American singer Beyoncé headlined the 2018 Coachella Valley Music and Arts Festival, performing on April 14 and 21 at the Empire Polo Club in Indio, California. She was the first Black woman to headline the festival and her performance immediately received widespread critical acclaim. Many in the media described the show as "historic," while The New York Times proclaimed it as "meaningful, absorbing, forceful and radical." The performance was internally nicknamed "Beychella", as can be seen in the Homecoming documentary, and the nickname was announced during the performance.
Her performances paid tribute to the culture of historically black colleges and universities, featuring a full marching band and majorette dancers, while incorporating various aspects of black Greek life, such as a step show along with strolling by pledges. The performances were also influenced by black feminism, sampling black authors and featuring on-stage appearances by fellow Destiny's Child members Kelly Rowland and Michelle Williams, her husband Jay-Z, and her sister Solange Knowles.
The performances were recorded and released as a Netflix-original concert film, Homecoming, on April 17, 2019, accompanied by a live album. Homecoming likewise received widespread critical acclaim and has been named as one of the greatest concert films of all time.
Background
On January 4, 2017, Beyoncé was announced as a headlining act for the April 2017 Coachella festival. However, on February 23, 2017, she postponed her performance until the following year, due to doctor's concerns regarding her pregnancy with twins (born in June 2017). The secondary (resale) market for tickets to the festival that year fell 12% after the announcement she was postponing.
Playing her rescheduled dates in 2018, Beyoncé became the first black woman ever to headline the festival. In its nearly twenty years of existence, the festival has only had two other women solo headliners, Lady Gaga (who replaced Beyoncé in 2017) and Björk (2002 and 2007).
Even prior to Beyoncé's performance, the nickname "Beychella" emerged for the 2018 festival. Tina Lawson, mother of Beyoncé and Solange Knowles, later said that prior to the show, she had expressed reservations about the performance Beyoncé had planned, worried that the largely white audience at Coachella might not understand a show so steeped in black culture, particularly black college culture. Lawson recounted that Beyoncé replied saying that given the platform she had achieved in her career, she felt "a responsibility to do what's best for the world and not what is most popular."
Synopsis
For her April 14, 2018, performance, some 100 dancers as well as her sister Solange, her husband Jay-Z, and her former girl group Destiny's Child joined Beyoncé on stage. On Weekend 2, she was joined by J Balvin for "Mi Gente" in which his verse was sung first; on the Netflix documentary Homecoming, his part has been omitted. She played a 26-song set to 125,000 concert-goers in attendance including Bajan singer Rihanna as well as millions watching via the live-stream on YouTube and subsequent playback. The set sampled Malcolm X and Nina Simone among others. Beyoncé wore five different costumes through the two-hour performance, designed with Olivier Rousteing of French fashion house Balmain.
Musical style
Writing in The New Yorker, Doreen St. Félix described the musical style of the performance as an "education in black expression [... and] musical history – a mélange of New Orleans and its horns, Houston and its chopped and screwed beats, Brooklyn and its rap velocity, Kingston and its dancehall, and Nigeria and the legacy of its dissenter, Fela Kuti [...] underscoring not only [Beyoncé's] Southernness but the global Black vernacular that continues to shape her." Near the beginning of the set, Beyoncé sang "Lift Every Voice and Sing," colloquially known as the "Black national anthem". The Wiz, one of Motown's most notable motion pictures, was also sampled in the horn arrangement that heralded Beyoncé's return to the stage after her first costume change.