The 2010s File Feature
Apes**t
Apest — The Carters A Surprise in the Louvre On June 16, 2018, Beyoncé and Jay-Z released everything at once: an album, a visual companion, and a music video…
01 The Story
Apes**t — The Carters
A Surprise in the Louvre
On June 16, 2018, Beyoncé and Jay-Z released everything at once: an album, a visual companion, and a music video filmed inside the Louvre museum in Paris. The project was titled Everything Is Love, credited to The Carters, and it arrived with no prior announcement beyond a few days' notice. The lead single, the track, was already something remarkable in conception; its video was something else entirely, a statement delivered not just in music but in imagery, with two of the most famous artists in the world moving through galleries of European classical art surrounded by Black dancers, making an argument about presence, access, and cultural inheritance that required no explanatory text.
The pairing of Beyoncé and Jay-Z as a formal collaborative unit had been foreshadowed across both of their solo careers, but Everything Is Love was the first release explicitly credited to both under the joint name. It arrived in the wake of two solo albums, Jay-Z's 4:44 in 2017 and Beyoncé's Lemonade in 2016, both of which had addressed their relationship's difficulties with unusual directness. The Carters project represented something like a resolution, though one made on their own terms and in their own idiom.
The Track: Construction and Credentials
The production was handled by Pharrell Williams, who built a beat with unusual sonic architecture: a lurching, almost confrontational low end, filtered vocal samples, and a tempo that feels simultaneously maximalist and precise. The arrangement gave both Beyoncé and Jay-Z space to operate at their most assertive, trading verses that were less conversational than parallel declarations of their own positions. The track is built for impact rather than intimacy, and it achieves that impact immediately.
The Louvre as setting for the music video was a choice charged with cultural significance. The museum houses some of the most celebrated art in Western history, predominantly art that reflects the tastes, commissions, and subjects of European aristocracy and the institutions they built. Beyoncé and Jay-Z moving through those galleries, performing in front of paintings and sculptures that have almost nothing to do with their own cultural heritage, and doing so with complete ownership of the space, carried an argument about representation and belonging that the lyrical content of the track amplified.
Chart Performance and Commercial Impact
The track debuted on the Billboard Hot 100 on June 30, 2018, at position 13, which represented the peak it would reach over the course of its 15 weeks on the chart. That debut position, number 13, was itself a statement: a surprise release from an unannounced album landing inside the top 15 of the Hot 100 purely on the strength of streaming reflects the combined commercial weight of two of the most bankable artists in contemporary music.
Over the 15 weeks it spent on the chart, the track cycled through positions that reflected the typical pattern of streaming-driven success without sustained radio promotion. The album as a whole had been released exclusively on Tidal before moving to other streaming platforms, a decision that affected its overall streaming numbers relative to albums with full cross-platform availability from release. Despite this, the track maintained a chart presence of considerable duration for a project handled with this degree of commercial unconventionality.
The Carters as a Joint Statement
The collaborative credit itself carried meaning. Beyoncé and Jay-Z are individually two of the most commercially and critically significant artists of the 21st century; together they form a unit whose cultural footprint extends far beyond music into fashion, visual art, philanthropy, and the broader conversation about Black excellence and achievement in American life. The track as the lead single was, accordingly, not merely heard as a song but received as a declaration of joint status and shared position.
Both performances on the track are fully committed in a way that makes clear neither artist is simply along for the collaborative ride. Beyoncé's verse carries her characteristic combination of precision and charisma; Jay-Z's contribution demonstrates the verbal dexterity and reference density that had defined his career across three decades. Together they produce something that exceeds either artist's solo contribution to the track, which is the condition for genuine collaboration rather than mere co-appearance.
Legacy and Cultural Impact
The track and its video generated a cultural conversation that extended well past its chart life, touching on questions of Black representation in European cultural institutions, the economics and ethics of art ownership, and the ways in which successful Black artists choose to occupy and address spaces historically built for different audiences. Academic and critical writing about the Louvre video appeared in numerous publications and contexts, treating it as a work of visual art that warranted serious analysis rather than simply as a music video promoting a commercial release. That kind of cross-disciplinary reception is rare for any popular music release, and it reflects the ambition and execution that The Carters brought to the project.
The combination of the track's sound, the video's imagery, and the broader context of Everything Is Love as a statement about the Carters' public and private lives produced one of the more fully realized artistic packages of 2018. Few releases of that year were discussed with as much sustained intensity or analyzed with as much care.
"Apes**t" — The Carters' singular moment on the 2010s charts.
02 Song Meaning
Apes**t — The Carters
Power as Subject Matter
The track is fundamentally about power: the specific, hard-won power of two people who have arrived at a position where they can dictate the terms of their own cultural presentation, and who choose to use that position to make an argument about what power looks like when held by Black artists at the peak of their careers. The lyrical content is less narrative than declarative, a series of assertions about achievement, status, and the particular satisfaction of having earned something that was not freely given. This is a register that Jay-Z has worked in throughout his career, but the combination of both Carters delivering it together amplifies the statement considerably.
The Louvre setting for the video gave the track's themes a visual grammar that the lyrics alone could not supply. The art on those walls represents centuries of European cultural production, largely made for and by people whose world excluded the ancestors of Beyoncé and Jay-Z. The decision to film there, and to perform with complete confidence and ownership in that space, extended the track's argument beyond what any lyric can do: it made the claim physically, in space, on camera.
Black Excellence and Cultural Reclamation
Critics and scholars who wrote about the video's Louvre sequences identified a consistent theme: the act of standing in a space that was not built for you and treating it as though it belongs to you is itself a form of reclamation. The juxtaposition of African and African-American dancers with the paintings and sculptures of the European tradition created a visual dialogue about whose bodies have been represented in art, who has controlled those representations, and what it means to insert yourself into that history on your own terms.
This was not a new argument in Black cultural discourse. Artists, writers, and thinkers had been making versions of it for decades. What the track and its video contributed was the delivery of that argument through the specific medium of mainstream popular music, directed at an audience that might never encounter it in a more explicitly intellectual context. The reach of two artists of the Carters' magnitude meant that the conversation about representation and cultural space reached people who would not necessarily have sought it out.
The Relationship as Public Statement
The context of the Everything Is Love album as a document of Beyoncé and Jay-Z's relationship added a layer of meaning to the track that its sonic content alone does not contain. The project arrived after two solo albums that had addressed their relationship's difficulties with unusual candor; this track, as the joint lead single, represented them choosing to present themselves together, on their own terms, at their most assured. The energy the track projects is not vulnerability but strength, and the joint performance enacts exactly the kind of solidarity that the album's narrative required at that moment.
For listeners who had followed both artists' careers and the public dimension of their relationship through their solo work, this track arrived as a specific kind of answer: not to critics or to the media but to the questions that the preceding years of public scrutiny had raised about the stability and nature of their partnership. The answer was offered not in interviews or statements but in music, which is the form both artists have consistently trusted to carry the most important things they want to say.
Why the Track Endures
The combination of Pharrell Williams' production, the cultural argument of the Louvre video, and the two performances at its center gives the track a density that rewards return visits. Each element operates independently as well as collectively: the beat holds up outside the video context, the video holds up as visual art separate from the song, and the performances hold up as demonstrations of two artists at the height of their capabilities. Few tracks from 2018 contain as much simultaneously; fewer still manage to make all of it cohere into a single statement rather than a collection of impressive components.
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