The New Yorker:

On Saturday, around 9 p.m., Pacific Time, I logged on to the Coachella live stream to await Beyoncé’s visit to the desert. Beyoncé was scheduled to play at 11:05 p.m. The three sisters of HAIM were opening on the main stage; after them, on a different stage, came the twenty-two-year-old Post Malone, a clever preacher of rich-kid chagrin, who moaned his hazy song about being a rock star as if it were a dirge. With his wiry hair and face tattoos, Post Malone augurs a new era of American white boy, one unconsciously beholden to black art forms but averse to acknowledging them. More and more, this is the Zeitgeist: blackness as fashion.

Beyoncé does not bend to trend. It was clear, when she took the stage, that she would serve as a corrective. She established her affiliation with the queen figure, emerging in a Nefertiti costume by Balmain. With a golden staff in hand, she cleared the catwalk to the exuberance of “Do Whatcha Wanna,” by New Orleans’s Rebirth Brass Band. (The sound reminded me of a night last summer, when I drifted, tipsy and full, into the Tremé bar owned by the band’s original jazz trumpeter, Kermit Ruffins, and witnessed his colorful rendition of Wiz Khalifa and Charlie Puth’s “See You Again.”) Behind her were bleachers stacked with dancers, drumlines, and a marching band arranged in a pyramid. This was maximalism of a gloriously disruptive intensity.

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