The new wave of albums unexpectedly dropping continues, as Beyoncé and Jay-Z dropped a joint album titled Everything Is Love.

The husband and wife duo have been on their ‘On The Run II’ tour in Europe so far, and are set to bring the show to America in July 2018 according to reports. They recently dropped a video for the track “Ape Sh*t” from the album. The album is available exclusively on Tidal.

Not only did the first couple of American pop music impose their standard omertà on the songwriters, musicians, producers and technicians who helped them complete their new album “Everything Is Love”; they also got the mandarins of Paris’s largest museum to keep mum about their first single, whose video was shot in the galleries and the exterior plaza of the Musée du Louvre.

The video for the single “Apes**t” sees Beyoncé, Jay-Z and their dancers vamp on Pierre Paulin’s circular gray banquettes, drop verses in front of I.M. Pei’s entrance pyramid and squirm in formation in front of Jacques-Louis David’s gigantic “Coronation of Napoleon.”

Directed by Ricky Saiz, Bey and Jay follow the well-trod tourist route past the Louvre’s three most famous works — the Venus de Milo on the ground floor, the Winged Victory of Samothrace atop the broad Daru staircase and the Mona Lisa in the Denon wing. The couple and their dancers also perform in front of the large-scale paintings of revolutionary and early imperial France in the long Grande Galerie: David’s “Oath of the Horatii” and portrait of Madame Récamier; Théodore Géricault’s “Charging Chasseur” and “Raft of the Medusa.” (Longtime Louvre watchers will know that Jay-Z is not the first black artist to rap there: In 2006, Toni Morrison invited slam poets from Paris’s banlieues to freestyle in front of Géricault’s shipwreck.)

 

While some fans have exulted that only Queen Bey has the cash and the clout to privatize Europe’s grandest museum, there is nothing very rare about filming here. About 500 shoots take place at the Louvre every year. The Carters’ clip follows in the tradition of “Wonder Woman,” “Fifty Shades Freed” and such noble cultural achievements as “The Smurfs 2.” Film and television shoots serve as an essential marketing for the Louvre — attendance is up again, after terrorism-induced declines in 2016 — and as of 2015, the top fee was just 15,000 euros, or about $17,500, for a full day’s shoot in the galleries. There are hotel rooms here that cost more than that.

A hand-held camera pans across the ornate walls of the Apollo Gallery, built for Louis XIV, and zooms in on its gold-framed ceiling murals. And there are dance sequences inside and outside the building, staged by the avant-garde Belgian choreographer Sidi Larbi Cherkaoui, in which performers kneel like protesting football players and do synchronized abdominal exercises on the Daru stairs.

 

 

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peep the full video below: