How Beyonce's Lemonade Is Much More Than Jay-Z's Infidelity
We all know who Beyonce is, right? Multi-platinum, Grammy-award-winning recording artist, actress, and wife of Jay-Z? Yeah, that's the one.
Beyonce recently released her newest project, Lemonade, a visual album featured on HBO and also exclusively released on Tidal. After the surprise release, there have been a lot of rumors about Jay-Z's infidelity, but there's so much more to the album than just that.
The lyrics of Lemonade clearly reveal a man's unfaithfulness to a woman - multiple times during the album, she refers to a marriage and a ring. In the song Sorry, she says, "Lookin' at my watch he should've been home / Today I regret the night I put that ring on.."
Also, in the song Don't Hurt Yourself, she says, "This is your final warning / You know I give you life / You try this s**t again / You gon' lose your wife."
Beyonce also refers to another woman, an alleged mistress. In the song Sorry again, she says, "He only want me when I'm not there / He better call Becky with the good hair..."
Rachel Roy, 42-year-old fashion designer, posted a photo on Instagram almost immediately after Lemonade's visual album release. She captioned the photo "Good hair don't care, but we will take good lighting, for selfies, or self truths, always. live in the light #nodramaqueens." Rachel Roy also could have been the cause of the elevator situation after the Met Gala back in 2014, where Solange Knowles attacked Jay-Z, and according to PEOPLE.com, Solange was "provoked" by Rachel Roy.
Could she be Becky with the good hair?
Did Jay-Z really cheat? On the one and only Queen B?
First of all, Beyonce and Jay-Z are estimated to be worth U.S. $1 billion combined. They are both entertainers and very smart business people.
Lemonade was exclusively released on Tidal, an online music streaming service co-owned by Beyonce and Jay-Z. Jay-Z was behind the entire creative process of Lemonade, he had to have known the repercussions - it's not like Beyonce surprised released the album behind Jay-Z's back, revealed that she knew he was cheating, and kicked him to the curb.
So, did he cheat? No one knows. Beyonce and Jay-Z are an extremely private couple. In an exclusive statement to the Associated Press in 2014 after the elevator incident, Beyonce, Jay-Z, and Solange are said to have worked out their differences.
“As a result of the public release of the elevator security footage from Monday, May 5th, there has been a great deal of speculation about what triggered the unfortunate incident. But the most important thing is that our family has worked through it…”
The only people who really know what the cause of the elevator situation is, or if Jay-Z really cheated, are the people involved - Jay-Z and Beyonce. Their main concerns are their family and the fact that they're making money off of this album.
What is Lemonade really about?
Love that was once lost, found again. In the song All Night, Beyonce says, "Give you some time to prove that I can trust you again / How I've missed you, my love..." Also, on the first night of her Formation World Tour, she dedicated the song "Halo" to Jay-Z, "I want to dedicate this to my beautiful husband, I love you so much."
Aside from a love story, Beyonce tells the story of the experience of black women. Lemonade’s visual album has many chapters: intuition, denial, anger, apathy, emptiness, accountability, reformation, forgiveness, resurrection, hope, and redemption. A writer from Rolling Stone says that these chapters “are at once about one couple; many couples; the sometimes complicated relationships between black women, men, fathers and daughters; and black women's relationship to an unequal America.”
The visual album also features powerful black women such as Zendaya, Chloe and Halle Bailey, Lisa and Naomi Diaz, Amandla Stenberg, Serena Williams, Quvenzhane Wallis, Winne Harlow, Tina Knowles Larson, her daughter Blue Ivy, Jay-Z’s grandmother Hattie White, and the mothers of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, and Eric Garner.
It’s time we stop accusing Jay-Z of cheating and embrace the true meaning of Lemonade.
In the visual album, there was a clip of a Malcom X speech saying, “the most disrespected woman in America is the black woman, the most unprotected woman in America is the black woman, the most neglected woman in America is the black woman.” Lemonade is a project meant to show society not only the mistreatment, but also the resilience of black women.