Beyoncé’s Homecoming: Surprise live album drops with Netflix film

“Instead of me pulling out my flower crown, it was more important that I brought our culture to Coachella,” Beyoncé says in Homecoming, the new documentary about her landmark performance at the California music festival this time last year, which has just landed on Netflix – alongside a surprise 40-track live album of the set that also dropped today.

Beychella, as it came to be known, was a showcase not only for the singer but also for African-American culture. Staged to mimic a homecoming at one of the United States’ historically black colleges, it featured a marching band, majorettes, fraternity pledges and step-dancing. The set sampled Nina Simone, Fela Kuti, Dawn Penn, Juvenile and Fast Life Yungstaz, among many other black artists. It also included Lift Every Voice and Sing – the United States’ “black national anthem” – as well as the words of Malcolm X and even Queen Nefertiti.

Which is to say it was new terrain for a festival usually associated with fringe tops, peace signs and, yes, flower crowns – so much so that Beyoncé’s mother had worried the set’s references would be lost on the predominantly white audience. (Beyoncé told her she had “a responsibility to do what’s best for the world and not what is most popular”.)

After watching her sing, sashay and swag-surf for two hours, you’d be hard pressed to name a greater living entertainer

The result upped the ante for live music and reimagined what a festival show could look like. After watching her sing, sashay and swag-surf for two hours, you’d be hard pressed to name a greater living entertainer. “I studied my history, I studied my past and I put every mistake and all my triumphs from my 22-year career into my two-hour homecoming performance,” the singer says in the new film, which credits her as a director, writer and executive producer.

Like the live album, Homecoming features the full set, switching so seamlessly between her performances at each weekend of the festival that the only way you can tell one from the other is through her different ensembles.

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