The singer’s exhilarating Homecoming documentary is a fascinating study in celebrity
Have you seen Homecoming yet? Netflix has yet to reveal viewing figures for Beyoncé’s exhilarating, self-directed concert documentary, but by the measure of feverish social media volume, it feels like the streaming event of 2019 so far. Since it debuted on the platform last week, the internet has been thick with analysis and awed gushing over the 137-minute celebration of the R&B titan’s landmark 2018 Coachella set: not just from Twitter minions, but the likes of Michelle Obama and Lin-Manuel Miranda. Last week, it was reported that Homecoming is the first of three specials Beyoncé will deliver to Netflix in a $60m (£46m) deal, the company having trounced the offer of her previous television partner, HBO.
You’d have to go back quite a way to find a concert doc that has taken on this level of pop-cultural cachet. Black musicians, in particular, have traditionally got short shrift in the genre, so it’s apt that Homecoming hits screens just before Sydney Pollack’s long-shelved, shiver-inducing Aretha Franklin gospel session Amazing Grace at last comes to cinemas. (Anyone buzzing from Homecoming’s blast of pop and political energies, meanwhile, should get to iTunes for Wattstax, a frenzied, riveting preservation of the Stax soul label’s 1973 benefit concert.)
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