the tour’s 40-plus dates have been held in outdoor stadiums, the Dome at America’s Center provided respite from the malignant heat that descended on St. Louis this week. And the baneful temperatures did not keep thousands of fans from waiting outside the building much of the day to get the prime spots in Club Renaissance, the section inside the circle-shaped runway that extends into the crowd from the main stage, which puts the die-hardest members of the BeyHive directly into the middle of the action and closest to Queen Bey.
As an embedded journalist down in the seats just outside Club Renaissance, I was surrounded by pageants of eye-popping haute couture defined by pronounced fluidity, fans of all genders in silver catsuits and drop-jewel hats working world-class selfies next to powerfully bearded NFL players and a Pride parade of disco-alien-cowboys who were there to stick with Beyoncé through thique and thin.
Once the show started — an hour and ten minutes after the official 8 p.m. start time —and Beyoncé materialized on stage in front of a gargantuan video screen, things got very loud. Like violently, concussively, hazardously loud. Between the shrieking and scream-singing from the fans and the ferocious volume coming from the stage, the uncomfortable decibel levels swirling inside the Dome were the price to be paid for the comfortable climate control inside the building. The seismic vibrations of the bass had even my arm hairs shaking their asses.
You’ve seen the videos. The Renaissance Tour has been among the most obsessively streamed and posted in history, so most fans in the building were already intimately TikTok-trained on each of the show’s different acts and costume changes, although Bey still offered plenty of wardrobe surprises. Fans closest to the stage even brought their own props in anticipation of key moments, like a lavish club version ofRocky Horror, whipping out handheld fans for “Heated” or inflating blue balloons when Beyoncé’s daughter, Blue Ivy, appeared onstage during the “My Power”/“Black Parade” sequence.
Overall, Beyoncé’s stadium-sized sci-fi extravaganza is an outrageously stunning spectacle that specializes in more of everything. More songs, more dancers, more mirror-ball horses, more futuristic robot arms, more blondes having more fun, more pregnant trumpeters, more sensory stimulation than central nervous systems are designed to tolerate. Here is Beyoncé in a full-body black-and-silver Barbarella catsuit straddling a silver military-style tank that carries her through the vast round cavity positioned between a gargantuan pair of spread high-heeled legs in the middle of the video screen. Now she’s the “Alien Superstar” hatched like a sexy Moloch from Metropolis, frame-wielding machinery while strutting in a shimmery silver bodysuit and thigh-high boots draped in oversized pink fur. There she’s singing “Cuff It” in full party mode with horn players, backup singers and 20 dancers all tangled up in blue. Now the stage is transformed into an opulent cathedral as Beyoncé’s white robe magically morphs into stained-glass patterns before she sings “Church Girl.” Here she is in a bee-inspired yellow bodysuit delivering “America Has a Problem” behind a faux TV broadcast desk for KNTY 4 NEWS. And look up: Beyoncé is riding her disco pony sky-high around the stadium during “Summer Renaissance” amid bursts of confetti.
Such aural and visual maximalism represents concert technology dialed all the way up to never-before-reached heights, and the fact that the Renaissance Tour has coincided with Taylor Swift’s Eras Tour has made for something of a concert-tech arms race this summer. (U2’s upcoming Sphere shows in Las Vegas will be the next volley in this battle.) It’s not hard to find Beyoncé vs. Taylor debates, but while both shows have distinct differences — I attended the Eras Tour stop in Kansas City, which gasted every inch of my flabber — they are both stunning achievements from two generational talents at the peak of their powers.
As with Swift’s show, every song in the set was met with encore-level ecstasy by the crowd. But unlike the Eras Tour, a career-spanning epic by name and design, the Renaissance Tour is built almost entirely around Beyoncé’s new album, itself a revolutionary achievement. What other artist who has been making hits for almost 30 years plays stadiums and focuses primarily on new material? Imagine the Rolling Stones playing to 80,000 people and performing all-new material for over two hours, leaving out “Satisfaction” and “Jumping Jack Flash.” That’s essentially what Beyoncé did — no “Single Ladies,” no “Halo,” no Destiny’s Child songs and only one song from Lemonade.
Yes, there were a few older songs, most notably during Beyoncé’s own “opening act” sequence when she first took the stage to sing some of her classic ballads. It was another power flex — to open the show with slow, luxurious soul songs — “Dangerously in Love 2,” “1 + 1” (letting the audience take those signature upward swoops), “I Care,” and a slow first verse of Tina Turner’s “River Deep, Mountain High” (preceded by her acknowledgment that the song was particularly special here in St. Louis), establishing Beyoncé as a vocalist first before the dance-floor night to come.
And what a vocalist. For two-and-half hours, Beyoncé was a vocal powerhouse with absurdly excellent force, tone and dexterity, from the ballads to the bangers, and it was all live. We have, unfortunately, gotten used to dance-oriented pop singers dialing in pre-recorded vocal tracks during performances. Not the Queen. She sang flawlessly amid all the popping, locking, hairography and equestrianism, and never once did she sound out of breath.
The dancing, by the way, was fantastic. While Beyoncé herself held back from some of the full-on titanic dance movement we are used to seeing from her, her phalanx of backup dancers were superb throughout, including Les Twins, the six-foot-four, braided, hip-hop-dancing twin French brothers who worked the catwalks between acts and, during the encore, were tethered to 40-foot poles that whipped the pair around as though atop palm trees in a hurricane. The dance team was also given an extended showcase during “Pure/Honey” at show’s end with a ballroom dance-off sequence, one of several tributes to the queer community, highlighted by the squat-dancing acrobatics of scene legend Honey Balenciaga.
Such improvisational sequences made for some site-unique moments even within the tight choreography of the show. During a jubilant “Love on Top,” for instance, Beyoncé turned the vocals over to the audience, and St. Louis again proved to be one of the great singing cities, nailing the key changes and then, refusing to stop, returning to the top of the chorus again and again. Beyoncé looked genuinely stunned, finally forcing the fans to wrap it up so she could transition into “Crazy in Love.” Again, such a song pairing would suggest a finale for any other artist. For Beyoncé, she still had a dozen songs to go.
While it was all Renaissance all night, the show contained many mashups, snippets, lyrical callbacks and melodic allusions to keep fans on their toes, a long-standing Bey tradition, and much of that blending related to the night’s overall themes, which included celebrating Black musical traditions. She reeled off the names of Black female singers during “Break My Soul” (hitting Grace Jones twice), emphasized Afrofuturist imagery and offered up powerful messages of inclusion of female empowerment.
As much multimedia mauling as the night offered, none of it would have worked as well were the music not amazing, and once the Renaissance set started, the band — sparkling in all silver within the hadron collider crater, including Emily Bear on piano, Agape Jerry on guitar, and bassist Lauren Taneil (making her return in a surprise treat for St. Louis) —lay down a slamming groove for more than two hours that never let up.
This is what a Renaissance looks like. The night looked back at musical archives and transmogrified the world into futuristic imagery, but with a thrilling, towering concert masterpiece from one of the all-time greats, Beyoncé provided St. Louis with an utterly joyous celebration of the right here, right now.
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