On the scene at Beyoncé and Jay-Z's epic On the Run II tour opening in Wales
Cardiff, Wales, a city first settled by the Romans in 55 AD, claims to be home to the highest per-capita concentration of castles (and also, incidentally, indoor Victorian shopping arcades) in the world. Perhaps it’s fitting then that on the first Wednesday in June it hosted royalty, becoming ground zero for the global launch of Jay-Z and Beyoncé‘s On the Run II tour.
By 3 p.m., the pubs and sidewalk cafes surrounding Millennium Stadium spilled over with fans downing al fresco pints and Zinfandels and swaying to a booming, Bey-adjacent soundtrack (Rihanna, Ciara, Dawn Penn). By 7, the flower-crowned, bedazzled, and already drunk began to pour through the venue doors; at approximately 8:30, the house lights went up.
“Part II (On the Run)” and “’03 Bonnie & Clyde” pivoted to “Drunk in Love” — then “Irreplaceable” and “Diva,” its digitized, gleefully bratty chorus paired with fitting images (Michael B. Jordan’s Black Panther villain, vintage Janet Jackson and Diddy). On the main stage behind them, acrobatic dancers stacked in a sort of massive cabinet posed backlit in dramatic Fosse tableaux, “Cell Block Tango”-style.
“Naughty Girl,” “Big Pimpin'” “Countdown,” “Run This Town”: If there was a single time temporarily forgot, it roared back, nearly every lyric happily boomeranged by a near-capacity crowd. Beyoncé stopped the forward march only briefly on “Sorry,” pausing to turn its “suck on my balls” command into a percussive breakdown and ask, clearly rhetorically, “Ladies, are we smart? Are we strong? Have we had… enough?”
“99 Problems” came paired with dragon puffs of pyro and a slew of famous mugshots: Jane Fonda, Jim Morrison, Lisa “Left Eye” Lopes, David Bowie, ODB. A brief, incendiary snippet of “Ring the Alarm” moved into the stomp-rock rave-up of “Don’t Hurt Yourself” and a fiercely tender “I Care.”
Beyoncé stepped once more into the substitute breach on “No Church in the Wild,” taking on the low notes of Frank Ocean’s slow-burn chorus. “Upgrade U” spilled into “N—s in Paris,” before she returned triumphant for “Formation,” her phalanx of all-female dancers clad in leotards and dramatic black latex hats that looked like manhole covers for a high-end fetish ball. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s famous intro to “Flawless” came as a far late postscript to the song itself, but her crisply recorded reading, and a black screen splashed with an all-caps FEMINIST, brought a fresh wave of high-pitched cheers.
Between-song banter was limited, confined mostly to Hello-Cleveland asides like “Where my ladies at?” and “Are you having a good time, Cardiff?” The set list was also conspicuously light on Jay’s most recent album, 4:44, though maybe that was wise; his lacerating race critique “The Story of O.J.” seemed to leave the majority-white room either puzzled or mildly curious, at best.
After more than two hours that felt like a marathon even to a passive bystander with a comfortable chair, the pair emerged, hands intertwined, to sign off with Throne‘s pretty, shamelessly sentimental ballad “Forever Young.” “Thank you, Cardiff. It feels so good to be on stage with the one I love,” she beamed. And love was all over the screen behind them, in home movies of Jay painting Blue Ivy’s toenails and Beyoncé cradling twins (though apparently not always necessarily Rumi and Sir) — even a clip that looked a lot like a renewal of wedding vows.
In 2018 there is no real runner-up in the superstar sweepstakes that is the Jay-Oncé Industrial Complex; no current power couple with more combined hits or a more commanding stage presence. If anything could be said to be missing from the evening it was a certain rawness, the cracks in the flawless foundation of a famously private marriage revealed in each of their most recent albums: Lemonade’s flayed-bare infidelity anthems and 4:44‘s raw, unusually candid responses.
