Beyoncé shines in third instalment of hip-hop love story with Jay-z
Everything is Love The Carters
★★★★★
When did Beyoncé and Jay-z become the John and Yoko of hip-hop? Pop’s reigning power couple have become so self-referential their oeuvre has become a public dissection and vindication of their marriage. Mind you, Beyoncé can sing better than Yoko Ono. In fact, she can sing better than just about everyone.
It is Beyoncé’s voice that illuminates and lubricates Everything Is Love, the joint album that the powerhouse R’N’B diva and her rap mogul husband announced without warning on Saturday, during their co-headlined stadium show in London and released exclusively via their streaming platform, Tidal. After Beyoncé addressed rumours about the state of her union with Jay-z with her 2016 album, Lemonade, and Jay-z admitted to his infidelity with last year’s 4:44, this is effectively the third album in a soap-operatic series about the ups and downs of their relationship.
Everything Is Love reunites the couple in a declaration of their enduring amour. It is the climax of the most grandstanding showbiz couples’ therapy session witnessed since Lennon and Ono’s Double Fantasy in 1980. On closing track Lovehappy, Beyoncé sings across an old school soul sample: “Love is deeper than your pain and I believe you can change.”
The album makes for a fascinating document. We hear about the early days of their courtship; the rumours of Jay-z having an illegitimate child (“Billie Jean in his prime / For the thousandth time, the kid ain’t mine”); their move from New York to Los Angeles and the renewal of their vows. Beyoncé and Jay-z’s relaxed interchanges are peppered with amusing pop culture references to his awards snub, the couple’s inclusion in Forbes rich list and their disputes with rival streaming services.
There is a lot of fun to be had here. But it is hard to escape the sense of brand management, too, as the emotional turmoil that infused those two earlier albums is queasily resolved in declarations of undying affection. Like John and Yoko, The Carters can be just a bit too pleased with their self-mythologised love. But this being hip-hop, the way they tend to express affection is through brand names and lifestyle boasts (“Sittin’ dock of the bay with a big yacht / Sippin’ Yamazaki on the rocks”).
Only one track, the punchy Black Effect, sees the happy couple unlock their gazes from each other’s eyes for long enough to address problems lesser mortals might face. With its sharp references to police brutality, false arrest and the shooting of Trayvon Martin, it puts Beyoncé and Jay-z at the forefront of Black Lives Matter. John and Yoko were pretty good at tackling political issues, too.
In comparative musical terms, though, you could amusingly question who is the Beatle in this particular studio set-up. As a hip-hop album, Everything Is Love should play to Jay-z’s strengths. And while he is on fine form throughout, it is his wife who does the heavy musical lifting. Beyoncé impressively matches her superstar rapper husband in terms of lyrical swagger, rhythmic flow and verbal bounce. That she does it to a backdrop of samples constructed around her own extraordinary singing lends the record’s mantric grooves the luxurious sheen of high-end pop.
The result of using that remarkable voice both as back and foreground is to turn Jay-z into a guest on Beyoncé’s album. A man who seems to have risen above rap’s customary ego plays, Jay-z sounds genuinely comfortable in this setting. But it is Beyoncé who thrives. Production throughout (from a wide range of hip-hop beatmakers) is sleek, modern and dynamic but it takes a producer of Pharrell Williams’s confidence to dare slather such a rich voice in effects reserved for more pedestrian singers. The way Beyoncé’s vocal can suddenly lift out of the electronic monotone and into the ether at the end of phrases becomes a special effect in itself.
These are not pop songs, though. Everything Is Love certainly doesn’t have the musical expansiveness of Lemonade. There are neither ballads nor bangers, and not much in the way of melodic song construction at all. Rather, these are snappily repetitive beats on which the stars can put across their message as a form of hip-hop conversation. Beyond the intrigue that holds, Everything Is Love offers the opportunity to hear Beyoncé add another string to her already wellstrung bow.
If Lemonade’s bravura honesty brought out qualities of depth and focus in Beyoncé that had only been hinted at before, this record demonstrates that she has the skills to be a world-beating rapper. I suppose it helps that she has one of the greatest rappers who ever lived in the role of her number one cheerleader.
Everything is Love by The Carters is available now on Tidal