This assignment encourages creativity. “Write about a masterpiece,” the prompt broadly

instructs, welcoming unconventional responses and interpretations — maybe a particularly

beloved article of clothing or a warm, home-cooked meal. So it might seem a bit cowardly to

write about “APESHIT,” a Beyonce and Jay-Z (together known as The Carters) music video shot

in a museum famous for housing what critics have deemed mankind’s greatest masterpieces —

the Louvre. Home to the likes of da Vinci’s enigmatic “Mona Lisa” and Delacroix’s Coldplay-

popularized “Liberty Leading the People,” the Parisian monument seems like an unlikely setting

for the music video of a song with an expletive in the title. But for six minutes and five seconds,

Beyoncé and her husband stand regally in front of larger-than-life gilded frames while dancers in

nude leotards move like water around them.

The video was released June 16, 2018 and has more than 250 million views. It begins

with ethereal rings of a church bell and faint, echoed claps of high-heeled-steps in an empty

room. We see several up-close shots of some of the Louvre’s paintings: the shadowed contours

of a woman’s white veil, the quick, textured brushstrokes of an older man’s contorted face, an

arm thrust into a blazing flame of red and yellow paint.

And then suddenly, the music starts. The synthesized, rubbery pulse of the song blares,

punctuated by a man’s rhythmic vocalizations. The camera slowly moves through the cavernous

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halls of the Louvre. We see Beyonce and Jay-Z standing in colorful pantsuits in front of the

Mona Lisa while gazing boldly and unflinchingly at the camera — at us.

To me, what makes this music video a masterpiece is its subversion of the meaning of

“masterpiece.” When we hear the word, the artwork of White men invariably comes to mind:

Mona Lisa, David, Starry Night, Scream, Sunday Afternoon on the Island of La Grande Jatte,

American Gothic, Birth of Venus, Las Meninas, Girl with a Pearl Earring, Composition with Red

Blue and Yellow, Guernica....the list could go on and on.

But The Carters directly challenge this way of thinking. They sever the line we

instinctively draw between “masterpiece” and “White men,” instead foregrounding another kind

of masterpiece, one that is un-frameable: Beyonce and Jay-Z themselves — or, more broadly,

Black art and Black love.

If I were to go through each and every visually stunning moment of the music video, this

response paper would be too long (and might take me an extra couple weeks to write!). Instead, I

will focus on some of the standout shots and elements of the video. I also want to acknowledge

that many Black thinkers have already critiqued this song, like Kimberly Drew and Alexandra

M. Thomas. As a non-Black person, I am an outside viewer; my perspective without the lived

experience of being Black in the U.S. is extremely limited. That being said, here’s my own —

albeit narrowed — take on “APESHIT.”

One particularly prominent part of the music video is the dancers — all of whom are

Black women wearing varying shades of brown leotards. They help accomplish the video’s main

purpose: to center, spotlight, and revere Blackness, broadening the scope of the video beyond the

Carters. Their presence signifies that “APESHIT” is not just about one Grammy Award-winning

Black couple, but about Blackness itself — its strength, beauty, resilience, and power.

In one scene, Beyonce sits in front of the famous Winged Victory of Samothrace. The two

seem to be mirroring each other; Beyonce’s voluminous, ribboned white gown mimics the

marble wet drapery of the sculpture. But there’s an obvious difference. The Winged Victory of

Samothrace is headless and immboile, a nonliving piece of rock carved more than two thousands

years ago. Beyonce, on the other hand, is commanding and lively, looking straight into the

camera as she raps and her body lurches to the beat. She is real. When the two are side by side,

the sculpture seems obsolete by comparison, an antiquated and irrelevant vestige of the past. We

wonder why it stands so high on the pedestal. We ask ourselves: who is the real masterpiece?

A couple years ago I visited La Plaza de Cultura y Artes, a Mexican-American museum

and cultural center in Los Angeles. One of the exhibitions there, entitled “Make ‘Em All

Mexican” by Linda Vallejo, also featured a reimagined Winged Victory of Samothrace. Titled

La Victoria, it was a two-foot-tall sculpture that looked almost exactly like the original except for

one crucial difference: it was covered in brown acrylic paint. To see such a famous sculpture with a deep brown hue and a glossy sheen was mesmerizing (and the reason why I took the picture!). “By changing the color,” UCLA cinema and media studies professor Chon Noriega

explains, “it profoundly upsets not just what is in front of you, but the ideas of popular culture

that you carry inside of you” (Miranda 2016).

La Victoria by Linda Vallejo

But the ideas to which Noriega refers extend beyond present-day pop culture. The history

of art — even Before the Common Era, as the Winged Victory of Samothrace dates back to 190

BCE — has been created and canonized by the West. Both Beyonce and Linda Vallejo reach far

back into antiquity to kink this hegemonic historical narrative in its incipience. They challenge

us to reevaluate our preconceived notions of highbrow and lowbrow art, of masterpieces and the

mundane. What if the Winged Victory of Samothrace was Brown? What if she was Black?

There is another kind of masterpiece that takes center stage in “APESHIT”: Black love.

Intermittent shots show Jay-Z and Beyonce warmly embracing each other or holding hands. The

couple is a prominent cultural symbol of Black love, especially after repairing their mariage

following Jay-Z’s infidelity (Spanos 2017). This relationship — one that has built mutual respect

and trust from hardship — is the true work of art, they seem to say. In one of the scenes, the

famous Venus of Milo stands behind them, but it is blurred out. What really catches our attention

is the two of them assertively standing tall and holding hands in front of a rheumy, blue-lit

backdrop.

But as I mentioned before, The Carters are not just referring to themselves in this music

video. They show that Black love in any form — even if it is not between an ultra-successful and

mega-wealthy couple — is a masterpiece. They reconstruct the Louvre’s classical art with real,

living Black subjects. In a particularly poignant shot, the painting of a woman embracing a man

cuts away to a woman embracing her boyfriend on a bed in a small, orange-walled room. This

juxtaposition provides yet another example of how Black love is the real splendor, not

brushstrokes on a canvas. (I guess we could answer the question “Does life imitate art or does art

imitate life?” with “Neither; life reinvents art and vice versa.”)

Analyzing the lyrics of “APESHIT” merits a whole separate essay (or maybe seven!), but

I will point out a few verses in particular that I think are crucial to understanding the song. About

two-thirds of the way through the video, Jay-Z begins rapping:

I said no to the Super Bowl, you need me, I don't need you

Every night we in the end zone, tell the NFL we in stadiums too (...)

Tell the Grammy’s fuck that oh for eight shit

Have you ever seen a crowd goin’ apeshit? (“APESHIT”)

Just as the music video rejects White standards of beauty, it also rejects White standards

of success. The NFL has a long history of anti-Blackness; it is a White-led organization (Belson

2020) with a history of race-norming (denying Black players concussion settlements by arguing

that their low cognitive scores are due to their race rather than their injuries) (Zirin 2021). But

after the league blackballed Colin Kaepernick following his decision to take a knee protesting

anti-Black police brutality in 2016, many Black artists directly boycotted them (Moore 2018).

Rihanna, Cardi B, Nicki Minaj, and a slew of other stars turned down an opportunity to headline

the Super Bowl halftime show (Grady 2019). Jay-Z references this unprecedented turn of events,

in which a White-led, century-old, multi-billion-dollar corporation began begging Black artists to

perform and boost ticket sales.

Similarly, the Grammys have snubbed Black artists for decades — Beyonce losing to

Adele in 2017 or The Weeknd’s 2021 nomination exclusion, for example — and pigeonholed

them into R&B and rap genres (Sisario 2021). The “oh for for eight shit” line references the 2018

Grammys in which Jay-Z had eight nominations — making him the most recognized artist of the

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year — but did not win a single one (Howard 2018). That being said, The Carters have actually

won 51 Grammys (yes, you read that right!) between the two of them. For Jay-Z to diss the

Grammys given his relative success makes this verse all the more scathing. They may have 51

awards, he seems to say, but don’t forget about the 108 other nominations that went

unrecognized.

As Jay-Z asserts, he doesn’t need the Super Bowl — they need him. He names the

unexpected yet pronounced power differential between Black artists and mainstream White

establishments. Jay-Z and other Black artists who boycotted the annual championship game are

“in the end zone,” implying that they are winning in a different sense — selling out concert

tickets and accruing millions of dollars. He talks directly to the institutions that have failed to

respect not only him and his wife, but all Black Americans. The Carters declare that they have

grown beyond anti-Black football leagues and recording academies, finally unencumbered by

their dehumanizing conventions and codes. After all, their crowds are going “apeshit” — so who

cares about the NFL or the Grammys? And with more than 250 million YouTube views for this

music video alone, I can’t see how they’d be wrong.

The Carters’ decision to title the song “APESHIT” is not insignificant. The word —

which is in all caps — evokes images of tumultuous throngs of excited concert-goers or the

eruption of cheers in a bar once the favored football team scores. The audiences at Jay-Z and

Beyonce’s shows are going “apeshit,” coming in droves just to see them perform. But the word

has a negative connotation, too. As Urban Dictionary very helpfully illuminates, “apeshit” can

also mean “[t]o go completely off the deep end; succumb to extreme rage” (Lil Ringo 2007).

And it does seem like The Carters are going “off the deep end” — they’re angry. Angry at how

the Grammys snub Black artists, how the NFL robs Black players, how the United States

commits violence against Black Americans every day. In this music video, they “succumb to

extreme rage” by rejecting the supremacy of White art. Instead, they make their own art.

In the final scene of the music video, Beyonce and Jay-Z take one last lingering look at

the camera and each other before slowly turning around to face the Mona Lisa. The Carters, who

were previously the art and objects of consumption, now join us as the viewers. Suddenly, we re-

evaluate our gaze. How would we look at the Mona Lisa with Beyonce and Jay-Z standing

beside us? How do they view White art? How do Black Americans view White art — especially

when it has been glorified at the expense of their erasure and exploitation? What is the real

masterpiece: the 500-year-old painting or the song itself? Since The Carters are selling out

stadiums worldwide and their crowds are going apeshit, I’d venture to guess the latter.