It may seem an odd thing to say about a record that’s a guaranteed smash hit, but there’s a sense in which Everything Is Love represents a rather dicey undertaking, and not merely because it features Beyoncé rapping more heavily than it features Beyoncé singing. It’s clearly intended as the third part of a trilogy. After Lemonade, her album packed with hell-hath-no-fury revelations of infidelity and emotional ruin, and 4:44, his album of agonised mea-culpa guilt, comes the joint album affirming Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s renewed romantic bliss. “We broke up and got back together,” raps the latter on the closing Lovehappy. “Now we’re happy in love,” adds his wife.
Its very existence runs the risk of making the two releases that preceded it seem less like urgent, brave exorcisms of pent-up emotions – the duo’s equivalent of Blood on the Tracks or Here, My Dear, albums their authors felt they had to make “almost like a therapy session” as Jay-Z put it last year – than stages in a carefully premeditated plan to wring as much capital out of the couple’s nuptial discord as possible. It doesn’t take away from the musical contents of those preceding records, both artistic highlights in their respective makers’ oeuvres. But it does make them look a little more obviously calculated, very clearly underlining that the whole business is as much an exercise in brand management as soul-baring artistry.
But, even if you tend to a cynical view, it’s hard not to boggle at the imposing and authoritative way it’s all been executed: from the sudden arrival of Lemonade, with its deft interweaving of relationship despair and black womanhood, to the joint tour currently packing stadiums around the world. And besides, as Everything Is Love keeps emphasising, Jay-Z and Beyoncé don’t care what you think. Presumably realising that an album full of them making gooey eyes at each other might be a little sickly, the topic of their patched-up relationship is more or less confined to its opening and closing tracks, where, it has to be said, it’s dealt with skilfully.
For more read the full of article at The Guardian
