August 1965, Shea Stadium, Queens: The story goes that when playing this show, the Beatles finally decided to acknowledge a sense they’d been developing for nearly two years, since Beatlemania first set in: Concerts, on their tours, were no longer about music, which could hardly be heard, but were merely occasions for amassed, frenzied mobs to scream at deafening volume. The Craft of Performance had been outmoded, in the era of the rockstar, by the Cult of Personality. This tour would be the Beatles’ last, as they lashed themselves to the studio mast ever after.

May 2018, Oracle Arena, Oakland: The Cult of Personality has demanded its own aesthetic for these past five decades. Overall volume swells to no discernible limit; dancers in garish costumes proliferate across pop platforms, dwarfing the likely-lip-syncing-anyway alleged main attraction; lasers and flying pigs blind us to beauty and background; and Spinal-Tap-parodied set pieces are wheeled and wielded. What the music needs to be music again, what it needs to approach the Gesamtkunstwerk that Wagner dreamed, is a modern Barnum–someone who gives us not merely a concert but a show. A true performance. A clever lyricist who can phrase and belt until songs become earworms on the hit parade that every audience member can echo note for note in, yes, no question, a whipped-up frenzy of womanist wilding. A show designer (yes, she’s directly credited for that, first billed) who can weave claymation with Selickesque street props and multimedia hyperreality to complement and complicate and complete the sounds rather than substitute for them. A daring acrobat whose world class dancers form the ring in which she is set as jewel.

Sir James Paul McCartney, I respect your songwriting beyond all comparison, and I trust your perfect ear was right when it told you that what was demanded of you in performance was no longer craft, let alone art. You made the right decision in your time. But now, here–I give you the consummate artist of 21st century popular performance, Lady Alecia Beth Moore. Please be upstanding.