![]() Until our fairly recent Black Renaissance, featuring the groundbreaking Black Panther and A Wrinkle In Time narratives at its center, the American imagination seems to have been most comfortable with Black relationships steeped in Black suffering and pain (think 12 Years A Slave). "This is, as Black love and Black family is and has been in America, a matriarchal gift." ![]() So the first crooning of this chorus is more than just a sweet affirmation-it’s a healing from traumatic history. Black couples, as property, were often legally forbidden from marriage. We take for granted that Black people can make plans now like everyone else, but for enslaved people, time was not their own and the future wasn’t, either. ![]() But knowing what Beyoncé understands about history-hers, Black families, Black lovers-when she sings, “Let’s make love in the summertime, yeah/On the sands, beach sands, make plans/To be in each others’ arms,” she’s fully aware of the luxury her ancestors didn’t have, since slaveowners often made enslaved people work as long as the sun was up-which in the summer could be 14-hour days, according to the Monticello Foundation. “Summer,” the album’s opening track, sounds like a standard sultry anthem. ![]() This is, as Black love and Black family is and has been in America, a matriarchal gift-her name comes first on all tracks, followed by his, then The Carters. Whether she’s talking about her metaphorical dick or asking us to stop hounding her about JAY-Z’s snowballing mediocrity in the face of her much more obvious evolutionary leaps and bounds doesn’t matter much. As for a desire to please the powerful at any cost, Beyonce’s answer is “get off my dick.” Self-confidence and autonomy are in abundance on every track, especially “Nice,” which showcases Beyoncé at the height of her rapping prowess. Anger is turned outward, at the appropriate targets (JAY-Z takes swipes at the NFL and the Grammys, for example). One way of gauging how free The Carters are on Everything is Love is comparing them to Painter’s definition. In her biography of Sojourner Truth, Nell Painter writes about the slave mentality and how it didn’t occur in a vacuum: “Its characteristics-a lack of self-confidence, personal autonomy and independent thought a sense of one’s own insignificance in comparison to the importance of others a desire to please the powerful at any cost and finally, a ferocious anger that is often turned inward but can surge into frightening outbursts-are precisely the rants of vulnerable people who have been battered.”Įverything Is Love celebrates the hard-won absence of these qualities 153 years after the Emancipation Proclamation declared all enslaved persons free. Heralded and received as the long-anticipated event album from one of the most-surveilled couples in contemporary popular culture, the joint effort displays the couple's (particularly Beyoncé's) unique talent for reframing Black history-while making some of their own-with stunning acuity. Felix describes as her Southernness and the global black vernacular. Like much of Beyoncé’s most fascinating work of late, the album-a collaboration with her husband JAY-Z-emphasizes the unique intersection of what New Yorker writer Doreen St. To fully appreciate Everything is Love, it helps to think about the past.
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