Editor’s note: The following article is an op-ed, and the views expressed are the author’s own. Read more opinions on theGrio.
If you’ve been keeping up with Beyoncé’s “Cowboy Carter” tour—of course you have—you have probably seen videos on social media (or from friends who have pulled up at a tour stop) of Beyoncé floating over the crowd during the song “16 Carriages.” She does this as a video montage of her career plays on jumbo screens reminding all who watch that there is only one Beyoncé. Because she’s so classy, she does this in a velvet-wrapped red Cadillac.
Well, during the first night of her hometown stop in Houston, things didn’t go exactly as planned. During her drive over the crowd, there was a “technical mishap” that resulted in the car slightly tipping to the side (shouts out to Paul Wall) while suspended in midair before being stopped over concertgoers who were probably concerned about the safety of Beyoncé and hoping not to be crushed by a velvet-wrapped Cadillac, and not necessarily in that order.
Beyoncé must have been terrified.
Thankfully Beyoncé was safely lowered and removed from the vehicle and she then continued her show. She then also had a Sunday show before heading to the Washington, D.C. area for two shows.
I can’t imagine what it was like for her to be suspended in the air in a vehicle that felt like it might turn over. I don’t even like it when people bend corners too quickly on streets that are empty. She’s a professional so she kept it moving but I kind of wonder what she was thinking while that was happening, you know.
I have a few thoughts, non-confirmed by Beyoncé or her camp from Parkwood Entertainment so don’t quote me literally… But here are five things she might have been thinking while suspended in the air.
1. “WHAT. IN. THE.****.”
Look, I ain’t saying that the first thing Beyoncé does is curse when something goes wrong, but it’s usually the first thing that most people do when…things hit the fan. A car stalling mid-air and then starting to tip? Yeah, that would be the proverbial…thing…hitting the fan. I’m just saying, she might not have said it but I’ll get she was thinking it. But again, never one to let you see her sweat, Bey’s fans would never know because she was cool, calm and collected.
2. “Rihanna was up in the air pregnant at the Super Bowl and that went off without a hitch, but nooooooo, I’m stuck in the air in a car. At least it’s a Cadillac.”
If you remember Rihanna’s 2023 Super Bowl performance, she ended the show being elevated on a platform while pregnant. I’m sure A$AP Rocky wasn’t the only one who couldn’t wait for that platform to come down. Well, Beyoncé probably had her whole family feeling the same way. Stage manager Blue Ivy, Ms. Rumi, Sir, Mama Tina and more. Which leads to…
3. “Jay is going to say ‘I told you so.’”
I’ve been to see Jay-Z perform a few times and while I’ve always enjoyed his shows (and I’m talking about back into the 1990s—I saw that man perform at DC Live in 1998 with Amil on stage), he’s never been quite as adventurous as his wife gets for performances. To be fair, hip-hop shows (save for Kanye) rarely get to the level of performance of pop star shows, but still.
Anyway, I’ll bet at some point Jay-Z was like, “I don’t think you should do the ‘drive over the crowd thing anymore,’ that thing could get stuck. HOV!” I’ve been a fan of Jay-Z for over 20 years now, I feel like I know his petty and this feels like a joke he would have made before this, but won’t anymore because Happy wife…you know the rest.
4. “Cirque du Soleil made this look so…simple.”
If you’ve been to a Cirque show then you’ve seen people floating and flying all over the place. In the age of the internet where we are exposed to great feats every second with the swipe of our finger, sometimes the difficulty of what people are pulling off can lose its context. The exceptional can start to seem regular. Maybe Queen B just felt like flying through the air was a given for her show (especially after flying on that shiny horse during the Renaissance tour) and the people behind the scenes weren’t real about their own limitations. But let’s be real, if anybody could take Cirque du Soleil gymnastics and level it up to include a car, it’s H-town’s finest. Everybody else needs to rise to the occasion.
5. “Somebody is SO getting fired tonight.”
Look, we all know that Beyoncé is nothing if not a perfectionist. It’s in her Virgo shando. And if I got stuck up in the sky even if it wasn’t “somebody’s fault” per se, my first thought would be, “when I get down, somebody is sho’ nuff getting their walking papers.” The Queen may have chosen to be merciful but for our sake, we hope whoever is running the show got it squared away so it never ever happens again. Hopefully, it was a glitch on the part of technology and not a human, but real talk, we may never know.
Either way, I’m just glad she’s alright.
Panama Jackson is a columnist at theGrio and host of the award-winning podcast, “Dear Culture” on theGrio Black Podcast Network. He writes very Black things, drinks very brown liquors, and is pretty fly for a light guy. His biggest accomplishment to date coincides with his Blackest accomplishment to date in that he received a phone call from Oprah Winfrey after she read one of his pieces (biggest) but he didn’t answer the phone because the caller ID said “Unknown” (Blackest).
