Jay Z just dropped the visual album for his new “Family Feud” track on Friday, and you can bet there’s a whole lot of Beyoncé in it (as there damn well should be). Like Bey’s Lemonade, the video for the song, directed by the glorious Ava DuVernay, is beautifully done and spans more than 400 years (beginning in 2444 and working back to 2018, just in case you thought time behaved in a straight and linear progression). It also features a host of incredible women in cameos, including Mindy Kaling, Rashida Jones, Jessica Chastain, America Ferrera, Thandie Newton, and Rosario Dawson.
But that’s not all: Jay Z also opens up in a really transparent verse about his infidelity and his marriage with Beyoncé–just like he did in “4:44,” (that’s also the title track for the record that “Family Feud” features on). We’ll break it down for you.
“Yeah, I’ll f— up a good thing if you let me
Let me alone, Becky”
“Becky with the good hair” was infamously mentioned in Beyoncé’s “Sorry” from Lemonade as a name for whomever it was that Jay Z was cheating on Bey with: “They sneaking out the back door/He only want me when I’m not there/He better call Becky with the good hair.” We still don’t have official confirmation about who, exactly, Becky is, but these two lines seem to be a direct reference to the same incident.
“A man that don’t take care his family can’t be rich
I’ll watch ‘Godfather,’ I miss that whole sh–
My consciousness was Michael’s common sense
I missed the karma that came as a consequence
N—as bustin’ off through the curtains ’cause she hurtin’
Kay losin’ the babies ’cause their future’s uncertain
Nobody wins when the family feuds
We all screwed ’cause we never had the tools.”
At first glance—and we’re sure more fan theories and analyses will come out—but it seems like Jay Z’s comparing himself to Michael Corleone from the Godfather trilogy. As Bustle points out, Michael put his lil’ Mafia biz before his family, which had destructive consequences on the unit as a whole. In Jay Z’s world, the connection could be made to his infidelities coming before his marriage and family, which brings us to…
…his last line: “We all screwed ’cause we never had the tools.” Strengthening the above theory is an interview Jay Z did with the New York Times in November, when he first went on record saying that he’d cheated. In it, he says that a difficult childhood led to him shutting down emotionally because he was in “survival mode”—maybe a parallel to his statement about how he didn’t have the tools to, apparently, deal with his issues with connection. “You have to survive. So you go into survival mode, and when you go into survival mode, what happens? You shut down all emotions,” Jay Z said, referring to “a difficult childhood that resulted in a tendency to isolate himself” (as Vogue put it). “So even with women, you gonna shut down emotionally, so you can’t connect . . . . In my case, like, it’s deep. And then all the things happen from there: infidelity.”
Listen to a preview clip below, or fire up Tidal to listen to the whole thing.
Related: Jay Z References ‘Stillborns’ and Cheating on Beyoncé on His New Album ‘4:44’
