American pop-culture phenomenon Beyoncé Knowles-Carter, Hip-Hop icon Sean "Jay-Z" Carter and their all-star team of creatives, recently released the visual for their newest collaboration titled "Ape Shit." The new music video, the first from their “Everything Is Love” joint album, is proving to be yet another layered and complex artifact from the anthology of the family Carter (the pair are married with three children). But this video is different from others. 

Set inside the Louvre museum, the Ape Shit video challenges a silent, enduring, yet unsettling message, as told through the overwhelming absence of black faces in the art housed in the Louvre. A possible message that speaks to a centuries-old sanitization of black contribution and the sometimes-intentional erasure of black representation; actions that both suggest and reinforce the narrative that people of the African diaspora are mere tangential footnotes of human anthropology, expressed through art- the best of which are displayed at the world’s largest art museum- the Louvre.

Through an examination of the Ape Shit video, the theory of agenda setting will be applied. By examining the juxtaposition of iconic European and African art next to, arguably, two of the most famous Black musicians in the world, this essay will attempt to decode the true agenda of the Carter's: revive, reclaim and rebuild.

The events that led up to the release of this video may very-well be sixty-eight years in the making. Over a half-century ago, in a small modest apartment nestled along the streets of St. Germain, an eclectic neighborhood of Paris, France (situated less than two miles from the iconic Louvre museum), was once the home of American novelist and essayist James Baldwin.

Immortalized in recent years by many for his deeply honest and sometimes sobering works such as; Notes of A Native Son, The Fire Next Time and Go Tell it on the Mountain, the New York City born Baldwin had an enduring love for Paris: its people, its culture and its famous art. Baldwin's sometimes brash delivery and panache for preaching truth to power made him famous but it is his art that made him legend.  

Baldwin spent a great deal of his adult life in Paris and later settled in a provincial region of southern France. Baldwin, by his own account, saw Paris as a sort of exile. And exile that provided him the luxury of a mostly peaceful existence. One where he could regularly expel the oxygen from his lungs without the fear of racist, homophobic and xenophobic threats of violence descending upon his black, queer, intellectual and American body. But this peace came at a cost.

In many ways, Baldwin was invisible in Paris. He would be tolerated but not celebrated. Even in death, his works would see the some of the posthumous veneration extended to many literary greats, but he would not be revered in the same way William Faulkner, Henry James, Jack London and other contemporaries are.

Over thirty years have passed since the death of Baldwin and while he knew nothing of the Carters (neither were working artists at the time of his 1987 death) the spirit of Baldwin and other forgotten and otherwise underrated Black artists, relegated as ‘niche’ artists, only appealing to other blacks, would be given their due; celebrated by their own in arguably the most distinguished house of art in the world.

For the purpose of this essay, the artifacts that will be discussed in the Ape Shit video will be limited to; the coronation of Napoleon, the great sphinx of Tanis and the Mona Lisa

Beyoncé uses the coronation of Napoleon as a backdrop for the revival of black feminine unity.

Commissioned by former Emperor of France, Napoleon Bonaparte, The Consecration of Emperor Napoleon I and Coronation of Empress Josephine in the Cathedral of Notre-Dame de Paris on 2 December 1804, is one of the largest oil on canvas paintings on display at the Louvre. The painting which spans twenty feet in length and thirty-two feet in height was completed in 1808 by Jacques-Louis David. Bonaparte was known for the meticulous management (and sometimes the manufacturing) of his own image. So, when David was commissioned to paint the occasion of Bonaparte’s consecration and the coronation of wife Josephine de Beauharnais, it was natural that the emperor would take some creative license on the project.

What makes the performance sequence of Beyoncé and her eight perfectly synchronized dancers so eyebrow-raising, isn’t their movements, it is rather, the ironic meaning of the painting behind him. What many don’t know about this particular painting is that depicts Bonaparte crowning himself emperor and subsequently crowning his wife Josephine as Empress. Traditionally, the coronation was an act to be executed by the pope. Bonaparte crowning himself emperor is not only a symbolic demonstration of his growing power as emperor but also his defiance of the papacy’s ability to control him.