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Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter Tour Thrills the NYC Area: Review & 7 Best Moments

“I said, they NEVER take the country out me!” Beyoncé bellowed in the misty night sky on Thursday (May 22) — repeating a lyric from “Formation” for emphasis, and also presenting the main idea of her sprawling Cowboy Carter tour, which made its way to New Jersey’s MetLife Stadium for the first of a five-night run. Most superstars on their eighth album, and a quarter-century into their career, would craft a stadium show around their most well-loved hits, with a few new songs sprinkled in for good measure; Beyoncé is, of course, not like most superstars.

The Cowboy Carter tour instead animates every inch of last year’s full-length, with the entirety of the album’s country-music vision unwrapped in painstaking detail, from the instrumentation to the visuals to the choreography; a handful of well-worn hits are grouped together in the setlist, but they come across closer to an afterthought than a point of emphasis. This is not a complaint: Beyoncé is not only a dazzling performer with a second-to-none combination of stage presence and vocal strength, but as she’s evolved into an uncompromising album artist over the past decade, she’s become more adept at translating a studio aesthetic into a stage show with cohesion and purpose.

In the case of Cowboy Carter tour, the result is a sumptuous exploration of Beyoncé’s riff on country as a core influence and thrilling modern medium, complete with a line-dance stage moves, fake westerns as visual interludes, costumes with ample fringe and a giant stage in the shape of a star. With Cowboy Carter, Beyoncé bent modern country music around her personality, and its corresponding stage show achieves a similar effect, getting a stadium audience to don cowboy hats to watch their favorite pop star.

Yet the show makes clear that this is who she’s always been: her musical interests may change and her catalog of hits may grow, but this side of Beyoncé is indispensable to her identity. Indeed, no one can take the country out of her — so she decided to make Cowboy Carter her biggest, boldest live show to date.

With Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter tour starting its run in the NYC area on Thursday night, here are the seven best moments from night one at MetLife Stadium:

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