Beyoncé and Jay-Z: The State of the Union Is Strong

Author: Jon Pareles / Source: New York Times

The strife, sorrow, fury, self-doubt and atonement are over; it’s time for a victory lap. That’s the basis of “Everything Is Love” by the Carters: Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s first full-length album together after years of marriage, parenthood, musical collaborations and shared touring, including the London stadium concert on Saturday where they abruptly announced the release of the new album.

The nine-song “Everything Is Love” and a bonus track, “Salud!,” are available (at least for now) only on Tidal, the streaming service they partly own.

“Everything Is Love” arrives as the capstone of a trilogy. It proclaims a happy ending to the sequence of albums that began with Beyoncé’s prodigious 2016 “Lemonade”: a grand statement, magnified by its dreamlike full-length video and interludes of poetry, that set personal betrayal and resolve alongside a multigenerational history of African-American women’s travails. It continued in 2017 with Jay-Z’s “4:44,” a stripped-down, strikingly exposed album about accepting responsibility as a grown man, husband and father.

With their new album as the Carters, Jay-Z (born Shawn Carter) and Beyoncé are once again a united force, celebrating their success on every front: artistic, financial, marital, erotic, historic. The joint album has been long in the making, Jay-Z said in an interview with The New York Times; the care shows in tracks that can hark back to vintage R&B or delve into eerie, disorienting electronic soundscapes.

In the album’s first single, “Apes**t,” Beyoncé sings, “I can’t believe we made it.” But of course she can: The song is unapologetically arrogant and pugnacious over trap percussion and nagging, dissonant chords. Jay-Z shrugs off his zero wins out of eight Grammy nominations in 2018 by pointing to the Carters’ ecstatic, stadium-sized audiences on tour; he adds, “I said no to the Super Bowl/You need me, I don’t need you.” The Carters often position themselves as equals to institutions and corporations, willing to take on the N.F.L., Spotify and a presidential tweet.

This is more familiar, less vulnerable and less exploratory territory than the zones where Beyoncé and Jay-Z ventured on “Lemonade” and “4:44.” Neither is alone now; they…

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