This week is the one-month wedding anniversary of Meghan Markle and Prince Harry. The biracial actress, who wove black rituals throughout her globally televised wedding, conjured a swath of social-media celebrations of the wedding's alleged "wokeness"—as if Markle, accompanied by her black mother, Doria Ragland, could alone out the damned spot of British colonialism through opulent ceremony. Much as many may wish, it's impossible to erase centuries of racism at a wedding, even if it is attended by Oprah and Serena Williams. The same can be said for Beyoncé and Jay-Z's lush joint album Everything Is Love, the finale in a trilogy that includes the raucous confessional Lemonade and the more laissez-faire 4:44. The album, which appeared on TIDAL Saturday afternoon before expanding to other streaming platforms on Monday, is accompanied by a bold album cover depicting a black woman combing a black man's hair with the Mona Lisa looming in the background. The visual is broadened by a video for the album's lead single "Apeshit," where Beyoncé and Jay-Z take over the Louvre, blare Migos-assisted trap beats, and celebrate black bodies in front of European art. It's a sight to behold, for sure, but is it a disruption in the same vein as Beyoncé sinking a cop car in a New Orleans flood in "Formation"? As taking her baseball bat named "Hot Sauce" to a surveillance camera in "Hold Up"? As Jay's "The Story of O.J." music video, detailing America's history of dehumanizing black faces with Jim Crow–era bigotry? It would be hard to stick the landing in this album trilogy, particularly for one that began with such heights as celebrating the godliness of black womanhood, but the images of Beyoncé and Jay-Z in the Louvre stumble in their attempt to reclaim colonialist art as a form of black liberation. The most striking moments are those reminiscent of Deana Lawson’s staged portraits of working-class black people that showcases their lives and homes with striking honesty. Images of black men kneeling as Jay-Z calls out the NFL and boasts about turning down the Super Bowl feel cathartic. But it's hard to forget that as Beyoncé and Jay-Z center black bodies in the Louvre, there is already a plethora of black bodies among the colonialist artwork—bodies of slaves depicted in European artwork. There is also surely African art that has been plundered from its homeland. (French president Emmanuel Macron has even made it a priority for French museums to begin returning stolen African artifacts.) Is staging black bodies in the Louvre enough to upend this, without demanding Beyoncé and Jay-Z become Erik Killmonger? The complicated racism steeped into the Louvre is impossible to rinse out, even with pop-culture royalty celebrating their union in its halls. There are many explicitly black art spaces to occupy, but they would not leave you with a reminder of the Carters' vast wealth (reminiscent of Jay-Z rapping about owning Basquiats, just to brag about them), which they are apt to remind you of on Everything Is Love. Beyoncé has always playfully adopted hip-hop's braggadocious nature on tracks like "Yoncé" and "Bow Down," but rapping about her great-great grandchildren already being on the Forbes list leaves a sour taste. What was once a sexy game of one-upmanship on songs like "Upgrade U" now feels like we are celebrating the Carters because of their bank-account balance. It makes Beyoncé's forgiveness of Jay-Z's adultery seem perfunctory, manufactured to sell albums and another joint tour. Perhaps it's because Beyoncé left the earth scorched with soul-baring profanity on Lemonade (and that Jay-Z's 4:44 lacked any of that energy). When Everything Is Love resorts to tired clichés like "black queen, you rescued us, you rescued us, rescued us," it reminds you that rappers too often use the women in their lives to signify emotional growth. The most reflection Jay-Z musters on the album is the standout track "Black Effect," which harks back to 2001's The Blueprint. Cynically considered an overtly commercial album at the time, in retrospect, Jay-Z's laid-back flow over soul samples manages to evoke a sense of authenticity and introspection. Similarly, "Black Effect" opens with a thesis on the nature of love and has Jay-Z once again celebrating the magnitude of his wealth, but also recognizing that even black excellence doesn't come without the ills of racism and police brutality. He highlights the abuses against Kalief Browder and Trayvon Martin, which remind you that even though Everything Is Love is masked in a brazen commercialism, the black royal couple feels the weight of their people on their hearts. On the same track, Beyoncé warns detractors, "I will never let you shoot the nose off my Pharaoh." As Beyoncé performs a frenetic dance before the Louvre's Great Sphinx of Tanis while Jay-Z hovers behind her, it's apparent that she cannot afford to be anodyne—she's issuing a salvo not only for their marriage but for the image of their marriage. It's inconsequential whether her fanbase, the Beyhive, has forgiven Jay-Z for his indiscretions because she has, at least publicly so. After all, they're royalty. And lest their monarchy be brought down, the crown must always win.<doc-sep>Until recently, JAY-Z and Beyoncé had made careers of being astoundingly larger than life—cults of personalities we, in fact, knew very little about. He carefully crafted a narrative of corner-hustler-turned-corporate-CEO while guarding the intimate secrets of those closest to him; she was a perfectly manicured pop star who built an empire on turning the vagaries of life into empowerment anthems. Lemonade and 4:44 were watershed moments because they offered a glimpse of the more vulnerable traits of the mystical artists behind them. The Carters zoomed in close enough to show the cracks—to hear a man struggling to find maturity and a woman searching for clarity. Through those albums, we were allowed to see their flaws and we formed deeper connections to them because of it. Their surprise joint release, Everything Is Love, completes the arc. It’s a testament to how a complicated love survived through self-reflection, compromise, and ruthless honesty. The quintessential power couple has reemerged to stunt on everyone—haters, mistresses, America itself—while serving up a spectacle of romance and opulence like make-up sex on a bed of money. The Carters’ final episode of a presumed trilogy packages truth in a way that makes it more captivating than any lie or tabloid fodder. Elevator fights, rumors of discord, and marriage counseling swirled around their initial “On the Run” tour in 2014. It took another two years to confirm the suspicion, and by then, it was near impossible to look away from their turmoil. But even now, with drama in the rear view, the return of marital harmony still holds a thrill. Opening track “SUMMER” picks up where Lemonade’s “All Night” left off, a slow dance with the warm sensuality of forgiveness. Above a soulful live band, Beyoncé croons sweetly about making love to her husband, but it’s one of the few times she’ll play the part of the mellifluous singer. This is “don't think I'm just his little wife” writ large and there is little room for honeyed words; Bey is fired up and in rare form. The couple’s happily ever after is a celebration of both resilient black love (to the chagrin of those for whom infidelity is irredeemable) and proud black extravagance (to the chagrin of those who for whom money is not freedom). As quickly as the opener’s majestic strings fade out, the thunderous “APESHIT” rumbles in. And so continues the second life of Beyoncé, your favorite rapper’s favorite rapper. She kicks triplet flows all over Pharrell’s club-ready production, accented by Quavo and Offset ad-libs. She raps in double time, crashing the syllables into each other: “Put some respeck on my check/Or pay me in equity/Watch me reverse out of debt (skrt! ).” Jay is an afterthought on the song despite seamlessly integrating Chief Keef’s “Faneto,” The Lion King, and some well-placed Grammys and NFL shade in the span of his verse: “Every night we in the end zone/Tell the NFL we in stadiums too.” And what audacity to film the video for a trap banger in the Louvre—the pinnacle of violent colonial history presented as high art—and to call it “APESHIT,” and to fill the place with black creators who are rarely revered on the walls. Each frame of melanin situated against white space is a gorgeous piece of art unto itself. Everything Is Love largely doubles down on the status symbols, generational wealth, and sustainability put forth in songs like “Family Feud” and “Legacy” from 4:44. Bey’s line on “BOSS”—”My great-great-grandchildren already rich/That’s a lot of brown chil’run on your Forbes list”—is the best of many flexes on the album. Likewise, Jay’s assertion on the same song that “Over here we measure success by how many people successful next to you/Here we say you broke if everybody is broke except for you” echoes a form of cooperative economics. Communal connections thread the album, coming to a head on the sinuous “FRIENDS” which finds the Carters recognizing comrades (and frenemies, probably) as the bedrock of their prosperity. When “did it on my own” rhetoric is still the go-to for success stories, Jay and Beyoncé pausing to honor those in their orbit who ground them is as admirable as it is relatable. By and large, though, they hold the focus on themselves, staying in one another’s sight and playing off each other in a manner far removed from the honeymoon phase of “’03 Bonnie & Clyde” or “Crazy in Love.” He doesn’t even need to say anything else when he beams “it’s Beyoncé nigga, oh my god” on the synth-pop jam “HEARD ABOUT US.” Their peak synergy and star power make Everything Is Love an event, but Jay is the moon to Beyoncé’s sun. He has shown his spectacular bravado for 20 years, but we’re still getting accustomed to Bey, a woman of action over words, really talking her shit. She’s radiant here, a balladeer and trap rapper, an around-the-way girl and reigning queen all rolled into one. She works in nods to the stoner comedy Half Baked, Notorious B.I.G., Shawty Lo/Young Jeezy, and Dr. Dre by singing the hook of “Still D.R.E.,” a track her husband helped write. Her limberness on the album makes one of the best rappers to ever live look like a one-trick pony by comparison. The Carters remain billionaires who are not interested in leaving their blackness behind, and that, in some ways, is renegade—even if capitalism isn’t salvation. It’s what makes a song like “BLACK EFFECT,” an explicit ode to black excellence set to a soulful soundscape courtesy of Miami producer duo Cool & Dre, so powerful. They’re still using their platform to acknowledge the history—through the names Kalief Browder, Trayvon Martin, Sarah Baartman, MLK, Malcolm X—and the current condition of black people through affirmation and critiques of appropriation and police brutality. As director Ava DuVernay wrote in 2011 of Jay and Kanye’s Watch the Throne: “Tell me who has ’made it’ to the highest heights and then started speaking the truth about the beauty of us, Black Folk, our souls, our bodies, our brains.” Of course, Kanye has reneged, but Jay and Bey remain committed to championing our lives and experiences.<doc-sep>Beyonce and Jay-Z‘s surprise joint album, “Everything is Love,” debuted on Saturday, June 16, without any advance promotion. Now critics have had their say. Is it as good as the albums that preceded it in their trilogy of marital strife, Beyonce’s “Lemonade” and Jay-Z’s “4:44”? As of this writing the album has an impressive MetaCritic score of 82 based on 17 reviews so far. That’s the same score as “4:44,” but shy of the 92 received by “Lemonade.” If it’s a bit of a step down for Beyonce, though, consider how high she’s stepping down from. For the sake of comparison, “Everything is Love” has rated 12 points higher than this year’s Grammy winner for Album of the Year, “24K Magic” by Bruno Mars. It’s true that reviews aren’t everything when it comes to the Grammys; Mars actually had the lowest MetaCritic score of any of the five nominees this year. But good reviews are a good start. Critics are calling “Everything is Love” “stunning” and “musically and melodically on point.” But maybe the recording industry’s biggest power couple will suffer by comparison to themselves. Some reviewers also note that the new album is “less adventurous” than what came before, and “not the best from either” artist. If Grammy voters balked at “Lemonade” and “4:44,” will they honor an album with less acclaim so soon after? SIGN UPfor Gold Derby’s free newsletter with latest predictions What do you think of “Everything is Love” and everything the critics have to say about it? Check out some of the reviews below, and join the discussion on this and more in our music forums. Jem Aswad (Variety): “How does it rate as an album? Solid and generally satisfying, but not the best from either. Both artists’ high standards guarantee that the songs are musically and melodically on point, with a top-shelf team of collaborators … The most interesting thing about ‘Everything Is Love,’ which feels like a light dessert after ‘Lemonade’ and Beyonce’s deeply Afro-centric Coachella performance, may be what comes next.” Sheldon Pearce (Rolling Stone): “‘Everything Is Love’ is couples counseling as an art exhibition, as much a splendid relationship retrospective as it is a celebration of their growing black family dynasty … Beyoncé and Jay co-produced every song, but Cool & Dre, Pharrell and Boi-1da distinguish exactly what the album sounds like – at times classicist and often trendy but usually stunning.” Alexis Petridis (The Guardian): “If there’s nothing on ‘Everything’ Is Love’ that matches the breathtaking sonic experimentation of ‘Lemonade’s’ ‘Freedom’ – plus the sound of Beyoncé singing through Auto-Tune feels surplus to requirements, serving to diminish one of modern R&B’s true powerhouse voices – there’s still a lot to like about the music, which is far more rooted in hip-hop than R&B.” Mikael Wood (Los Angeles Times): “The Carters are in a less adventurous mode here than they were on the kaleidoscopic ‘Lemonade’ or the radically intimate ‘4:44.’ Compared to those efforts — or to Beyoncé’s mind-blower of a performance at April’s Coachella festival — this album doesn’t seek to present either musician in a startling new light.”<doc-sep>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, discussion and triumphalist vindication of their marriage. Mind you, Beyoncé can sing a bit better than Yoko. Well, she can sing a bit 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 released without warning on Saturday. Announced during the final London show of their co-headlined stadium tour On The Run II and released exclusively via their streaming platform Tidal, it is effectively the third album in a soap-operatic series about the ups and downs of their relationship. Beyoncé's Lemonade fired the first shots across the bows in April 2016, a staggering pop masterpiece about marital discord and black womanhood. Mixing art and life by specifically addressing the very public rumours about the state of her union with Jay-Z, its bravura honesty brought out qualities of depth and focus in Beyoncé that had only been hinted at before. Jay-Z, to his credit, responded last year with 4:44, a self-lacerating mea culpa that confessed his infidelity, examined his masculinity and pleaded for a second chance with the woman he loved. Nominated for eight Grammys (although it failed to win any) it was the most mature and philosophical album of his outstanding career and arguably one of the most grown-up albums ever heard in rap.<doc-sep>
With “Everything Is Love,” the three-season musical miniseries about Beyonce and Jay-Z — a.k.a. the Carters — reaches a happy ending. It’s both a completion — of the marriage trilogy that began with Beyonce’s 2016 album “Lemonade” and her widely discussed accounts of Jay’s infidelity — and a continuation, with his tales of contrition on last summer’s “4:44.” As with such a triumphant denouement, everything about this long-rumored tag-team album from America’s first couple, which arrived with little warning on Saturday afternoon, speaks to marital unity, equality, fairness, forgiveness and redemption. It’s officially credited to “The Carters,” which may include their children, who are mentioned in many of the songs. Eldest Blue Ivy even shouts out to her younger twin siblings, Rumi and Sir, between tracks. That message of familial parity carries over to the way the two share the spotlight. Their participation in the visuals, the album’s first video (for the song “Apesh–“) and even the vocals, is almost completely 50-50: If one takes the lead for a song or two while the other adds a verse or hook or bridge, they swap roles for the next. The closing track “LoveHappy,” with a classic soul sample from Phoenix Express’ 1971 song “You Make My Life a Sunny Day” (via Killer Mike’s “Ric Flair”), is a victory lap, with Beyonce singing, “Sometimes I thought we’d never see the light … Damn, look at us now / We came, and we conquered, now we’re happy in love.” It’s probably no coincidence that this family affair dropped during Father’s Day weekend. Before we dive deep into the narratives, most importantly, how does it rate as an album? Solid and generally satisfying, but not the best from either. Both artists’ high standards guarantee that the songs are musically and melodically on point, with a top-shelf team of collaborators that range from established (Pharrell, Cool & Dre, Boi-1da) to left-field (TV on the Radio’s Dave Sitek, who worked on Solange’s 2016 opus “A Seat at the Table”) to relative newcomers (Vory, Jahaan Sweet and Sevn Thomas); Migos guest on “Apesh–.” Jay’s flow and lyrics are smooth as ever, and Beyonce — who never releases an album without giving herself new challenges — is rapping far more often than before, trying on a couple of new voices and even, on “Friends,” using autotune to twist her vocal into new shapes. The album covers a wide variety of styles — from a banger like the single/video “Apesh–” to the soulful “Boss” to the softer “Friends” and “Heard About Us” — over an uncharacteristically brief 40-odd minutes and 10 songs (including “Salud,” a “bonus track” that does not appear in the album’s sequence and is exclusively available on Tidal). The lyrics are more problematic. As always, they’re dense with subplots and deep references and social-media feeding Easter eggs, but they’re also self-referential and uncharacteristically (for Beyonce, anyway) self-obsessed. We get more mea culpas from Jay, more warnings from Bey, and he takes a wistful look back at their long courtship, recalling when they first spent time together on a flight back from a 2000 MTV appearance in Mexico (“We played it cool at the pool of the Cancun, VMA… Fate had me sittin’ next to you on the plane/ And I knew straight away”). There are also references to lyrics from other rappers ranging from Lil Wayne and Chief Keef to Mos Def and Notorious B.I.G., and also some shade apparently thrown Kanye West’s way in “Friends,” with a reference to Jay’s non-attendance at his wedding (“I ain’t goin’ to nobody nothin’ when me and my wife beefin’/ I don’t care if the house on fire, if I’m dyin’, I ain’t leavin’”). Jay also slams the Grammys and the Super Bowl in “Apesh–,” referencing both his refusal to perform during the 2018 halftime show, and him receiving zero Grammy awards despite eight nominations earlier this year: “Tell the Grammys f— that 0 for 8 s— / Have you ever seen the crowd goin’ apes—?” For her part, Beyonce throws shade at various unnamed b—hes and hoes, and in “Nice,” at Spotify.