There’s a reason Kansas City is known for having the loudest stadium in the NFL. Packed with people, GEHA Field at Arrowhead Stadium can get supersonic noisy.
But when Beyoncé takes the stage there on Sunday, she’s going to urge her adoring Beyhive to go utterly silent for about five seconds.
It happens during her song “Energy.” She will cue thousands of fans to stop singing/yelling/screaming/talking all at once, on beat — the musical equivalent of Beyoncé stopping a speeding train on a dime.
Those fleeting seconds have become the viral phenomenon known as the “mute challenge,” already hailed by some as iconic audience participation.
Fans heading to Arrowhead are determined to slay it for this final show of Beyonce’s “Renaissance” tour.
Some cities have more than met the challenge, with huge, excited stadium crowds falling as silent as symphony fans, on cue. Crowds in Washington, D.C., and Atlanta nailed it, earning huge smiles from the queen herself.
“Y’all won, y’all won, y’all won,” she told the audience at Mercedes-Benz Stadium in Atlanta on Aug. 11.
Other cities apparently missed the memo.
“Too many of y’all screamed, ‘wooo,’” one fan in Seattle complained on X, formerly Twitter.
Bragging rights are up for grabs as the tour winds down. Members of the Beyhive have posted tutorials online for fans going to the Kansas City show. Their advice boils down to various versions of this: “Kansas City better (shut the bleep up) for the mute challenge,” warned one Beyonce fan on X.
TikTok user Don Stone titled his video, “PSA! Mute means MUTE! SILENCE!”
“This is NOT a game!” Stone says in the video. “When that woman says ‘everybody on mute,’ I don’t want to hear (bleep). I better be able to hear a pin drop. …
“If I catch you making any (bleepy-bleepy) noise, I will hunt you down and find you.”
Last week two women coming to Arrowhead from New York City challenged their fellow fans to be quiet.
“We’re going to be on mute. We’re coming from New York City so you know us … New York energy … we’re not going to come with the screaming … we’re going to mute,” one of the women said.
“Let’s do this, let’s represent New York and Kansas City. Let’s make Kansas City win.”
Freeze!
Millions of fans have watched videos of the challenge and Beyoncé’s response in each city. It began at her first stop in Stockholm in May, where the crowd didn’t understand what was expected.
During the song “Energy,” she sings: “Big wave in the room, the crowd gon’ move. Look around, everybody on mute.”
The music immediately stops.
Beyoncé freezes.
Her backup dancers freeze too, shushing the crowd with fingers over their mouths.
Beyoncé is supposed to be the one to break the silence, which lasts about eight beats, by singing the next line: “Look around, it’s me and my crew. Big energy.”
It took a few shows for fans to start catching on. In Stockholm, for instance, the crowd loudly sang the next line in the song instead of going mute. European audiences kept singing and cheering during their quiet times.
Womp womp.
“This Beyoncé mute thing is amusing because now you know how teachers felt when they tried to get your classroom to be quiet but at least one kid was always making noise,” someone wrote on X.
By the time the tour came to the United States in July, though, audiences knew what to do. The challenge — also known as the “Everybody on Mute War” and “Everybody on Mute Challenge” — had gone viral. Competition heated up. Which crowd could remain the quietest?
“Atlanta Beyhive holds the lead, and if Angelenos want this (merely symbolic) crown, they need to rally,” the Los Angeles Times wrote earlier this month before the tour stopped there.
Fans at the show at MetLife Stadium in New Jersey got serious, passing out little instruction cards: “‘During ‘Energy’, when Beyoncé says ‘Everybody on mute,’ be mute! No cheering, no hollering, no finishing the lyric.”
Because her set list has remained largely the same throughout the tour, fans know when to get ready for the challenge. She reportedly sings “Energy” toward the middle of the concert, usually following “Cuff It” as it does on the “Renaissance” album.
Don’t sneeze
Last month, singer Adele challenged one of her Las Vegas audiences to try the mute challenge.
She teed them up. “Everybody on mute,” she sang.
And the audience kept yacking.
“You (bleeping) failed miserably,” she joked, telling the audience that when Beyoncé sings “’everybody on mute,’ you have to be (bleeping) quiet.”
A slew of other famous folks have actually done the challenge, several at the tour’s LA stops where actors Lupita Nyong’o, Nicole Richie, Zendaya and Tom Holland were all seen going mute in the audience.
Zendaya put her hands over her mouth to mute herself. At least they were her own hands.
Some videos show fans slapping their hands over the mouths of other fans who cheer during the silence. By some estimations it takes only a handful of people in a stadium crowd to ruin the effect. And it keeps happening.
Staying silent even for just a few seconds at a Beyoncé concert is just so counterintuitive for the Beyhive, “like getting a toddler to not be excited about the thing that they’re excited about,” Catherine Provenzano, an assistant musicology professor at UCLA, told the LA Times.
So that’s what Kansas City is up against.
“Kansas City we have more than enough time to not (bleep) this up!” one TikTok user posted in July.
She playful suggested that anyone who ruins it risks meeting the business end of a rolling pin or — eek! — meat cleaver.
She was kidding.
But it’s no joke that Kansas City wants to win the whole enchilada.
So much so that another TikTok user has apologized in advance if she ruins it, explaining she has allergy problems that make her sneeze excessively.
“I’m tellin’ Kansas City right now, don’t get mad at me,” she begged.