How Jay-Z, Beyoncé and Solange Going to a 2009 Grizzly Bear Concert Ended Up an Iconic Indie-Pop Crossover Moment

In 2025, artists from the indie and pop worlds collaborate and co-mingle regularly enough that it’s almost hard to remember a time when it was ever really that novel. But earlier this century, indie and pop were still isolated enough that in 2009, when Solange took her sister Beyoncé and Bey’s husband Jay-Z to a concert by the band Grizzly Bear at the Wiliamsburg Waterfront in Brooklyn, NY, it ended up making for a media sensation — especially when Jay started raving about his experience and about the entire “indie rock movement” in TV interviews later that year.

On this Great Moments in Pop Star History episode of the Greatest Pop Stars podcast, host Andrew Unterberger is joined by Stereogum writer/editor Chris DeVille to fully unpack this oddly historic moment of the Knowles-Carter clan checking out one of the buzziest indie bands of 2009. We start by discussing Chris’ new book Such Great Heights: The Complete Cultural History of the Indie Rock Explosion (now available for preorder) and how it tells more than just the story of the genre, but rather the story of the whole audience — including both of us, as millennial indie rock fans who came of age during the period covered, and who saw our own tastes evolving along with the music.

Then, it’s back to 2009 — when Beyoncé was already one of our greatest pop stars but not necessarily one of the hippest, when Jay-Z was looking to distance himself from an increasingly inhospitable hip-hop mainstream, and when Solange was still finding herself as an artist. We look at how this moment ended up being both a telling and a consequential one for all three of those iconic artists, as well as how it ended up marking the cultural peak for Grizzly Bear, and perhaps for late-’00s indie in general. We also ask: Was Bey really making fun of hipsters with her Fauxchella getup? Was there another band we might’ve found more likely to have really blown Jay’s mind about indie rock’s possibilities? And if we were to re-stage a similarly mind-blowing pop-meets-indie moment in 2025, which artists would we go with?

Check it out above — along with a YouTube playlist of some of the related moments discussed in the podcast — and subscribe to the Greatest Pop Stars podcast on Apple Music or Spotify (or wherever you get your podcasts) for weekly discussions every Thursday about all things related to pop stardom!

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