It’s the album that’s been in the works for a while, at least since before Lemonade usurped the highly profitable concept of a joint Jay-Z and Beyoncé record. And one does kind of have to wonder what that might have sounded like, if it had been released in, say, 2014–all filled with youthful naïveté and Beyoncé pretending not to notice Jay-Z’s then wandering eye (which has swiftly been plucked out, for all intents and purposes, as he seems to have bowed quite nicely down to Beyoncé and her matriarchal world).
But we’ll never know now, the duo has been through “too much,” or at least staged a lot for the public. From the Solange elevator scandal to Lemonade to the controversy surrounding Bey being a feminist yet choosing to forgive the man who cheated on her multiple times, there’s been no shortage of material for a collaborative (though it feels like basically just a Beyoncé endeavor) album of a “therapeutic” nature. So they begin with “Summer” (appropriate considering the time of the record’s release and their current On the Run II Tour), a slowed down track that pays homage to beach imagery past, most notably “Drunk In Love,” as Bey grossly encourages, “Up and down motion, come swim in my ocean, yeah yeah.” All right, we get that you’re in love anew, but can you just bring it down a notch? We all know you’re not really living that porno lifestyle, for whenever people talk a lot about sex, it usually means they’re not having it or it’s not that great (I should know).
At the very least, however, they have the decency to follow up this bathetic “love song” with “Apeshit,” the single that’s more of a true testament to what their relationship represents: the financial benefit and convenience of being a power couple, even though it appears that Bey composes both sides of the yin yang. For some reason really into name checking luxury watch brands like Patek Philippe (phrased as Philippe Patek in this case) and Richard Mille, Jay and Bey are endlessly fond of shouting their level of wealth to the mountaintops as, in their minds, an encouragement to other black people to follow suit. But, in the end, it’s really just shouting to the mountaintops about their own wealth.
To that point, the braggadocio continues on “Boss,” in which Jay-Z gets to air his grievances with Drake and Kanye turning their backs on Tidal (which, yes still blows as a concept) and Beyoncé simply gets to talk about how she “got that dinero on [her] mind.” Bitch, get in line with J. Lo. And yet, A. Rod is a bit too daft to care as much about money as Jay-Z, so in this regard Yoncé truly has met her materialistically appetitive soul mate. This album, very transparently, isn’t a love letter to love, but a love letter to money and its power when two juggernaut celebrities positioning themselves as the joint spokesperson for black people combine forces. Even though it’s really obvious that Jay-Z needs Beyoncé to fortify his own clout, not the other way around. And perhaps knowing he has the power of “Beysus” on his side, he feels confident in taking on the whitest, most patriarchal institution of all–the NFL–by baiting on “Apeshit,” “I 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.”
While this level of arrogance is positive in some ways (for very few people, even blancos, are willing to speak out against the backer behind America’s favorite sport), it mostly perpetuates “aspirants” to hold out hope for a false idea for what life is supposed to be: Lambos, overpriced watches and bangin’ sex that no one actually has.
They try to come back down to earth now and again, as is the case on, “Nice,” somewhat sarcastically explaining all the ways in which they’ve been generous to those that now malign them. What’s more, “Jay-hova” reminds us that he was the original narcissist with that comparison to God/Jesus shit (another read for Kanye) by rapping, “I can do anything” and “Great advice, damn you, Hov, Jesus Christ.” This song is debatably the least enjoyable by sheer lack of virtue of its redundancy. Considering the two only have nine songs to impress us with on the record, “Nice” feels like an especial waste. “713” (the Houston area code), another attempt at being “humble,” kind of just rips off the backbeat from Justin Timberlake’s “Summer Love” and, yeah, it feels somewhat disingenuous for Beyoncé to assure, “We still got love for the streets.” That love tends to come when a well-timed publicity opportunity for donating cash or getting a photo with a hurricane victim comes along. But sure, “love” (tied to money) nonetheless.
The Kardashian-Jenner inferiority shade is also addressed by Jay on “Friends” when he raps, “Y’all put niggas on a t-shirt, it hurts you ain’t never meet ‘em,” referencing Kylie and Kendall’s attempt at putting 2pac and Biggie on shirts for their fashion line. The track also serves as a chance to shout out to all their friends who have remained through thick and thin, even if, once again, it’s through a narcissistic lens–case in point being Jay-Z eager to take full credit for being the source that freed Meek Mill from prison early. And of course Bey is there to paint a picture of how great it is to be her friend with, “My friends, real friends, better than your friends/That’s how we keep popping out that Benz, yeah/No foes, real friends, we ain’t even got to pretend, yeah/Get bands, get bands, spend it all on my friends.”
With regard to the Jenners getting shaded for stealing imagery, what they’ve tried is nothing that The Carters haven’t gotten away with, constantly ripping off from “lesser known” black artistry to, in their minds, help spread the gospel when, in fact, it often just leads to them getting the credit. As Chimamanda Ngozi Adhichie put it, “Literally every major newspaper in the world wanted to speak with me about Beyoncé [after “Flawless”]. I felt such a resentment. I thought: are books really that unimportant to you? Another thing I hated was that I read everywhere: now people finally know her, thanks to Beyoncé, or: she must be very grateful. I found that disappointing. I thought: I am a writer and I have been for some time and I refuse to perform in this charade that is now apparently expected of me: ‘Thanks to Beyoncé, my life will never be the same again.'” And no, her life never would. Just as, say, Deana Lawson’s never will. For her signature photographic style is what the imagery from the “Apeshit” video is being compared to (one of the images serving as the album cover featuring Jasmine Harper and Nicholas “Slick” Stewart on it).
Speaking to Lawson’s authentic documents of black aesthetics, the reliance on “blackness” that Beyoncé and Jay-Z have made (especially in recent years) a somewhat shallow career out of is something that very few are willing to call them out on, especially since there aren’t very many other black entertainers that white people will exalt so readily. Perhaps only Adichie was willing to comment honestly on Beyoncé’s frequent hypocrisy by stating in 2016 of “Flawless,” “Her type of feminism is not mine, as it is the kind that gives quite a lot of space to the necessity of men. I think men are lovely, but I don’t think that women should relate everything they do to men: did he hurt me, do I forgive him, did he put a ring on my finger? We women are so conditioned to relate everything to men. Put a group of women together and the conversation will eventually be about men. Put a group of men together and they will not talk about women at all, they will just talk about their own stuff. We women should spend about twenty percent of our time on men, because it’s fun, but otherwise we should also be talking about our own stuff.”
Clearly, Beyoncé has not taken this “brand” of feminism on in her own life, with use of Jay-Z strategic to her artistic material and financial gain being too paramount to shove aside for the sole sake of being a “bona fide” feminist. This much is apparent on “Heard About Us,” a track that continues to portray herself and Jay-Z as a unit as opposed to two separate individuals. Paying homage to Jay-Z’s fallen friend, Biggie, Bey borrows the lyrics, “If you don’t know, now you know,” as both of them speak about their incomparable grade of fame (“Everyday I’m getting sued famous”).
But that’s the tradeoff for being the self-proclaimed influencers behind the “Black Effect,” a track that finds Jay-Z insisting, “I’m good on any MLK Boulevard/See my vision with a Tec bitch I’m Malcolm X.” The first sentence probably refers to Jay-Z’s “street cred” on any “dangerous” street, Brooklyn or otherwise, with Bey herself having once shouted, “Call me Malcolm X!” on Lemonade‘s “Don’t Hurt Yourself.” While the concept behind Everything Is Love is theoretically about the love between Beyoncé and Jay-Z, it’ is, at its core, about loving the “accoutrements” of “blackness,” with Jay-Z taking the opportunity to, once again, brag, “Shit I am the culture / I made my own wave, so now they anti-Tidal.”
The two slink back into a love-in for their own marriage–vows renewed after Jay-Z’s extramarital dick wetting–on the final track, “LoveHappy.” Another track that lends more of a voice to Beyoncé, she decides, in the end, “We came, and we saw, and we conquered it all/We came, and we conquered, now we’re happy in love.” This is code for, “We’re happier when the money is rolling in on a dual level so that we always live above and outside the systemic abuse of black people and can pass on this wad of cash to subsequent generations so that they, too, might fight the power.” She also insists, “You did some things to me, boy, you do some things to me/But love is deeper than your pain and I believe you can change/Baby, the ups and downs are worth it, long way to go, but we’ll work it/We’re flawed but we’re still perfect for each other.” This sentiment definitely does not impress Achidie much.
In any case, Beyoncé declared that the best revenge is your paper on “Formation.” It seems this is the one statement that both she and Jay-Z can remain faithful to in terms of their true motives behind riding the wave of a “formerly” rocky marriage. And in truth, Lemonade is a better piece of art, which kind of proves that hate and jealousy are far more relatable than this “everything is love” phony baloney.
