To paraphrase a line from Family Feud, a track aired tonight from Jay-Z’s most recent album, 4:44: “What’s better than one billionaire music superstar whose baby pictures melt the internet? Two.”
The last time Beyoncé – said billionaire (actual net worth $350m) – and her husband Jay-Z – said other billionaire (actual net worth $860m) – toured together, in 2014, their On the Run tour did not come to the UK. Now, the Welsh capital finds itself hosting the very first night of the couple’s On the Run II world tour, in which a mature, battle-worn, convincing love affair between two huge entertainers is played out on a vast stage with a set the size of a small city block, with double-jointed dancers, live horn and string sections and mobile hydraulic platforms. If you were pitching the whole thing to a producer in a lift, it’s Beyoncé’s Formation tour of 2016-meets-Watch the Throne, the hip-hop double-header undertaken by Jay-Z and Kanye West in 2011 and 2012 – except with a lot more pictures of small children woven into the slightly strained Caribbean Bonnie and Clyde visual narrative that frames the show. This is not the Afro-American extravaganza of signifiers that Beyoncé put together for the Coachella festival in the US in April, in which she reunited Destiny’s Child and packed her stage set with symbolism. But there is no shortage of wow factor here, if perhaps for slightly different reasons than anticipated.
The couple haven’t released many images of their nearly one-year-old twins, Rumi and Sir, to the public. So on one level this entire two-hours-plus gig feels like one long slow musical tease, building towards grainy holiday snaps of Beyoncé holding twins, Jay-Z holding twins, the sleeping twins’ fingers touching and Blue Ivy, their eldest child, getting cuter every time the US entertainment power-family holiday in the Caribbean.
Judging from the reaction on social media after the show, it’s as though the entire internet is a nosy aunt, impatient with the formalities – the elegiac singing, the word-perfect rapping, the gluteal dancing, the constantly changing costumes – and instead lunging for the photo album with liver-spotted talons. Now, it transpires that the babies being held in the videos were perhaps not Rumi and Sir after all, casting the tour’s opening claim – “This is real life” – into some doubt.
The last time the Carters toured en famille, the landscape was unrecognisable: fake news wasn’t even much of a thing. The Met Ball lift incident, where Solange Knowles, Beyoncé’s sister, attacked Jay-Z, shining a spotlight on the tumult in Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s marriage, happened in spring 2014, shortly before the first On the Run tour. Since then, we’ve had Lemonade, the jaw-dropping Beyoncé album, in which Jay-Z’s infidelity was laid bare, and 4:44, the groundbreaking Jay-Z record in which the rapper owned up and aimed to be a better man.
He’s certainly a changed-looking man. Previously short-cropped and dressed down, tonight Jay-Z is startlingly laid-back: slim, rocking Rastafarian-inspired high fashion, unprecedentedly stubbly, hair grown out. Beyoncé, meanwhile, is pure glowing halogen: an encyclopaedia of dance moves; unrelentingly Beyoncé-esque. When one holds the stage on their own, the other does a costume change. When they take a break for an interlude, a metaphorical gangster fantasy set in Jamaica in which houses burn and vows are renewed unfolds on what is rumoured to be the widest screen ever to hit an arena. The detail can be intriguing – why is that most un-American word “FUCKERY” displayed upside down? The Jamaican influence, at a guess – and exquisite. Beyoncé ends Naughty Girl with a snippet of Destiny’s Child’s Say My Name, but sung in Indian devotional style, which segues sublimely into the Egyptian sample of Jay-Z’s Big Pimpin’, subject of a recent court case over royalties.
Given the seismic shifts, On the Run II is – necessarily – more than just a romp through the foundation texts of this most public of American musical romances, fun as they remain. The track where it arguably all began, ’03 Bonnie and Clyde (2002), plays out across twin runways with Beyoncé and Jay-Z trading lines across a lake of fans. There are bald patches in the stands and bald patches on the ground, too; the stadium is only semi-full, but not to a level where questions need to be asked.
Much later, Crazy in Love, arguably still the best song the Carters have ever done together, sounds hyped with the generous application of a live horn section: multiple trumpets, a couple of trombones and two tubas; the reaction of the place certainly sounds sold out. Déjà Vu, another bit of ancient history, hasn’t aged as well and the artists’ most recent his’n’hers outing – a DJ Khaled track called Top Off – didn’t really meet with much enthusiasm when it was released in March. It doesn’t exactly rock the house live, either.
Obviously, there are umpteen solo tracks from each artist’s multi-platinum careers to chuck into this generous – perhaps a little too generous – two-and-a-half-hour extravaganza. Hearing the hits from back when the world was younger – Jay-Z’s 99 Problems, say, or Beyoncé’s Run the World (Girls) – is no chore. Beyoncé’s Drunk in Love manages to retain its horny recklessness, even when it forms part of the vast military exercise that is a stadium gig. Behind the stage is a structure like an unfinished block of flats, where the band, the dancers and the musicians cavort in cubes; at one point, Jay-Z descends it on a window-cleaner’s lift. There’s a giggle when a dancer does the floss.
Then there are the slightly confusing songs, where Beyoncé stands in for someone like Justin Timberlake – on the Jay-Z opener Holy Grail – or where he does a track where the spirit of absent collaborators hovers uncertainly. N***** in Paris was the triumphant highlight of that long-ago Jay-Z/Kanye collaboration, being repeated multiple times as the outro to their tour. It feels strange to hear it as a Jay-Z track tonight, an echo of another complicated alliance whose status still remains unresolved.
On the Run II is – unequivocally – way more interesting than On the Run I must have been, because of gyrations this marriage has taken. It is the bitter Lemonade songs that remain the most unbearably exciting: Don’t Hurt Yourself and Freedom are enduring assaults on all the senses. Throughout, the Carters really do look disgustingly happy in each other’s company, but it takes the Lemonade and 4:44 songs to make this lavish, ongoing buddy caper truly persuasive.
