Beyoncé is the Wiz
An essay on spectacle, silver boots, and the rituals we keep paying for.
Somewhere over the stadium lights, Beyoncé told her people to wear cowboy boots—and they did. Just like that. No wand, no flying monkeys, no velvet rope. Just an Instagram post and the power of Wi-Fi. Whole cities shimmered. Fans flew across continents. Tickets cleared rent money. Instagram shimmered red, white, and blue.
And me? I stayed in Kansas.
Not Dorothy’s Kansas exactly—mine has more student debt and worse public transit—but still. From the safety of my couch, I watched the Cowboy Carter tour unfold like the technicolor dream it promised to be.
My group chats lit up. TikToks of chrome outfits flickered by like parade floats. Beyoncé rode a mechanical horse through a country-western Emerald City, and I scrolled past it all like the girl who missed the bus to Oz.
And maybe I did.
Or maybe I just saw the curtain.
Because I couldn't stop thinking about it—how badly people wanted to be there. Not just to hear the music, but to be seen hearing it.
To be in the glow of collective joy, that holy thing Durkheim called collective effervescence. When a crowd stops being individuals and becomes a single charged body. When singing becomes testimony. When choreography becomes ritual.
And it works. Because she is the Wiz.
But what does it mean when the only place we believe in magic anymore is inside a stadium with platinum-priced wristbands and 45-minute merch lines? What happens when our joy has a ticket price and a 3-item limit per customer?
So this is my way in. I didn’t go to Cowboy Carter. I didn’t follow the yellow brick road to the stadium gates. But I watched, and I thought, and I wrote. Because something about Beyoncé as The Wiz felt... right. And something about the rest of us—paying for the dream, screaming through the smoke—felt like a question waiting to be asked.
So let’s ask it.
Beyoncé is the Wiz...
But the Wiz needs the people...
We are the curtain too.
The Church of Beyoncé: Collective Effervescence or Empty Spectacle?
Beyoncé’s tour is pitched like a mass gathering, even a pilgrimage. Fans stream in, flags waving, ready to be touched by her light.
The promise: feel something bigger than yourself.
The stadium becomes a giant hoedown, with flying cars and seasoned dancers, an Americana image flipped on its head. Lights flare, tracks pump through the speakers, bodies sway. For a moment it feels transcendent. It’s no wonder people say the performers become sacred at shows like these.
But let’s not kid ourselves: this church has a hefty entry fee.
Beyoncé’s Cowboy Carter Tour opened amid chaos. Millions of fans flooded Ticketmaster – some estimates say queues from 30,000 up to 80,000 people – only to be spat out by glitches or “jaw-dropping” prices.
Reddit and Twitter turned angry: people branded it “ticket hell,” “bulls--t,” and “greedy.” Nosebleed seats went for six hundred dollars a pop. One fan joked they’d end up watching from the parking lot.
Even Beyoncé disciples admit: maybe the stadium grind isn’t fun anymore. One fan lamented, “Stadium concerts aren’t fun to me anymore. The whole experience is stressful, time-consuming, overstimulating… I can only see the artist from the screen, which I can do at home.”
In an age where Coachella sets live stream to millions, the buzz has shifted. Concerts are becoming a luxury good, a status symbol. If you can DVR Beyoncé’s every move for free online, why drop hundreds on a seat?
These complaints suggest our communal ritual might have lost its soul. Durkheim saw rituals bonding tribes against “anti-social forces” – but here it feels like capitalism got a line item.
The collective isn’t in the same bubble; it’s scattered in overpriced selfies and FOMO anxiety. Even true die-hards are wary: we used to go into debt for Beyoncé’s tours. Now many ask if it’s worth leaving the couch.
I chew on that irony. “Beyoncé is our Wiz” — a powerful wizard of culture — but a Wiz still needs his people.
She may conjure euphoria under the spotlights, but the energy only happens if we’re there to channel it. Otherwise the grand set becomes just a half-empty stage.
Behind the Curtain: Imagining the Wiz
Imagine Beyoncé offstage, after the curtain falls. Her costume glitter discarded, she’s not unlike the Wizard of Oz tinkering behind velvet. Perhaps she watches the crowd from a bank of monitors.
She sees fans in cowboy boots singing along; she scans social media outrage about ticket prices; she might even flinch at rising online theater of anger. In this backstage scene, Beyoncé isn’t a distant star but a human orchestrator. The Wiz needs an audience to turn his illusions real.
I picture her as diligent and exhausted, adjusting stage cues. Maybe she trains young dancers how to sidestep out of the way during a laser show. Or maybe she quietly watches the merch booth, eyes on the line snaking outside. She reminds herself: without these people out there, swinging lightsticks and shouting, there is no magic. Every scream and chant feeds the power of her show.
And in that private moment, maybe she smiles. Beyoncé knows that when we call her sacred, what we really honor is our shared experience. She helped build a shimmering facade, but we uplift it with our voices. Under the curtain, it’s clear: we are as much part of the show’s enchantment as she is.
Once again it comes to me in a hushed refrain:
Beyoncé is the Wiz...
But the Wiz needs the people...
We are the curtain too.
Dancing Outside the Arena: Rent Parties, Block Parties, Carnival
Stepping back further, consider where true Black joy has always lived: in community-run festivals and house parties, long before corporate tours. These were not ticketed spectacles but spontaneously welded gatherings.
Carnival (Brazil, Caribbean, etc.): An annual pre-Lenten festival where samba and steelpan reign. It’s a celebration born from Afro-diasporic tradition.
For Carnival, class and racial divisions are somewhat invisible and people escape into a collective fantasy. They dance under sequins, mocking their rulers, even protesting injustices. As a Carnival banner once read, the carnival “fantasy world… shows us the potentiality of better in our real lives”.
Rent Parties (Harlem, 1920s): These were real underground blockbusters: tenants literally hosted jazz bands and passed a hat to raise rent. Every hall and tenement became a temple of solidarity.
Families paid their bills with finger-snapping tunes, trading hardship for a night of swing. Rent parties were survival, but also pure joy—neighbors singing to lift spirits and keep the lights on1.
Block Parties (U.S. inner cities): From the Bronx to Detroit, Black block parties turned streets into dance floors. In 1973, DJ Kool Herc threw a legendary party that birthed hip-hop. Block parties held us together as peace treaties between gangs.
These outdoor raves were so vital that Black people solidified the block party as a mode of survival during crises of crime, poverty, and racism. Music, food, unity – that was the formula.
AfroFuture (Accra, Ghana): A modern example of diasporic festivity. Each year Afrochella celebrates Africa’s diverse culture and the vibrant work of African creatives, spotlighting young talent.
It’s the diaspora’s answer to Coachella, but steeped in community: workshops, block parties, fashion, art. This festival and others like it literally reconnect the continent, making a global village with no backstage barriers2.
These gatherings share one truth: the people create the sacred moment. There’s no all-seeing boss aside from us. The magic happens when neighbors play music, little kids climb on floats, elders pass down dance steps.
In rent parties and block parties, we are the performance, singing ourselves into unity. In Carnival, we don feathered masks and shape our streets into parades of prophecy. It’s a raw kind of effervescence Durkheim would recognize – not corporate or commercial, but communal and defiant.
Beyoncé’s tour tries to tap into that energy – and to her credit, she draws on it. (Even her album name Cowboy Carter is a wink to history: Beyoncé herself is Black Texan, as legitimate in country lore as Linda Martell or Charley Pride.) But the frames are different. In these grassroots festivals, joy was never meant to be sold to the highest bidder; it was the people’s ritual.
There’s a difference between being entertained by a spectacle and becoming the spectacle. In Beyoncé’s stadium church, fans pay and watch – we mostly remain the congregation. In a Carnival block, we are the procession.
We are the curtain too. Even at the grandest show, the crowd weaves the backdrop of belief.
Beyoncé may hold the spotlight, but remember: without us, she’s alone on stage. The real, timeless alchemy of Black joy isn’t on any tour poster – it’s in any of these dance circles, parades, and house parties.
Beyoncé is the Wiz...
But the Wiz needs the people...
We are the curtain too.
Black Art Spotlight: The Color Is
In The Wiz’s Emerald City Sequence, Richard Pryor’s Wizard doesn’t just rule Emerald City—he curates it. He speaks, and the citizens change color. One decree, and green is in. Another, and green is dead. Red becomes the vibe. Then gold. Then who knows. It’s a mood ring of materialism where fashion is obedience and style is survival.
“If you are seen green / It means you got mean bread,” they sing.
“If you’re not seen red / Then you shouldn’t be seen nowhere.”
The choreography is exquisite, but so is the satire. What we’re watching isn’t just a dance number. It’s a parable about Black performance under the gaze of power. A city full of stylish Black folk, shimmering in unison, doing what they’re told with flair. The Wiz never has to raise his voice. He just changes the rules and watches them follow.
It’s funny—until it isn’t. Because even in 1978, this wasn’t just camp. It was critique. Of capitalism. Of trend cycles.
Of how quickly liberation gets refashioned into lifestyle. Of how easily joy becomes currency. Of how Black expression is celebrated only when it’s choreographed, photogenic, profitable.
And that’s why Beyoncé is the Wiz.
Not in a derogatory way. In a literal way. Like the Wiz, she commands a spectacle, changes the cultural weather with a whisper, and makes entire arenas shimmer on cue. She tells us what to wear, how to move, when to sing. And we do it—joyfully, brilliantly, sometimes even reverently.
But unlike Pryor’s Wiz, Beyoncé doesn’t disappear behind the smoke. She stands in it. She performs through it. She bathes her daughters in it.
That makes her both the architect and the avatar. She’s the myth and the mirror.
And still—she needs the crowd. There’s no Emerald City without citizens. No shimmer without movement. No effervescence without us.
So I think of the fans wearing silver for Virgo season. Of the rain-soaked arena in New Jersey. Of the girl in Accra singing “Texas Hold ’Em” off her phone.
Of the block parties that birthed hip-hop and the rent parties that paid Harlem’s bills. I think of women walking with the world on her head. I think of how easy it is to get lost in the colors. How hard it is to remember the paint came from us.
And I hear the chorus again:
Beyoncé is the Wiz...
But the Wiz needs the people...
We are the curtain too.
So next time the color changes, let’s remember: we don’t just wear the green, or the red, or the gold.
We built the Emerald City.
We are the color.
A rent party was a Harlem house party in the 1920s where Black tenants raised rent money by hiring musicians and passing the hat.
AfroFuture is an annual Accra festival celebrating African diaspora culture, bringing together art, music and entrepreneurship.
Well said.