antipopper

Above: my best shot of Destiny’s Child from last night. (More at Flickr.) What can I say? The craziness can’t really be described. The hysteria was insane, and you know, it was totally warranted.

On Beyoncé: I’ve always found her a bit annoying, on an affective level. But in the flesh and relatively up close (yay for Caro’s dancefloor tickets!), Beyoncé was unfeasibly, almost terrifyingly beautiful, like a mythological creature. The most interesting thing about this is not that I’m being “superficial” here by concentrating on her beauty, but that she’s recently learned how to really work it in a way that I think was largely absent during their last tour, and even in the Dangerously In Love material, which when it debuted seemed to be going through the motions, at least for me. This is why I preferred the Child as an ensemble, and eschewed Beyoncé-worship.

But now, Beyoncé theatrically emanates an incredible luminosity, as if she were a substance about to sublimate past her skin. Sure, the moves are quite transparent, but that doesn’t matter — you don’t feel cheated at all. When she looks you straight in the eye and sings “I love you” during “Dangerously in Love 2″, one’s jaw can’t help but drop. At which point she can slowly stalk the stage in silence, looking at everyone gaping. I haven’t seen anything like it.

Meanwhile, Caro’s take on all of this is “fuck, Beyoncé has the best boobs in the whole world!”…

Other fragmentary points:

• You don’t really want to try queue-jumping several thousand thirteen-year-old girls. But we did it anyway, and lived!

• “What do you think the gender balance of this place is right now?” I ask. “Like a humanities class,” says Miguel. Funny.

• Miguel and Michael sang along to every word.

• It’s good to have my prejudices confirmed yet again: Michelle sucks. Vindication! Except from Shane, who insists on defending the indefensible. Michelle = the Problem Child.

• Flipside of the prejudice confirmation: Kelly rocks! Again! Vindication! Embarrassingly, I launched into a loud “I told you so…” rant, right then and there.

• Kelly said that she’d been all over the world and hadn’t yet found a good man. At this point, Michael put up his hand and started jumping up and down, yelling, “pick me! pick me!”. We pretended not to know him.

• Skewing the setlist towards the ballads was dumb, as always, but they even cut “Bootylicious” short. Huh?

• I’ll never get tired of multiple costume changes. And during the one for “Soldier”, there was a fucking excellent set-piece involving all the male dancers in Black Panther uniforms. I think Hon almost wet himself.

Oh yeah, a realisation: Destiny’s Child’s tongue-twisting, ultra-verbose melodic phrasing (especially when housed in such sleekly abstract R’n'B warheads) really is one of the most distinctive innovations in recent popular music. It reminds me vaguely of the way the Manics’ lyrics always scanned so strangely when sung, but without any of the grade-school pretense.

[ tags: destinys-child, beyonce, rnb, music, pop-culture, review ]