They’ve performed here before, but never like this. Never together. Never sharing the stage with someone else as famous as they are (or almost, anyway). And aside from her “Lemonade” tour stop in 2016, never with as much personal baggage on display for 40,000 fans to examine.
Fortunately, Wednesday night’s mega-big, plan-the-summer-around-it concert at U.S. Bank Stadium was not the same kind of show we’ve already seen Beyoncé and Jay-Z deliver separately in the Twin Cities.
She lost some of the precision, cohesion and all-out wow factor of her 2016 tour, but she seemed looser and more playful. He ditched his aloofness and gained more showmanship and cocksure bravado — even as he spent a few songs groveling and showing off a more tender side.
Minneapolis fell about halfway through the superstar couple’s 36-stop On the Run II Tour, which is hitting stadiums on both sides of the Atlantic. Three of the trek’s U.S. shows are in new football stadiums, two of which are already known to have poor acoustics for concerts.
U.S. Bank Stadium’s bad reputation might partly explain why — even with one of the biggest hip-hop hitmakers of all time — the show basically drew the same size crowd as when Bey performed on her own at TCF Bank Stadium in 2016. Then again, some of her fans maybe didn’t want to see her with her hubby, whose purported infidelity was central on her “Lemonade” album and his latest, “4:44.”
That marital drama played out in spurts in Wednesday’s nearly 2½-hour performance, starting right out of the gate.
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