Beyonce, Jay Z Assemble Remarkable Tour

Beyonce aOn Saturday afternoon, wherever you were, you likely received a text message (or, more likely, a flurry of texts) alerting you to the arrival of a SURPRISE NEW BEYONCÉ ALBUM!!!!! (usually followed by an incomprehensible string of emojis). O.K., O.K., a few of the texts might have mentioned Jay-Z’s involvement, as well.

Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s joint album—Everything Is Love (an exclamation that feels more like something you’d see on Kanye West’s Twitter feed in 2018 than a Beyoncé album cover)—was released on Tidal on Saturday in the late afternoon, announced by a few Beyoncé Instagram posts and a Twitter post (and on screens in the stadium following their London stadium show). The Instagram posts didn’t even have captions or anything that explained how to listen to the album: Beyoncé and Jay-Z know these sort of mundane details will be disseminated without their involvement.

By Sunday morning, your Twitter feed was likely—strung between the politically focused tweets—chock-full of proclamations extolling the virtues of Beyoncé (a popular meme showcased a giraffe’s head thrashing through a car window, meant to represent what Beyoncé had done to our weekends).

But being aware of the album, and taking the social cues to put everything on hold for Beyoncé, is not the same as listening to it. The album was initially only available on Tidal, the streaming service partly owned by Jay-Z. If you don’t subscribe to Tidal and don’t have any desire to subscribe in the long term, listening to the album required signing up for a free trial of Tidal, which you then would have to remember to cancel at a later date to avoid paying monthly fees. Without any data available yet, it’s hard to know how many people outside of those who work in the media and music industries actually went through the “effort” to listen to the album on Tidal over the weekend. The pair did release, on YouTube (free for all!), a stunning music video for album standout “Apeshit,” which they had filmed at the Louvre.

In a way, this rollout process is analogous to when an extremely popular writer tweets a link to a huge article promising state secrets revealed, or whatever, but you realize it’s behind a paywall, so you just decide to get the gist from what you can read in other people’s tweets: “I’ll just wait to figure this out later.” In this case, “later” came Monday morning, when “the Carters,” as they are attributed for this album, decided to put the album on Spotify and Apple Music. It’s still behind a paywall, so to speak, but at least one to which far more people subscribe.

Does it make any difference that it required some work to listen to the album? Well, if it does make a dent to the commercial success of Everything Is Love (and it surely will), Beyoncé and Jay-Z certainly don’t care. In fact, Beyoncé addresses the accessibility of the album directly in track “Nice,” rapping, “If I gave two fucks—two fucks about streaming numbers / would have put Lemonade up on Spotify.” 2016’s Lemonade, as we all remember, was released exclusively on Tidal as well, but with a corresponding HBO special, which gave the album a bit more of a proper “launch”: if you had access to HBO and watched the special, you had heard the whole thing. (Her 2013 “surprise album,” Beyoncé, was released on iTunes immediately, two years before Tidal would launch.)

Much of Everything Is Love involves Beyoncé and Jay-Z riffing on their own wealth, power, and influence. Jay-Z lets us know he turned down the Super Bowl halftime show since he “doesn’t need” it. On the aptly titled “Boss,” Beyoncé sings: “My great-great-grandchildren already rich / that’s a lot of brown children on your Forbes list.” The fact that they filmed their music video in the Louvre is about as effective as assertion of power can get.

And there is no arguing: the two of them, as a combined force, are unstoppable. The grappling they did separately about their relationship, Beyoncé in Lemonade and Jay-Z in 2017’s 4:44, appears to have only made them a stronger joint force. This album is breezy and brash and, intriguingly, mostly drama- and conflict-free. It’s a bit jarring, even, reminiscent of when a good friend will spill to you over multiple bottles of wine about how awful their boyfriend is (and you commiserate and nod your head at the Instagram evidence), and then a month later you see them out together at a bar, seemingly happier than ever. (The only real explicit reference to their struggles is when Beyoncé sings “You fucked up the first stone, we had to get remarried” in “LoveHappy,” though even that feels mostly benign.)