COUPLE’S THERAPY
A guide to Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s surprise Everything is Love
There is arguably no couple better at controlling their own media coverage than Beyoncé and Jay-Z. When a video surfaced in 2014 showing her younger sister Solange attacking Jay-Z in an elevator, rumours of a strained marriage proliferated. Rather than battle the tabloids, they used the gossip to fuel two critically beloved, commercially successful records: her Lemonade and his 4:44. And in them they offered just as many details as they chose.
They continued their domination of the pop music world on Saturday, when they surprised the world by releasing their joint album Everything is Love, something of a sequel to those two solo records. Though they have collaborated for at least 15 years, this marks their first joint album, which they dropped under the name the Carters (Jay-Z’s real name is Shawn Carter).
The record is a victory lap from a couple who have mined their relationship for universal truths and then presented them as art. It’s a fierce love letter to success, to family, to blackness — but, most of all, to each other.
Here are a few early take-aways:
THE ALBUM
The record follows a recent trend of shorter run times, clocking in at 38 minutes and 17 seconds across nine tracks. The song titles also employ brevity, most of them being one word in all caps, such as Summer, Boss, Friends and Lovehappy.
Several producers contributed to the album, including Cool & Dre, Pharrell Williams, Nav and Dave Sitek from the rock band TV on the Radio. They have crafted an album of towering horns, racing synths and booming drums — but one that puts Beyoncé’s and Jay-Z’s vocals at the forefront. The album primarily focuses on two aspects: their marriage and their overwhelming success.
Much like Lemonade and 4:44, Everything is Love is filled with details of Jay-Z’s infidelity and the couple’s subsequent reconciliation.
“If me and my wife beefing, I don’t care if the house on fire, I’m dying ... I ain’t leaving,” Jay-Z raps on 713.
The two, meanwhile, have a difficult conversation on the album’s closer, Lovehappy.
Beyoncé: “You” messed “up the first stone, we had to get remarried.” Jay-Z: “Yo chill”
Beyoncé: “We keeping it real with these people, right?/ Lucky I ain’t kill you when I met ...”
Jay-Z: “You know how I met her/ We broke up and got back together/ To get her back I had to sweat her.”
Closing the record, Beyoncé offers this meditation on their union: “The ups and downs are worth it / Long way to go but we’re working / We’re flawed but we’re still perfect for each other, yeah yeah / Sometimes I thought we’d never see the light / We went through hell with heaven on our side / This beach ain’t always been no paradise.”
But many of their lyrics are straight boasting: “My success can’t be quantified,” Beyoncé sings on the expletiveladen Nice, adding that if she cared “about streaming numbers, would’ve put Lemonade up on Spotify.”
Jay-Z — in a line that cannot be printed in a family publication — complains that he didn’t win any of the eight Grammys he was nominated for in 2017. He also raps that he “said no to the Super Bowl/ You need me, I don’t need you/ Every night we in the end zone/ Tell the NFL we in stadiums too.” Woven throughout are references to police brutality and systematic racism, such as the chorus of Black Effect: “Get your hands up high like a false arrest / Let me see ’em up high, this is not a test.”
The album’s also full of classic hiphop references. On Heard About Us, Beyoncé belts out the famous line from Notorious B.I.G.’s Juicy: “If you don’t know, now you know.”
Finally the pair seem to throw a little shade at Kanye West when Beyoncé raps, “Hova, Beysus, watch the thrones.” In 2011, Jay-Z (Hova) and Kanye, who calls himself Yeezus, put out a record called Watch the Thrones.
Beyoncé seems to be implying that she’s taken Kanye’s throne.
THE VIDEO
Accompanying the album was an opulent music video for Apesh--. It was directed by Ricky Saiz, who also directed the video for Yonce in 2013. It finds the couple lounging, wandering and finally partying throughout the Louvre in Paris, alone save for a group of dancers in nude bodysuits.
As they delight in their surroundings, the camera wanders to various museum works, such as those by Jacques-Louis David. These paintings mostly feature white people, though the camera finds and zooms in on the few black and brown faces it can find.
Eventually, the video cuts between the paintings, the Carters and images of people of colour in the real world — a couple making out on their bed, teenagers kneeling in the same way the NFL will not allow its players during the national anthem.
The video is a study in juxtaposition: A juxtaposition between the fluid movements of the couple and the still paintings and statues. A juxtaposition between the black and brown dancers and the white faces lining the walls. A juxtaposition between art and reality.