In the past month I have learned that an audience with Beyoncé can be as challenging to schedule as a tennis match with the pope. Nava calls, “Cut,” and Beyoncé smiles and then tosses her hair around like a metalhead-neck down, hands raised in devil-horn salutes, as if she’s standing front row at Iron Maiden. When a camera on rails swoops in, she executes one of those dramatic hair flips that look deranged when attempted by ordinary civilians but amazing when she does them. OK, there is That Beauty and That Voice (“An incredible voice,” says her friend Alicia Keys) and Beyoncé’s place in pop music, which is now more adult and tenured than trendy-“She’s the queen,” says master music producer Timbaland. “Wow, great, Beyoncé-that’s really good, man.” From behind a monitor, Nava’s London accent offers cheeky, Austin Powers–y encouragements: Then Prince’s “Lovesexy.” Beyoncé begins to do hip turns and shoulder swivels and unleashes a sultry pout with just the right level of safe-for-parents suggestiveness. Michael Jackson’s “Don’t Stop ’Til You Get Enough” booms over a sound system.
Despite the competing demands of the evening-the product the client a fantastic, pulsing video screen that spills onto the floor and looks like Liberace’s fish tank-Nava keeps the focus on Beyoncé. The director forecasting hair anarchy is Jake Nava, Beyoncé’s partner for music videos like “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)”-which infamously drove Kanye West to crash Taylor Swift’s MTV Video Music Awards speech so he could declare it “one of the best videos of all time.” Nava oversees this shoot with the calm of a man with an ace tucked in his pocket. Beyoncé’s hair is shimmering in the dreamy and flawless way that hair in hair commercials is supposed to shimmer.
This is a commercial shoot for L’Oréal, and the business of hair is being attended to with the seriousness of a Congressional hearing. It’s a rainy winter evening in New York City, and inside a sprawling film studio across the river from midtown, Beyoncé Knowles is standing before a camera, cooling in her black Giuseppe Zanotti boots, awaiting a close-up. Beyoncé’s husband, Jay-Z, sent out a triumphant tweet from the darkness: “Lights out!!! Any questions?” Minutes after she finished, almost poetically, the power would bonk out in the Superdome. It was as if she was chasing all that post-Inauguration doubt down a narrow corridor, blasting a pair of laser guns.
She powered through a hailstorm of hits, briefly being joined by her Destiny’s Child colleagues Michelle Williams and Kelly Rowland for a medley and a brush of Beyoncé’s “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It).” It was impossible not to be taken by Beyoncé’s sheer relentlessness-in Proenza Schouler boots, no less. The Super Bowl is no shrine, and there’s always something a little ridiculous about it (New Kids on the Block once got this gig), but Beyoncé’s performance was conspicuous in its determination to project authenticity: real energy, real dancing, and yes, real-as-hell singing. But from the moment Beyoncé appeared at the Superdome midfield, left hand on hip-below an enormous, flaming silhouette of herself, left hand on hip-it was obvious she brought a motive and probably a little bit of a grudge. Sure, there was still the Super Bowl, perhaps an even more treacherous high wire, given its ludicrous logistics (a megastage to be assembled and stripped apart between halves of a football game) and a global audience in the hundreds of millions. As a bit of crisis-management stagecraft, it was a knockout, and after Beyoncé sailed through to the “home of the brave,” she smiled and offered two words to her skeptics:_ There, she opened by singing “The Star-Spangled Banner” again-clearly live-in a soulful and satisfying and very much Beyoncé way. It got nasty-Beyoncé was shoved forward as a symbol of a synthetic generation-and yet she said nothing for ten days, until surfacing in a white Olcay Gulsen minidress at a Super Bowl press conference in New Orleans on January 31. The resulting uproar was noisy and blustery and as close to a scandal as Beyoncé had experienced in her life for an artist accustomed to controlling the narrative, it was unfamiliar, awkward territory. Has there ever been a steeper, stranger, more rollicking two-week roller coaster in American pop-cultural life than the one Beyoncé Knowles rode from the middle of January (not long after I interviewed her for Vogue_) into early February? The craziness started, of course, with that national anthem on the Capitol steps Beyoncé’s soaring rendition was lavishly praised at first, but then it was revealed to have been sung to a prerecorded track.
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