Even if she hadn’t brought out Jay-Z, Solange, and her two former Destiny’s Child bandmates, Michelle Williams and Kelly Rowland, even if it hadn’t been a performance two years in the making, Beyoncé’s headlining set at Coachella Saturday night surely would have been a memorable one. But such an alternate scenario doesn’t really matter, because she did deliver all of the above on the main stage at the festival in Indio, California after suddenly bowing out last year. (She was replaced in the 2017 lineup with Lady Gaga, who went on to take up residency in Las Vegas.)
As she made sure to mention during her set, Beyoncé is the first black woman musician to headline the festival, which has been criticized for the lack of diversity among its top-billed acts. (Lady Gaga, for example, was just the second woman to headline the festival in Coachella history, and the first in ten years.) So, with the convergence of all these factors, everyone from your average festival-goer to Beyoncé’s admiring peers—both at the festival and beyond—was extremely hyped for the show, which ran a marathon 27 songs over the course of two hours. (It led the New York Times to declare, in a review of the show, that “Beyoncé Is Bigger Than Coachella.”)
And everyone, from Chance the Rapper to Ava DuVernay to Elizabeth Banks, made sure to make public their admiration for Queen Bey on social media. Rihanna, who, earlier in the day, hosted a pool party at Coachella, probably too busy dancing to post anything to Instagram or Snapchat, but Adele, watching on her television at home, posted multiple boomerangs of herself dancing along to the performance—in one, brandishing a trumpet, while in another, simply whipping her hair around.
Meanwhile, actress and model Cara Delevingne posted a more earnest tribute to the show. Alongside an image of Beyoncé, Rowland, and Williams, she captioned, “That performance made me burst into tears and sent shivers down my spine,” adding, “Thank you for inspiring so many and for lifting each other up.” She had previously criticized the festival’s ownership for its homophobic and anti-gun-control stances, and in a follow-up post to her Instagram stories, she explained that her condemnation of the festival and her admiration for Beyoncé are not mutually exclusive. “My hashtag was #Nochella,” she wrote. “I am allowed to shame that man and the festival and show my appreciation of an artist at the same time.”