He added, “I shared so much of my life, my childhood, and my family, the death of my nephew with the world. “I just think it’s really a part of your life that you gotta keep to yourself,” Jay-Z told Vibe in 2008, when asked why he’d kept his marriage to Beyoncé a secret. “I only talk about them in my songwriting otherwise things get too messy.” “I never talk about my relationships,” Beyoncé told Essence in 2005. Nevertheless, both parties played coy in the press, a practice they would continue throughout their relationship. There was almost no reason to bring Beyoncé into the mix if you didn’t want the press to start speculating wildly. Public speculation that Beyoncé and Jay-Z were dating began in 2002, when they collaborated on “’03 Bonnie and Clyde.” The song was a natural fit for Jay-Z’s player persona, but Beyoncé’s hook, a lyrical inverse of Tupac Shakur’s “Me and My Girlfriend,” which the track samples, was so generic that it could have been sung by practically anyone. In the early years of their relationship, Beyoncé and Jay-Z only rarely put each other in their songs So how do we get from a relationship so private that it’s kept secret for years to a relationship so public that it’s at the center of both participants’ latest albums? To understand how that transition happened, we have to look at how the gossip press covered the Knowles-Carter marriage - and how Beyoncé and Jay-Z responded. The couple’s last three albums have even formed a kind of marriage trilogy: 2016’s Lemonade saw Beyoncé accusing Jay-Z of adultery and then forgiving him, 2017’s 4:44 saw Jay-Z confessing and then begging for forgiveness to his sins, and 2018’s Everything In Love saw the couple overcoming their difficulties to triumphantly declare themselves “happily in love.” Since then, slowly but surely, their marriage has crept into the conversation about their music. They started dating in 2001 but didn’t go public until 2004, and they married in April 2008 and didn’t tell the public until that August. She was clearly putting on a pop music persona, and few thought the song was autobiographical.įor years, their entire relationship was secret. They might duet on a “Crazy in Love” here or a “Deja Vu” there, but when Beyoncé sent a man to the left, to the left in “Irreplaceable,” there was little public speculation over whether she was secretly singing about Jay-Z. When one of them released a song about love and infidelity, we didn’t automatically assume they were singing about each other.
There were overlaps, but they were carefully contained, discrete. But that didn’t use to be the case.įor a long time, the question of Beyoncé and Jay-Z’s relationship was distinct from the question of their music. We’ve heard about the intimate details of their marriage, the betrayals and the reconciliation. “No need to ask, you heard about us,” Beyoncé sings in her new joint album with husband Jay-Z, Everything Is Love.