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Watch: Beyoncé and Kendrick Lamar slay the BET Awards with a surprise performance

Constance Grady is a senior correspondent on the Culture team for Vox, where since 2016 she has covered books, publishing, gender, celebrity analysis, and theater.

It’s becoming increasingly clear that Beyoncé’s absolute favorite pastime is to drop something beautiful into the world with no warning whatsoever and then watch us all lose our minds: an album here, a single there, and now a live performance.

Beyoncé opened Sunday night’s BET Awards with a surprise performance of "Freedom," with her dancers filing out into the audience over a recording of a Martin Luther King Jr. speech. They joined Beyoncé onstage for a rendition of the water-flinging choreography that’s been blowing minds on the Lemonade tour — and then, just to make everyone lose their minds a little bit more, Kendrick Lamar popped out from beneath the stage to rap his verse live.

If Beyoncé keeps escalating like this, I fully expect her to quietly and without any fanfare create peace in the Middle East. And as we all cry, "But how?" she’ll just smile enigmatically, happily watching us all fall apart.