Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s New Vision of Gender in ‘Apeshit’

“The strongest thing a man can do is cry, to expose your feelings, to be vulnerable in front of the world,” Jay-Z told The New York Times after releasing his confessional record 4:44 in 2017. “You feel like you have to be this guarded person. That’s not real. It’s fake.” Just a year earlier, Beyoncé went on her own public journey in her album Lemonade, not solely to reckon with her husband’s infidelity, but also to better explore the many dimensions of black womanhood in America. If both musicians’ last solo records announced their newfound interest in more holistic conceptions of masculinity and femininity, then their new music video, “Apeshit,” and its accompanying album, Everything Is Love, show them living out some of these visions of gender together.

In “Apeshit,” which is set in Paris’s Louvre Museum and rife with centuries-old images of conquest, the Carters present themselves as a modern kind of royal family—one that’s not helmed by