Beyoncé Masters the Fierceness of Crowds
The pop star’s dazzling Coachella set further honed her career-long fascination with democratizing messages through mass movement.
More than 100dancers and musicians get hired for a mononym’s megafestival performance: We know, in some ways, what it’s going to look like. It’s going to look like the first moments of Beyoncé’s conversation-breaking Coachella set, in which leotard-wearing women formed two lines on a catwalk into the crowd, making way for Beyoncé in regal cape and headpiece. When people talk about pop stars as gods, they are drawing from imagery such as this. Or such as Madonna’s 2012 , in which she commanded a hard-bodied Roman batallion. Or Kanye West’s 2016 Madison Square Garden , when a village of
