Nachoes!: B’Day Til’ Kingdom Come

From their shared musical language to the radically different ways they write about love, desire and each other, B’Day Till Kingdom Come explores the strange relationship between two records made at the same moment - and the early traces of an artistic and emotional dialogue that would become impossible to miss a decade later with Lemonade (2016) and 4:44 (2017).

Recorded months apart in 2006, Beyoncé’s B’Day and JAY-Z’s Kingdom Come capture two artists in love arriving at very different turning points - and producing two unlikely sister albums in the process.

Fresh from the restraint of playing Deena Jones in Dreamgirls, Beyoncé made B’Day as an explosion of everything she had been forced to suppress: loud, sensual and uninhibited, drawing deeply from the live instrumentation, funk and soul of Black music.

JAY-Z returned from retirement with a strinkingly similar musical impulse. Long compared to Ernest Hemingway - the great American writer whose direct, economical style could communicate enormous meaning through what remained unsaid - Kingdom Come finds that restraint beginning to give way to something more expansive, in both its lush, live sound and moments of unusual emotional openness.

Made in conversation with one another, the two albums reveal the same relationship from opposite directions: Beyoncé discovering the freedom to express desire without restraint, while JAY-Z begins learning the emotional maturity required to love without possession.

Episodes

How playing the restrained Deena Jones in Dreamgirls pushed Beyoncé towards the loudest and most uninhibited album of her career.
Why the sensuality and physicality of “Déjà Vu” caused controversy - and how Beyoncé’s performance draws from the legacy of Josephine Baker.
From the banana dance to the “Black Venus,” how Josephine Baker turned spectacle, sexuality and self-invention into a new kind of stardom - and became a blueprint for the modern pop star.
While Beyoncé secretly made B’Day, JAY-Z was quietly beginning Kingdom Come - two albums made months apart, drawing from the same rich palette of live instrumentation, funk and soul.
Why JAY-Z has been compared to Ernest Hemingway - and how Kingdom Come begins to loosen the direct, restrained style that had defined his writing.
Through “Lost One,” JAY-Z confronts what it means to love Beyoncé as an equal - revealing the other side of the relationship she expresses so uninhibitedly on B’Day.