john candy dandy

Break it down for us, please:

barthel:

Jay-Z (feat. Beyoncé) - ‘03 Bonnie & Clyde

It’s easy to look back from Jay’s verse on “Monster” (“everybody want to know what my Achilles heel is / LOOOOOOOVE”) and say that his work increasingly consists of love songs to Beyoncé, but it was far from  obvious at the time. We can see now, though, how the tough-guy facade loosened up. It starts on “I Just Wanna Love U (Give It 2 Me)”:

Yeah, save the narrative you savin it for marriage
Let’s keep it real ma you savin it for cabbage 
You wanna see how far I’ma go 
How, much I’ma spend but you already know 
Zip, zero, stingy with dinero 
Might buy you Crist’, but that about it 
Might light your wrist, but that about it 
Fuck it, I might wife you and buy you nice whips 

It starts at the usual position - “ladies want me to give them money, but I will not give them money” - but then the toughness recedes, step by step: “OK, I’ll buy you champagne.” “OK, I’ll buy you jewelry.” “OK FUCK IT LET’S JUST GET MARRIED.” It’s a goofily honest expression of how love feels, that exponential slip from guarding your emotions to small shows of affection to a big, sloppy all-in.

And then there’s this song. Sure, Jay tries to make it sound hard, frames it as a crime partnership, emphasizes that in the video, and even references a notoriously dark Eminem song in the title. But the lyrics here don’t have a lot to do with dealing. Sure, they’re cruising the West Side Highway, but pretty soon they end up at home, watching TV. For a song about Bonnie and Clyde, no actual crime happens in the song, just hanging out and shopping.

It’s a remarkably honest vision of what love is like, which is to say boring and domestic. The approach to love you mostly get in rap is defensive and adolescent, reflecting a haute-teenage inability to engage with the object of your affection except through aggression and dismissal. But this is the point where Jay rises above all that to craft a true love song. Things like this are why his relationship to Beyoncé doesn’t feel like a gimmicky celebrity thing. Even if your girlfriend is one of the most beautiful women in the world, the thing you really like doing with her is just quietly hanging out, alone with one another. And it’s why lines like Beyoncé’s “All up in the kitchen in my heels, dinner time” (from “Countdown”) don’t come off as 100% regressive. Sure, she likes cooking for her man, but her man seems to like watching Sex and the City with her, so maybe that’s OK. And besides, if Beyoncé does cook (which, hmm), how else would she do it but in heels?

The net effect of all these love songs back-and-forth has been to give B and Jay the benefit of the doubt. They really do seem to love each other, a strange thing among people as successful as they are. But luckily, the two people in question are both really, really good at expressing the experience of living in the world through art. Sure, sometimes it goes a bit far (“LOOOOOVE”). But if they’re going to go some direction, there are worse ones than into a classic romance.