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Though there will always be a pop tint to anything Beyoncé does, Everything Is Love is largely a rap album. More than half a dozen songwriters and producers discuss how couple’s surprise LP came to be

Dre’s “Still D.R.E.” in the hook on “713,” she’s tracing this lineage, adding weight to her earlier “Nice” claim “Freestyling live, blueprint from my Jigga who never writes.” When Beyoncé repurposes lyrics Jay thought up for Dr. (Their daughter, Blue Ivy, pops up constantly like a recurring character.) Their depiction of an enriched black life, via a triumphant Rap-&-B windfall with nods to Chief Keef, Shawty Lo, Common, and Biggie and homages to Kalief Browder, Trayvon Martin, Martin Luther King, Jr., and Malcolm X, extends beyond their immediate family to those they’ve influenced and who’ve influenced them. They focus on each other first and their kids, being respecting partners and indulgent parents. The most glaring analog for such a statement is Watch the Throne, Jay’s collaborative album with frenemy Kanye West, which Beyoncé references offhandedly on “LoveHappy.” Both albums reconcile relishing extravagant black wealth with mourning a broken American political system, hoping listeners find visions of a freer black planet in their revelry, but only Everything is Love foregrounds family matters. They let Quavo ad-libs echo through the Louvre as they pose before the Mona Lisa in the “Apeshit” video, a fitting metaphor for rap’s infiltration of predominantly white spaces.Īs “Black Effect” makes obvious, and “ApeShit” conveys more understatedly, the Carters can’t and won’t forget their place in the black community, even as the continue to climb the highest rungs of white society. Bey’s wearing 35 chains and demanding to get paid in equity. Jay challenges the SEC and seeks a commendation for the part he played in freeing Meek Mill for good measure. In celebrating their reconciliation, the Carters take a victory lap hand-in-hand, and they have more ways to stunt than most, performing outsized rap boasts few others can match: saying no to the Super Bowl (“You need me, I don’t need you”), going to war with the Grammys, ignoring Spotify (“’Cause my success can’t be quantified”), dismissing Trump attacks (“ Your president tweeting about Hov like he knows us”). Pairing piano plinks with 808 bass, “713” takes their love to the streets. The Pharrell-produced “Nice” strips the fluorescent sheen off Lil Uzi Vert’s “Neon Guts” for something decidedly less animated but no less satisfying. “ApeShit” converts a Migos demo into a glitzy high-end trap boomer. In an exclusive interview with Rolling Stone, the veteran duo talk traveling to Paris to work on the album, and what it’s like to finish an album three hours before its releaseīeyoncé 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. When Beyoncé raps, “My great-great-grandchildren already rich/That’s a lot of brown children on your Forbes list,” she’s connecting the dots between their love and their legacy. 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.

Both albums dealt directly (and tacitly) with their responsibilities to each other, and their responsibility to society as black billionaires. If Lemonade was Beyoncé publicly, subtly and sublimely exorcising the demons of her union, 4:44 was a humbled and disarmed Jay-Z figuring family and community into his success equation. “And we started making music together.” In teaming up and completing this personal triptych they show mediation can be a tonic.

“We were using our art almost like a therapy session,” Jay told the New York Times. But it isn’t quite reconciliation or vindication until they come together. The ultimate power couple has been finding resolution and absolution through an active artistic process that’s apparently been as therapeutic and corrective for them as it’s been enrapturing for everyone else. Everything is Love is the refreshing final chapter in a trilogy of albums that includes Beyoncé’s unburdening 2016 odyssey Lemonade and Jay-Z’s 2017 conscience-stricken apologia 4:44, glimpses inside a strained marriage from both sides.