Show live-streamed on Netflix is first live performance of material from country-themed album Cowboy Carter

Some of Beyoncé’s most iconic moments have been on an American football field. Her barnstorming 2013 Super Bowl performance, complete with a Destiny’s Child reunion, was outdone by her guest appearance during Coldplay’s own 2016 half-time show as she homaged the Black Panthers and freaked out a sizeable quotient of the US establishment (“It is now ‘cool’ to embrace violence, mayhem, and frankly even racial separatism in the cause of civil rights”, the right-wing Heritage Foundation thinktank fumed at the time). Her 2018 Coachella performance, Homecoming, though not on a football field, featured college football’s majorettes and marching bands as she celebrated historically Black colleges and universities.

On Wednesday – in a Christmas Day half-time show streamed on Netflix from her native Houston as the Texans played the Baltimore Ravens – she again used a football game as somewhere for her to interrogate and play around with American iconography.