Summer Preview: Music - The Renaissance Started in Sweden

The first show of her world tour makes it clear: We are living in the Beyoncéverse.

- By Hunter Harris

There is a certain hierarchy between Wednesday, night one of Beyoncé’s Renaissance World Tour, and Thursday, night two. I heard it first on the Delta flight from JFK to Stockholm as the members of an almost entirely Black— and almost entirely Beyoncé-bound— boarding group took their seats. One man asked another which night he was seeing the show. “Thursday!” the guy answered. Night two, or, as far as his seatmate was concerned, night last. I swear I could hear the reply sizzle as it hit skin: “Ohhhh. Well, it will still be fun!”

For two nights in May, Stockholm became the capital of Black Planet, the epicenter of all internet activity, when the Renaissance tour—Beyoncé’s first solo tour in seven years and two(ish) albums—took over the city. After a viral TikTok tipped off fans that floor seats abroad were selling for a fraction of the cost of tickets in New York or Los Angeles (say, $2,000 in the U.S. versus less than $200 in Stockholm), those fans booked entire Eurotrips around Beyoncé. They got on the plane wearing compression socks for Beyoncé. When I arrived in Stockholm before the first show on May 10, a film programmer from L.A. told me her hotel had a sign in the elevator specifically for the Hive. She remembered it saying, welcome to beyoncé. Every Black person she’d met so far in Stockholm had traveled there for the show—except for one couple from Seattle, who just came because it’s spring.