As Beychella Week 2 approaches, everyone who won’t be there is mourning the fact that Beyoncé’s second performance—rumored to include a new set list—will not be streaming live. In an attempt to cope, we’ve compiled our favorite Beyoncé videos that are available online. Watching them all in a row won’t exactly be like seeing Bey run through “Get Me Bodied,” “Single Ladies,” and “Love on Top,” but it’s the next best thing.
Her 2015 Tribute to Stevie Wonder
Kate Halliwell: Like many members of the #beyhive, I tend to fall down the Beyoncé YouTube rabbit hole with alarming regularity. She has no shortage of mind-blowing performance videos, but the one I keep returning to lately is her 2015 tribute to Stevie Wonder on CBS. For nine glorious minutes, she runs through “Fingertips,” “Master Blaster,” and “Higher Ground” with the help of a few musically inclined friends. Yes, Ed Sheeran is there. No, it doesn’t matter. The approximate moment this became my favorite is around 4:50, when she scats along with the horn section and the audience politely loses its collective mind. The best part is how easy she makes it look—no real choreo, no backup dancers, just Bey doing her thing.
The National Anthem at the Super Bowl XLVII Press Conference
Andrew Gruttadaro: Some context: A few weeks before this, Beyoncé sang the national anthem at Barack Obama’s 2013 inauguration. After her rendition, people—also known as haters, also known as my sworn enemies because how dare they?—accused Beyoncé of lip syncing. Two days later, The New York Times, narcs that they are, confirmed the allegations. It became a minor controversy, which set the stage for the Super Bowl XLVII press conference, which Beyoncé was speaking at as the game’s halftime performer.
Will Beyoncé address her egregious lip syncing?
Will she apologize for disgracing her country/doing something that most major performers have done in their careers?
Curiosity swirled ahead of the conference. And then she took the mic, told everyone to get on their feet, and sang the most powerful, most perfect version of the national anthem in all of their dumb faces. “Any questions?” she asked with a cackle, knowing she had silenced anyone who was ever silly enough to doubt her.
Destiny’s Child on Smart Guy
Victor Luckerson: My favorite moment in Beyoncé’s intermittent acting career was the first one, as a guest star on the classic ’90s sitcom Smart Guy. In the episode, Destiny’s Child—LeToya and LaTavia in tow!—is recruiting backup dancers for their tour. They end up filming an entirely new music video for their early hit “No, No, No Pt. 2” featuring titular brainiac T.J. tap-dancing his heart out. Later on, at a school dance, they perform a soulful rendition of “Amazing Grace” that is now the standard version of the song in my mind. And Beyoncé attends said dance with T.J.’s older brother and Extremely Average Guy Marcus, perhaps mere months before upgrading to Jay-Z. I don’t know whether I’m more inspired by Bey’s youthful work ethic, T.J.’s dance moves, or Marcus’s dumb luck in shooting his shot. But I do know this still makes for great Saturday-morning viewing.
Beyoncé Sways Back and Forth
Lindsay Zoladz: For years, I have been transfixed by this video titled, poetically, “BIZARRE!! Beyonce SWAYS Back & Forth With NO Music PLAYING at Courtside Basketball Game!!” It was taken on November 3, 2014, when Beyoncé and Jay-Z were attending a Nets game, and tension between them seems, shall we say, high. A few curt words are exchanged, and then Beyoncé (circa very cute chin-length bob) begins to stare into space and sway from side to side, to no discernible rhythm, for an uncomfortably long time. I have seen this video cited as evidence of the conspiracy theory that Beyoncé is a clone and that this is footage of her “glitching,” but my fascination with the video is far less fabulist. It’s a tantalizing glimpse into Bey and Jay’s personal life, the kind of thing they usually keep so tightly under wraps. It’s also incredibly humanizing: Sometimes you get so mad at your partner for private reasons that you just have to passive-aggressively sway side to side when you are with them in public. Of course, sometimes shit goes down when there’s a billion dollars at the Barclays Center.
The Chicken Dance Video
Alyssa Bereznak: Literally every Beyoncé song is better than the “Chicken Dance” song. Music is not the point of this clip. It’s the fact that Beyoncé is so disciplined about staying on beat that you can set any one of her performances to a song with a similar tempo and it’ll look like she was made to dance to it. [YouTubers also gave the “Chicken Dance” treatment to “Single Ladies (Put a Ring on It)” and it holds up.] By some inexplicable law of Beyoncé meme association, I now think of the “Chicken Dance” song as ... kind of glamorous? I don’t know how to explain that; it’s just the power of Beyoncé.
Beyoncé Sings “Halo” at a Hospital
Michael Baumann: Some years ago, I stumbled onto a video of American chanteuse LP covering “Halo,” my favorite Beyoncé song. It’s a tricky number. Just months before, “Halo” ate Florence Welch alive on BBC1’s Live Lounge, so what LP does with the song in her live studio performance is remarkable. LP wears this self-satisfied smirk throughout the song, as well she should, because she and her band obviously put a lot of work into the cover and they knock it out of the park. It bangs. It’s great. Go listen for yourself, you won’t regret it.
Beyoncé is to millennials what Christianity was to our grandparents; there’s a societal expectation that you’ll be involved and occasionally perform conspicuous acts of piety, though as a Christmas-and-Easter-type Beyoncéist, my faith is hardly integral to my identity. So I started to let myself think LP’s cover of Halo was better than the original, and then YouTube—having sensed my apostasy and intending to rebuke me for it—served up the following.
Here’s Beyoncé singing “Halo” in a Singapore hospital for some reason, flanked by a single acoustic guitar and a couple of backup singers. While sitting in an easy chair and being filmed on a cellphone, she just annihilates the song. And it’s not just good for a live acoustic performance, each subsequent viewing reveals new wonders: We obsess over female artists’ ability to hit high notes, but often that comes at the expense of bailing on the lower register. LP does just this in the first verse, while Beyoncé just glides down there like she’s picking up a handful of soil. Or how there must be 100 people in that hospital room and nobody’s saying a goddamn word, they’re just all standing there bobbing their heads and snapping their fingers. It’s the reaction Beyoncé spends immense quantities of time and money to inspire in her live shows and videos, and she could just pull up an armchair by some hospital beds and everyone would react the same way. Even if you’re not the kind of fan who stays up all night to watch a live stream of Beyoncé at Coachella, it’s still hard not to be overawed by her no matter the setting.
