Pop review Ho-ho-ho-down from Beyoncé is playful and infectious

Some of Beyoncé's most memorable 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 2016 half-time show as she paid homage to the Black Panthers and freaked out a sizable section of the US establishment ("It is now 'cool' to embrace violence, mayhem and, frankly, even racial separatism in the cause of civil rights," the rightwing Heritage Foundation thinktank fumed at the time). Her 2018 Coachella performance, though not on a football field, featured college football's majorettes and marching bands as she celebrated historically black colleges and universities.

- Ben Beaumont-Thomas

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 to interrogate and play around with American iconography. The Christmas Day performance is the first live outing for material from Cowboy Carter, Beyoncé's 2024 album that added a whole new discipline: country music.

She begins with a recorded segment that shows her riding a white horse and wearing a cowboy hat so broad that it could have its own postcode, singing 16 Carriages as she passes people standing on horseback, acknowledging the tradition of African American horse riding clubs around the American south and indeed countrywide. Part of the Cowboy Carter project has been to firmly underline the contribution of black Americans to country music and culture (not convincing everyone), and so it is here—next up is her cover of the Beatles' Blackbird, with a quartet of black country backing singers.