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Entity reports on the secrecy of the marriage of Beyonce and Jay Z.

Which celebrity couple is your #relationshipgoals? Over-the-top lovebirds like Taylor Swift and Tom Hiddleston? Controversial pairs like Kim Kardashian and Kanye West? What about the celebrity power duo of Beyoncé and Jay-Z – also known as Bey-Z, Jayoncé and dozens of other nicknames? Although Beyoncé and Jay-Z are arguably the most popular celebrity couple in the media right now, they are certainly not like most celebrity couples. Why? Because you can’t find a single thing about the soulmate’s relationship in the press.

This is what makes Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s relationship so intriguing: we don’t know anything about it, yet their well-known partnership would, in any other case, compromise the privacy of their marriage. It seems as though Beyoncé and Jay-Z control the media, not vice versa. How could one of the most popular female musicians of our generation release a visual album with no publicity and still garner significant recognition and acclaim for her work? I mean, for crying out loud, the woman was selling “Boycott Beyoncé” t-shirts at her Formation World Tour venues. She knows that she can transform, tailor and sell her image however she wants, which is one of the many reasons why she’s a clever businesswoman as well as an incredibly successful artist in the entertainment world.

Then this woman, yet again, surprise-drops another visual album a week before its release date. Again, no prior publicity for the album, no update from Queen B about being in the studio working on some new music – nothing. And her husband acted as her partner in crime, zipping his lips about “LEMONADE.” They seem like the perfect couple…

…until everyone listened to and watched “LEMONADE.”

Beyoncé fans, myself included, essentially foamed at the mouth after the artist’s, nay, the Queen’s, release of the album. Not only was it a Beyoncé album, but it was also a highly personal narrative – a real, intimate gaze into the life of the singer and her marriage. By now, we had all forgotten about that little elevator thing with Jay-Z and Solange, what later became known as “elevator-gate” (although not to be confused with this elevator-gate). Once we heard Beyoncé’s claims of infidelity, we cranked up “LEMONADE” to full-volume and waited for the back-story we never heard from that fateful 2014 night at the Met Gala.

In the end, though, we’re still waiting. No, the album wasn’t lacking but, as usual, the singer applied a foggy lens to her private life. After analyzing the album track by track, all we really know is that Beyoncé experienced some sort of infidelity, or at least a very strong suspicion of it, which caused her to feel lied to. But she overcame this sadness (she is Beyoncé after all), and on “Don’t Hurt Yourself,” she got angry instead:

This is your final warning
You know I give you life
If you try this shit again,
You gon’ lose your wife.

This is where we finally see her call out the woman with whom Jay-Z cheated: Miss “Becky with the good hair?” Droves of Beyoncé fans, armed with bee emojis, flooded Rachel Roy’s (and Rachael Ray’s) social media with allegations that she was Becky.

By the end of the album, Beyoncé reconciles with her husband, realizing that they need each other to survive and that although mistakes can occur in a marriage, two soulmates who are truly in love, like Jay-Z and Beyoncé, can survive those problems. Cue “Formation” as we all sing, dance, slay and forget about all the divorce rumors and drama surrounding the couple’s marriage because everything seems to be fine.

However, as the hype died down, conspiracy theories surrounding “LEMONADE” started creeping into the public’s attention: elevator-gate was a publicity stunt made so Beyoncé could fabricate a cheating narrative for her next album, which, because of its intensely personal nature, would generate overwhelming sales and positive fan feedback.

The fans’ response: “Are you serious?”

J. Randy Taraborrelli, author of the unauthorized biography, “Becoming Beyoncé,” believes that Beyoncé most likely drew from her mother’s personal experience with infidelity with Beyoncé’s father, Mathew Knowles. 

In an article for Cosmopolitan he writes, “Now, I’m not a psychic, I’m a biographer, and I can’t say that Jay-Z didn’t have a one-night stand in a tour bus a week ago, but I do know from my studying of Beyoncé [that] her personality is such that if, in fact, she was actually having marital problems, she would not be sitting down writing songs about it for the nation to dissect and interpret. That’s not who she is. She’s too private a person to handle her marital dysfunction for the world to see and examine. More likely what she’s doing is she’s possibly writing about her mother’s marriage and what she witnessed there.”

As crazy as it may first sound, Taraborrelli makes a good argument: Beyoncé is a private person and she probably wouldn’t release such a personal collection of songs detailing (or at least suggesting) her own marital problems. We’ve also established that she controls her image and can customize it to fit within a popular narrative – namely, the narrative that elevator-gate was about Jay-Z cheating on Beyoncé.

Now one big question remains: what do we really know about Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s relationship? Quite frankly, the answer is unknown, even with “LEMONADE” on repeat. But whether or not “LEMONADE” gives us a true depiction of Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s relationship, the album provides a few important life lessons. First, through true love we can forgive those we cannot live without. Second, your mom’s advice to use sour lemons to make lemonade isn’t going out of style anytime soon.

Edited by Casey Cromwell
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